“Call it a hunch.”
I futz with a lock of hair. “I don’tthinkit is. I don’t know. When Death and Fortune left me at Castle Falbirg, the housekeeper asked for a family name, and my father was a smith, so. It worked.”
“Do you want me to keep using Schmidt?”
I swallow. “Vanja is fine.”
He lifts his mug to me. “Then to your health, Vanja.”
I didn’t expect to like hearing him say my name so much. Ireallydidn’t expect to giggle, but that at least I can drown in wine.
Then I reach for the cards again. Now the wineisgoing to my head, but I’ll be damned if I let Emeric get away with keeping my tell to himself. I know he’s going to expect me to leave the queen in the same place again. I slip the Knight of Shields there instead.
Sure enough, he turns over the knight.
“What is my tell?” I demand.
Emeric studies the cards, eyebrows quirking. “The secret isn’t to try to watch the cards. That’s whatyouwant me to do. But right before you stop moving them, you look at the mark.”
He leans forward and flips the card on the right. The Queen of Roses stares up at me.
He . . . he knew where she was all along.
“The secret,” Emeric says, “is to watch you.”
I can feel his gaze on me, and when I look up, I find the firelight snared in his eyes again.
And just like that: I am the firelight, caught in his stare, dancing and burning for it.
The room is suddenly very quiet, but it feels loud as thunder. Everything simmers with a new kind of fever, not just wine-warm but a strange sweet heat in my heartbeat, racing through every inch of me.
An entirely new question coils in the space between us.
We’re dangerously close to an answer, if one of us moves—
A sharp knock at the door shatters the silence. We both jerk back. As I scramble to my feet, I discover alotmore of the wine has gone to my head than I thought. Emeric isn’t in much better shape, stumbling into me. He starts to apologize and I clap my hand over his mouth, silently shush him, then drag him over to stand beside the door. Once it’s open, it’ll block him from view.
Then I shake out my hands, brush down my skirts, put on my best mild-mannered-servant face, and turn the knob.
Barthl is standing in the hall. He looks faintly surprised but only shifts in place.
“Marthe,” he says. “Please pass this message to your mistress. We have received word that the Prince and Dame von Falbirg will be arriving first thing in the morning.”
Every bit of that sweet fever drains from me.
“The margrave requests Princess Gisele join them for breakfast, for her parents wish to speak with her.” Barthl shifts his weight again. “Urgently.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Mirror toMirror
It isn’t until I wake up Tuesday morning that I realize my mistakes. Plural.
Was it splitting a bottle of wine by the fire with a boy who smells of juniper and keeps popping up one step ahead of me? Well, maybe. Probably. Almost certainly.
But the first undeniable mistake, you see, was depleting the wine too fast for Emeric to attempt taking the trellis back to his room. Adalbrecht couldn’t make an attempt on Gisele’s life with the von Falbirgs practically on his doorstep, so Poldi would be free to guard Emeric . . . but between the guests and the Wolfhünden, Emeric couldn’t exactly sally out of theprinzessin’s bedroom unnoticed either.
This paved the way for the second mistake: trying to wait up for sobriety. We made a half-hearted stab at planning the next move. That lasted about a minute, as we found that between the lingering grief, the exhaustion, and the wine, the best we could come up with was “hit Adalbrecht in the head with a shovel and move to Bourgienne.”
