The Queen shut the door, and sat across from her daughters before she finally spoke again.
“Yes,” she said, a little breathlessly. “Kai Cumhaill is a King, among his own people.”
Adeline frowned.
“His own people? When he arrived at the palace, Tara told us he’d come from somewhere in Eisalaan.”
At the word ‘us’, another questioning glance from Mareda had Adeline cursing inwardly.
Careful,she reminded herself.
The Queen sighed. “Heisfrom Eisalaan. The Cumhaill family were once our counterparts beneath the Laune. Kai Cumhaill is King of the Merrow.”
There was a stretch of muddled silence before anyone spoke.
“The Merrow,” Mareda said slowly, eyes narrowing.
Adeline’s brows pitched.
“From thefairytale?” She blurted.
“From thehistoryof our kingdom,” said the Queen. She paused then, eyes closed, and massaged the faint crease between her brows. “The Merrow are surfaced, and as you can imagine, they’re frightened.”
Surfaced.
That image at the back of Adeline’s mind shifted again, and she realised it all at once. She’dheardthis before; the merchant at the public court, all that grumbling about creatures clawing free of the Laune. And weeks back, hadn’t she heard about a creature climbing up from a crack in the ice? It was the very day the Prince - theKing- had stormed their courtyard, in fact. A merchant had seen him and had the fright of her life; they’d laughed about it in the kitchens that day.
All the fucking Daughters.
“I’ve been working closely with King Cumhaill,” the Queen went on. “To help them find their place in a world that has long forgotten them.”
The Queen leaned heavily on the armrest of her seat, and the flicker of movement pulled Adeline from her thoughts. Her mother’s perfect posture was slipping with every passing moment, giving way to exhaustion. Adeline wanted to comfort her, to take her hand and guide her back to the safety of her sickbed, but she forced herself to stay still and silent under Mareda’s keen eye.
“I need your help too, my loves,” said their mother. “If we welcome King Cumhaill into our court tonight, we acknowledge a kinship with the Merrow. That iscrucial. Our family must forge that bond, so we might set an example. A message to our people.”
Mareda leaned forward keenly.
“And what message is that, mother?”
Adeline felt an awful little twinge at the syrupy sweetness of her sister’s voice; a voice she only used around the Queen. But Selma met their eyes in turn, Mareda first, then Adeline, her piercing blue gaze impressing just how critical this was to her.
“The message that there is nothing to fear from the Merrow. That they are our countryfolk.”
???
One of the benefits of living above Imogen’s store was that Adeline didn’t have far to look for something beautiful to wear. A gathering hosted by her mother, after all, would not be a cosy evening spent playing cards in her parlour. The Queen of Snow and Silver didn’t do ‘cosy’.
After their mother retired to the inner chambers of her rooms to rest, Adeline first sent off a quick note to Ger inviting him to be her guest for the night, then hurried down to call a carriage home. As they rolled away from the palace, she watched the blank landscape pass by until the salted roads gave way to the slippery, frosted cobblestone of the Capital, snowbanks and pine trees thinning out into brightly painted storefronts.
Adeline hopped out on the main street, and stepped under the awning of a small apothecary to find her bearings. After the muffled silence of the snowy drive down from the Queen’s Village, the noise and bustle of the small city almost knocked her back, and she needed a moment to just breathe it all in. The smell of eucalyptus wafting from the cool, dim store behind her, the warm scent of sugared hazelnuts from a cart across the road. The chatter, and footfall, and echoing, carrying calls of street vendors enticing people to their carts. A playful tune played on the fiddle and drum burst out of a nearby tavern as a giggling couple stumbled through the door, arm in arm and rosy cheeked.
Adeline watched it all, her home of the past two years, the one starburst of colour in all of Eisalaan’s silver and white. People came from all over the world to see Lake Laune, the so-calledHeart of Adhlas– and perhaps it was.
But to Adeline, the Queen’s Capital was the heart of Eisalaan. The messy, bleeding, beating heart, pulsing with joy and revelry and life. Adeline stepped onto the cobblestones and was one with the crowd.
Twenty minutes later, she headed back to Imogen’s store, strode in, and plonked down a bottle of honeywine and a box of caramelised hazelnuts on the desk. Imogen looked up from the pedestal across the room, where she was busy pinning a bright blue Blessing Day dress on a sweet-faced little girl of around seven or eight.
Imogen nodded at the desk with an arched brow.
