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I hum, shifting on the spot, twisting to face her better. “So that’s what’s happening?”
Daein did confirm the rumours in his own way. But he stays tight-lipped about most of these troubles for the dokkalves and their political throwover than I would like him to. He has his reasons for not telling me much, but I suspect a big part of it is to keep me in the dark, not to protect me from anything, but to protectus. As though these changes and troubles are somehow threats to him and me as his wife directly.
I don’t know…
How much can one go off instinct and gut-feelings?
I’m probably being paranoid.
Skye doesn’t shift like I did to face me, she glides, ever so graceful and silky, like a precious ribbon drifting in the gentle breeze.
“The light is always meant to be,” she says softly, quietly. Doesn’t want us to be overheard by the drunken fae at the gambling table. “It was simply a matter of time before it defended itself.”
Her eyes narrow ever-so-slightly, observing me, watching for any reaction I might give. I just shrug.
“Can’t say much on it,” I admit. “I don’t know more than the rumours I heard at the ball. He—” I gesture to Daein, who throws onyx stones on the table with a vicious grin smeared across his beautiful face “—tells me nothing.”
“Dokkalves,” she says simply, as though it’s an obvious thing to expect from them. Maybe she’s not wrong. He doesn’t look down on me because I’m hiswife, but because I’m litalf in ancestry, Halfling in birth, human in life.
“I have been privy to rumours, too,” Skye inches into her point. “Did you not spend time in the Wastelands during labour and to heal your human sickness?”
My nod is faint, my eyes watchful.
Distantly, I think of my labour, my delusions of the light expanding, swelling, throbbing all around me in my agony. But these are mere mixed memories—I don’t think that ever happened at all. Still, it’s burned in my mind all the same as though it did happen and only just yesterday.
“I enjoy the light pillars,” I confess. “Since our bonding,” I add, casting a look at Daein who has no interest in anything other than his gambling, “I haven’t needed to go back for its healing powers. But when we pass around them in the carriage when we go back and forth between the lands, I can feel it, you know? Like the edges of the pillars are reaching out, just grazing me.”
Skye’s eyes sparkle with life and her smile slowly slides back onto her gold-painted lips. Golden hair falls down the side of her face, and as she leans closer, her breath tastes like peaches from the tree on top of the nearby hill.
“It calls to you, does it?”
I clench my jaw, a sudden flurry of worry icing my chest.
I said too much. Confessed too much in my weariness.
Then suspicion dawns on me—and I realise she waited for me to be tipsy from the wine and knackered from the trip, waited and then pounced.
But why?
“What are you getting at?” I ask, suddenly armed in my stony face and harsh tone.
“I think you know,” she whispers, all smiles and unspoken truths. “That little rumour of your sickness and the light pillars healing you—oh, that was not anything that was ever supposed to leave the dark lands. But it has. Your daughter is too disarmed by her love interest,” she adds, a hint of sinister intent in her soft tone.
Ensley…
She knew about my sickness, the labour, the light healing me. She knew, not because I told her, but from the talk in the castle.
And she talked. She bared my secret in whispered, quiet moments with Affay, probably hidden in some alcove at the ball. And it’s gone from there, through some of the royals, maybe first to his father, Rain, then to Princess Skye.
However it happened, ithappened. That’s what matters.
“You are more than what you appear,” Skye murmurs softly before she slowly rises from the loveseat and wanders over to the fireplace, as if to warm herself. When she stands still for a heartbeat, she turns her head slightly and spares me a knowing smile before she looks back at the flames.
Daein is none the wiser. Has no idea.
And I don’t know if I should tell him…
Worries flurry around my chest, encasing my heart like a whirlpool, as I stay sunken into the loveseat. I can hardly peel it all apart in my mind.
