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I shivered and read the rest of the letter, coming unmoored as I did. “She loves me,” I said when I looked up. “She tried to stop Lord Bloodthorn from taking me. She never gave me up willingly. I was wanted.”
“I believe it. I said I wished to make you a queen and she said queens were all very fine, but if it wasn’t what you wanted, she’d hunt me down and use my feathers as pillow stuffing.”
I gave a soft, disbelieving laugh. “Thank you for this. It means everything to me.” I held the letter to my chest. “Ella.” I had a name, a name not bound in debt and shame.
Tawhiri’s eyes were soft, his profile sharp against the lightening sky. It was nearly dawn, I realized with sudden alarm. We’d talked the night away.
“I need to go. I’ve already stayed too long.”
Tawhiri held out a hand, an offer.
“Shouldn’t you return to your ball?”
He just shook his head and kept his hand where it was. I took it.
We flew together back to the manor and touched down just outside the boundaries with only a few minutes to spare. For a moment we remained standing so close that I could feel the heat of him, a contrast to the cool morning.
“If you will marry me, come to the ball tonight and I will announce it.”
I tried to make light of it. “I don’t think you need doubt me. I’d rather be bound to you than the manor, and the trappings of royalty are a nice incentive too. Think of the number of hats I might purchase, as queen.”
His expression remained serious, as if he were weighing something. “Ella,” he began.
“Yes?” I prompted when he said nothing more. I felt dawn calling to me, the crest of a wave, but I didn’t move to cross the boundary.
“Your true name might break the curse,” he said all in a rush. “If you claim it with the dawn.”
I stared at him as the curse hummed to life, sunlight breaking over the manor wall. Pain struck. All the years of being caged, of never quite being good enough, of being always held at a distance, rose up in me and set me alight like a match to dry tinder.
“I am Ella,” I told the manor. “I claim myself from you.”
The curse pulsed, white-hot. Tawhiri caught me as my knees gave out, but it was done, burned out of my chest. I stood outside the bounds at dawn without pain for the first time in more than a decade.
“I’m free,” I said in wonder swiftly followed by a sharply illogical hurt, because I ought to be glad about it, oughtn’t I? Except that starlit towers and eyes dark as midnight had confused things. Tawhiri had given up the bargaining chip he held over me. “Why did you tell me that just now? Have you changed your mind?”
His hands still rested lightly beneath my arms. “No,” he said heavily. “My choice remains the same: I wish to marry you. I meant to tell you to test the spell against your name tomorrow morning, as a wedding gift. I should have, for now I have nothing to bargain with. But I…couldn’t.”
I stared at him. A fae king confessing he’d done something against his own interest for me.
“You want me to like you enough to marry you for yourself,” I said.
He winced. “Yes.” And then, hurrying on from admitting that vulnerability: “You are every bit as deserving as any other scion of the twelve houses, Ella. You are not somehow less, or lacking, and I would have you choose me knowing your own worth.”
I couldn’t speak. He touched a finger to my cheek. “If you will marry me, come to tonight’s ball. If not, then, I suppose farewell.” That glimpse of vulnerability folded away as if it had never been, and with a rush of wings, he was gone.
I lay awakefor a long time before sleep came. When I was roused, after what felt like only a few minutes, the mood in the house was furious. Lady Bloodthorn glared and huffed her way through the morning’s gossip sheet, which declared: MYSTERIOUS STRANGER STEALS KING’S HEART?
Lady Bloodthorn shook her head. “I have had messages flying back and forth all morning. No one has heard of her before.”
“She can’t be a child of one of the houses, can she?” Acantha looked down at her list, where she had detailed the names of her competitors along with their weaknesses. “Which means he can’t marry her, regardless. I don’t know why he’s wasting everyone’s time with this, this nobody.”
“Perhaps that’s why he’s spending so much time with her,” Rose said.
“Maybe she’s not a nobody,” I said softly.
Everyone looked at me in surprise.
“I mean, if no one knows who she is, she could be anyone,” I said hastily. “And she looked pure sidhe, didn’t she? Maybe she’s a sorceress, or, or a princess from another court.”
