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I balk, a true nightmare flashing before my eyes. “I don’t know how—”
His free arm curls around my waist, his hand warm at the small of my back. “Just relax.”
I flail, mostly. Then, as Dante moves, my spine straightens and my feet unstick from the ground. I move in perfect tandem, almost like magic.
Exactly like magic, actually.
I look down at my feet. “These shoes are enchanted.”
“Might’ve told Nurse Eina to give the fairies a request or two when they conjured your outfit. It’s not every day Camilla successfully bullies you into attendance. You havethreefairies at your disposal—may as well use them. Anyone in the court would murder to havetwo.”
“So this cleavage—isyourfault?”
“Oh, no, that was all Camilla. Please, I have some class.” Dante winks. “But you do look lovely tonight.”
My glower lasts all of a second before he twirls me around and the crescendo of the music carries my thoughts away. Dante candance;he’s the sort of tall, dark, and handsome that could make every lady and gent swoon if he weren’t competing with a prince and if they didn’t assume all Balicans were backwoods mystics obsessed with trees—which is their loss.
But even Dante can’t take my mind off my worries completely, and it shows.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“Thinking about some visions I had.” I haven’tstoppedthinking about them. “Even if—when—Cyrus falls in love tonight, it doesn’t mean Felicita’s last prophecy is broken. Or that something else bad won’t happen. Not that it will, but…It’s these little pieces coming together.”
“If something bad happens,” Dante says, with his soft smile and a halo of star-candles overhead, “we’ll do what we always do when everything seems hopeless.”
I stare up at him.
“Hope.”
“That’s the worst answer. I need you to know that.”
He laughs. The song ends and he guides me off the floor, my feet wobbly as I stop dancing and the enchantment fades.
“Do you believe in true love?” I ask. “Honestly?” Part of me wants to hear Dante say yes, just to have something to believe in.
“It’s…complicated.”
“That’s what everyone says.”
“No, I mean it involves a history lesson,” he deadpans.
Snatching a full carafe of wine out of a server’s hands, I jerk my head toward the exit with a fond, defeated sigh. “Well, anything’s better than this.”
Sometime after the clock strikes ten, Dante and I are tipsy and warm in a forgotten corner of the gardens, masks in our laps. Surrounded by fig trees and bodiless marble heads,we’ve apparently stumbled onto a graveyard for the palace’s broken statues. They’re already better company than anyone inside the ballroom—they don’t talk.
Dante regales me with a yarn starring Emilius the First, namesake to our current king and Cyrus’s great-great-grandfather. He had a love story for the ages, better known as the Prince and the Peasant.
For centuries, the territories that now make up Auveny had been small and divided, many lasting only the length of a single reign. When Emilius the First was a child, the lands were newly uniting under one banner. The farthest regions had no lords and were mostly homesteaders. The capital tried to place order upon them—and the taxes and laws that come with order—but they rebelled.
During this time, a witch of the rebels called on the Fates. She asked them to curse the prince to sing himself hoarse and dance until his feet fell off if the fighting did not end by his sixteenth birthday. The dukes laughed and said they would cease fighting when they won, but the seasons passed quickly, and when the prince turned sixteen, smoke still darkened the battlefields.
His feet started tapping. Song trilled from his throat at all hours.
The queen organized a special ball as a means to mask Emilius’s condition. After fourteen days of dancing, a peasant girl by the name of Giraldine arrived. Giraldine wasn’t even supposed to be at the palace—all things cruel and mortal rallied against her to keep her from it—but she was so pure of heart that the Fates intervened. They brought her in a crystalline carriage and had fairies spin her a dress sofine that a whisper could rustle it. She met the prince’s eyes across the ballroom; he was so shocked by her loveliness that he froze in place and asked for her hand, though his voice had been long gone.
The curse was broken. The tales wrote themselves.
“Or,” Dante says, lifting the carafe and taking another swig, “consider this: Giraldine was just a normal girl born in the cinders of a failed revolution. Old Emilius liked her enough; it doesn’t really matter if he did when everyone else did. That was precisely why he chose her: because she was the kind of bright young beauty who men would go to war for—hadgone to war for. He married her so those men would go to war for him instead of against him.”
