Page 28 of Sky’s Edge

Then I engaged the comm and greeted Tanyn with, “Warning. I’m packing to freeze my ass off on Sigil. So I’m not in a better mood.”

Tanyn said nothing, but my display changed from his face to a roaring fire that looked cozy and veritably screamed make some cocoa, grab your tablet and read for the next three days.

This changed to dark wood, a variety of equally cozy chairs, sofas and nooks, soft lighting, and then I could hear the wind whistling and see the snow gently falling because he’d walked out onto some balcony.

And the display was nothing but a vista of moonlit landscape covered in snow, an abundance of white-crested pine trees, stark-black stone mountains (also crested in white), and it wasn’t easy to see, but in the background, there were dark waters with big chunks of ice floating lazily on them.

His face filled the display again, and his lustrous brown hair was windswept when he said, “I’m already on Sigil.”

I didn’t want to have a million questions, but I did.

Questions like, even though it was gorgeous (no way around that, it just was), how did he survive it, being stuck out there, so far away from everywhere?

And other questions, like, had he been close to his mom?

And how did she die?

Also, did he speak to his dad at all in that time?

Further, even if it was gorgeous, why would he ever want to go back there?

Sigil Isle was less an exile than a prison.

“Is there anything there? Like a town or something?” I asked.

I watched him walk inside while he answered, “A landing bay for crafts, and a dock for boats. Other than that, no. Anything needed is flown in.”

“Do you have a staff?”

“Serving bots.”

Really?

“In a historical, royal property?” I queried.

Those didn’t usually have bots, because although it had been years, they’d had bugs when they first came out, and such properties couldn’t risk having damage done by bots on the fritz. It was very rare, but it still sometimes happened.

This was one of the reasons Dad and Mom employed beings at their house. When Mom was a little girl, her family had an early bot, it went haywire, it caused a huge amount of damage, not the least of which was breaking my Aunt Fiona’s clavicle, and Mom had barely escaped somewhat the same happening to her.

This meant Mom had a fear of bots. She wouldn’t even go to a restaurant if they used them as servers.

“Sigil’s citadel was in disrepair when Mom was sent here with me,” Tanyn shared, and I focused on him to see the firelight was dancing on his tanned face and fabulous hair, making his normal resting handsome even more resting handsome. “It was practically falling down. The one thing my father did after he got shot of us was have it restored. While Mom and I were here. It is not an important property to the crown.”

But it is to you, I thought.

And I thought this right before thinking of a female and her baby being stuck in a falling-down citadel in the literal middle of nowhere, where the one thing you could count on was freezing to death if you didn’t have proper shelter.

Gods, King Riland had been a massive dick.

“We’ll get more into that when you’re here,” he murmured.

I just stopped myself from wincing before I murmured back, “Okeydoke.”

“Did you have a good week?”

Bash had had a box of stuff I’d left at his place delivered, with everything in it broken, shredded or otherwise destroyed.

And Laura and Aleksei were back from their sojourn to Anubis. But I couldn’t bother her, the only being who had a sense of what I was facing (not the arranged marriage part, the imminently-being-a-royal part) because her new film had started shooting (she was a costume designer and intended to keep doing that, even though I doubted with all the other stuff she had to do she’d pull that off). So she was on set, at the same time planning her engagement party, already planning her wedding, along with an additional charity ball. Not to mention, the many appearances she had to do as the True Bride.