Page 37

“What absolute nonsense.” Lorelei shook back her long, wet curls over the shoulder of her drenched gown, and Gerard fought back the impulse to shift protectively in front of her too-exposed form. “As everyone here has clearly seen, we solved every riddle and defeated the giant, too.”

“‘Defeated’?” Oberon’s hands clenched around the arms of his throne as he half-rose from his seat, his body taut. “That beast still lives! The bargain I set him seven years ago has been broken, and now you’ve released him to rampage over your mother’s people. Do you care nothing about the world you chose to abandon?”

Chose? Gerard made careful note of that word.

But Lorelei was already snapping back, “That so-called beast is one of my mother’s people, and the bargain you tricked him into was unforgivable! A queen owes her protection to every member of her nation, not only to those who happen to look like her. If you knew anything about true governance beyond the glory and the stage setting of it—”

“If you knew anything of your own people, you’d be able to distinguish between us and our enemies!”

The words lashed out like a whip, and Gerard saw them hit true as Lorelei physically flinched. Not a single fae in the gathering of advisors behind the throne, the surviving competitors on the field, or the audience members in the stands beyond raised a voice in disagreement.

… And as Gerard watched, he saw that hit her, too.

Lorelei was a queen in her own right, his most inveterate nemesis, and an unrelenting political intriguer who openly loathed Gerard’s emperor. No matter how deep his previously denied feelings might be, if she refused to stop her scheming and back down from the oncoming international battlefield, his vows of loyalty would eventually force him to wield Imperial troops against her nation.

But at this moment, all the willpower in the world couldn’t have stopped Gerard from taking his final step to close the inches of distance between them until his arm brushed firmly against her small shoulder.

Her startled blue gaze flashed up to meet his. He held it steadily, his message unhidden:

Partners. At least for now.

For a long moment, there was silence.

Then Lorelei blazed her most triumphant smile, and high-summer heat suddenly erupted all around them, vibrant red and yellow lilies shooting up from the grass in a circle around their feet and a hot, dry breeze sweeping across the field to dry their wet clothes, hair, and skin in an instant.

An audible ripple of wonder passed through the stands. Even the advisors behind the throne were wide-eyed as they bent together to whisper frantically. Behind where Gerard stood, the sounds of mumbles and groans emerged from the contestants who’d been unconscious when they’d arrived. He didn’t need to turn around to understand that they’d been awakened, now, by Lorelei’s magic.

He also didn’t need to be an expert in fae culture to see the way Oberon’s lips twisted and know that Lorelei’s display had been far more powerful than anything the other man could ever summon … and everyone on this field knew it.

“Enough!” Oberon snapped. “This day’s trials are officially over.” With a whirl of silken red and orange robes, he stalked away from the throne and towards the thick woods beyond, leaving his lackeys to scurry after him.

No heralds signaled the end of this day’s challenges with glorious peals of their hunting horns as they had the day before. There was no smooth shift into an easy, scheduled celebration. Instead, uncertainty seemed to hold the field in a state of suspended animation, everyone waiting tensely for someone else to take charge …

Until Lorelei turned to wave at them all with graceful—and entirely false—gaiety. “Well! What an entertaining day it has been, darlings, hasn’t it? And don’t you fret about a thing. I’ll leave you all to enjoy a lovely gossip without having to worry about me listening in!”

Still wearing that wide and brittle smile, she drew one forefinger in a swift, circular motion and opened a shimmering portal into darkness just before her. The circular portal was already starting to close as she stepped through it, showering colorful glitter in her wake—

But Gerard was braced and ready for his partner’s flight. He threw himself through that narrowing gap and felt it snap shut just behind him.

He landed in a controlled forward roll, not in utter darkness as he’d expected, but atop a bed of soft grass in dim, shifting light. As he pulled himself up, dusting dirt and glitter from his jacket sleeves, he met Lorelei’s startled gaze once more under a canopy of gold-and-red-leafed branches, with no other sound but distant bird calls and the humming of insects.

Still, something about the sharp, vibrant taste of the air and the deep humming of the earth beneath his feet …

“This isn’t Balravia, is it?”

Lorelei turned away as she replied, but she didn’t quite manage to conceal the swift wiping of her eyes. “Ah, no. This is an even older spot of mine, actually.” Eyes dry once more, she shifted back to him and waved with casual grace at the small clearing where they stood, surrounded on all sides by wild woodland with no paths or markers. “My trees formed this clearing for me when I was a child.”

Before she’d been expelled to the mortal realm, then—or, in Oberon’s version of events, before she had made the choice herself to go there. That was a contradiction that required answers, but Gerard was in no mood to patiently dig them out.

In the past hour, he had been challenged, baffled, enraged, disturbed, awestruck, and, for the first time in years, terrified all the way down to his bones. Every bit of it was due to the actions of this small woman who stood before him now, her blue eyes seemingly guileless and all of her true emotions hidden, pretending that she hadn’t a care in the world.

For seven long years, she had tried to drive him mad. Deep down, he must have always known that she would eventually succeed.

Right now, reckless madness felt like freedom.

“It’s not Balravia,” he repeated evenly. “We’re not in the mortal realm. Here, in the fae realm, you’re not the queen, and Otto isn’t an emperor.”

“No…?” She tilted her head, watching him with dawning suspicion.