Page 59
“Easy, was it? You try bringing down a Chimera with a tin of scouring powder and a fire extinguisher.” I grinned up at him. “My entire arsenal was speakers and cleaning products. I once took out an entire flock of harpies with a Bluetooth speaker and a particularly aggressive playlist.”
“I know.” And there it was again, that note of something close to wonder. “When word first reached me of how you fought, how a mortal girl with no training and a bag of human odds and ends was felling creatures that had cut down soldiers twice her size, I didn’t believe it. I assumed my men were exaggerating.” His thumb traced the line of my jaw. “They weren’t. Your skill. Your nerve. You fought like something out of the old tales. You would rival my most elite warriors, and you did it with a bottle of perfume and a great deal of sheer, stubborn will.”
Understanding dawned. “Hence the nickname.”
His smile was fond, and dangerous, and entirely mine.
“Hence the nickname.” He repeated, then pulled me in and whispered, “My little warrior.”
He kissed me, and the bestiary still cradled open in my hands, the library, the castle and the whole waiting world simply fell away.
We didn’t move on quickly after that.
In truth, we didn’t move on at all for quite some time because Atlas had developed a sudden and very specific interest in the far back corner of the library. A dim, forgotten stretch of shelving that smelled of centuries of dust and nothing else.
“There is a section back here,” he murmured against my lips, walking me slowly backward into the stacks, “that has long been in want of a little excitement.”
“Is that so?” I breathed.
“No.” His grin turned wicked as the shadows closed around us. “But it is a corner of my castle that no one ever visits. Which makes it, by definition…” He lifted me clean off my feet, my spine meeting the spines of some long-neglected shelf, my legs winding around him on instinct. “…gloriously private.”
I caught one glimpse of the gold letters pressing into my shoulder blades before his mouth dropped to my throat and emptied my head of every coherent thought.
A Complete History of Northern Grain Tariffs. Volumes one through forty.
I would, I suspected, have profoundly fond feelings about agricultural taxation for the rest of my natural life.
What followed bore no resemblance whatsoever to the careful patience he’d shown me before. It was fast and greedy and barely contained, the silk of my skirts shoved high, and his laces wrenched loose. His mouth swallowed every sound he dragged out of me as he took me hard against four centuries of forgotten tax law.
One hand braced on the shelf beside my head, the other gripping my thigh, holding me exactly where he wanted me while he drove us both higher with single-minded purpose. When I finally shattered, I had to bite down on his shoulder to keep from bringing the entire castle running, and he followed only a breath later. My name muffled against my hair alongside a curse decidedly unbecoming of a king.
A considerable while later, thoroughly rumpled and several pins lighter in my hair, I made him swear that I could come back here.
Repeatedly.
“For the books,” I told him primly, smoothing my ruined skirts and failing entirely to look respectable. “Only the books.”
He was still laughing about it as he led me onward. He showed me music rooms and map rooms, a conservatory gone half wild with fruit trees. A long hall of windows where the light fell in colored pools across the floor. And at every turn, he kept up a quiet, dry commentary. A story about this king or that disaster, a confession that he had once gotten lost in his own east wing for the better part of an afternoon as a boy. All of it until I was laughing more than I had in longer than I could remember.
It was nice. Painfully, dangerously nice.
The kind of nice that made a girl forget she had ever lived any other way.
And then he brought me to the banqueting hall, and the spell of the quiet day shattered into noise.
The hall was enormous, larger than the throne room, larger than any room had a right to be. What with its incredible cathedral ceiling lost somewhere in shadow, far above us, and great arched windows running the length of one wall. And it was chaos. Beautiful, frantic chaos.
Servants swarmed everywhere, hauling long tables into place, draping them in cloth the colour of deep wine, arranging towers of glassware that caught the light and threw it back in fractured rainbows. Garlands of greenery and white blossoms were being wound up the columns. Somewhere, unseen, musicians were tuning their instruments in fits and starts. The air smelled of beeswax and crushed petals and something roasting, far off, that made my stomach growl despite the pastries still sitting comfortably inside me.
“All of this is for tonight?” I said faintly.
“All of this is for you,” Atlas confirmed.
“That’s no better. In fact, that’s significantly worse.” I watched a man stagger past beneath an armful of candles taller than he was. “You realize I have survived actual monsters with less terror than I am currently feeling about a dinner party.”
“It isn’t a dinner party. It is a banquet.” His hand settled at the small of my back, and his voice dropped just for me. “And you will be magnificent, little warrior. You ended a war these people thought would swallow them whole. There’s not a soul in that hall tonight who will not be desperate to thank you.”
“That’s the part that terrifies me.”
