Page 52 of Heart’s Rescue

She blinks. For a heartbeat, she looks like she’s been forced to swallow something vile. Then—

“No,” she says. “Not… him. Hesling is who I have to marry if—”

Her voice trails off. Suddenly, she’s very interested in her hands again. I try to remember to breathe; it’s gone from cold to hot inside this shelter in the span of a few words.

“If the prince doesn’t come back?” I ask.

It all fits, of course. She acts like a high-born lady. She came here for a reason, and that reason cut off my brother’s arm. I have a sudden flash of regret that I delivered that princely son of a bitch to the king alive.

Arryn pulls in a breath, and that soft little whisper of air over her lips yanks me out of fantasizing about her prince’s bloody, painful death. She looks more miserable now than she did when she was freezing to death in her blue velvet dress, her arms spread wide, begging me for mercy.

“Heh,” I say, trying but not quite managing to turn my words into a laugh. “They still do that in the Worlds Above, huh? Arrange marriages?”

She tilts her head to the side like I’m a message she’s trying to decipher. “They don’t do that here?” she asks.

“Not really,” I answer. “I mean, they used to. Phaedron had, like, a dozen women string him along and then break his heart when their families said they had to marry someone more suitable. But all that kinda fell off ages ago. I mean, what’s the point without the babies?”

“Oh.” Arryn’s voice is hardly more than a whisper.

I shrug. “Besides, it’s not like we’ve got any other kingdoms nearby. There’s no alliances to broker. And the king already adopted a bunch of orphans and named them heirs, so there’s no bloodlines to preserve.”

I look up. Arryn is watching me with those sharp brown eyes.

“The king adopted orphans?” she asks. “After the war?”

“After we got sealed in here,” I answer.

“But he didn’t adopt you and Phaedron?”

Her question hangs in the air, reverberating like the toll of the great brass bell at the World’s End teleportation hub.

“No,” I say, softly. “No one would adopt us.”

She’s silent, but I can see she’s working it out. Just like my charts. I feel like an open book in front of this woman, and it’s freaking unsettling.

“Your magic,” she says, watching me.

I huff out a breath. She wasn’t here. She doesn’t know how hard I struggled to control my magic, or how long Phaedron and I had to live together in the woods before he could convince the people of the World’s End that I really wasn’t a threat any longer. She doesn’t know how many times I came dangerously close to proving him wrong.

She doesn’t know a damn thing about me.

“Look, it’s time to go,” I say, and my voice is sharper than I’d intended.

Arryn nods. She begins to roll up the sleeping furs with such brisk efficiency that I almost want to stay and admire her. I kick my pack through the shelter’s entrance instead and start untying its ropes with a vengeance.