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“Might as well tell a bird not to flap its wings,” Lavee teased, as we headed out of the room.
“Might as well,” I agreed, my lips still pulled back in a grin.
“You look happy,” Diora remarked, as we slipped out of the castle together.
The words surprised me.
I felt happy, I supposed. Not the same way I had as a child, but I had been through a lot since I was that young and innocent. It made sense that my definition of happiness had changed, didn’t it?
Happiness to me back then had been a good book, and a comfortable seat, and a laugh with a family member.
Now… I supposed happiness to me was about having a safe place, a delicious meal, and a deep conversation with someone who cared about me.
I wasn’t going to consider that when I put all of those things together, they practically equaled Espen.
“I feel happy,” I admitted to her.
Life hadn’t felt pointless in the last few days.
It hadn’t felt like a waste of time, and I hadn’t been waiting for it to end.
I’d just been living.
And I supposed there might not be any happiness greater than that of forgetting life’s difficulties and just enjoying the moments as I lived them.
Revenge hadn’t been on my mind, despite the research Diora and Namir were undertaking.
I hadn’t wanted to kill anyone.
I’d just practiced with my knives, read a few romance books, eaten an assload of good food, and talked and laughed with Espen.
Stars, he was good at making me smile.
…which I needed to stop thinking about.
We were just friends.
And fated mates, but you know, friendly fated mates.
“I’m sure lip-locking with a sexy fae king daily doesn’t hurt,” Lavee teased.
“Definitely not.” I grinned, though my heart was still beating rapidly with the remaining happy jitters that had followed kissing the gorgeous king.
And damn, he had been good at kissing.
We headed into the city together.
I’d been so focused on my goal of killing Espen that I hadn’t paid any attention to the city the first time I made my way through it. I hadn’t cared about the style, or the structures, or the art, or anything else.
But the further we walked into the city, the more awed I was.
Everything was made of the same white, sparkling stone as the castle. The entire town seemed to glitter beneath the moon’s light, and people wandered the stall-lined streets without worry or fear.
The stalls were spread out so that none of the vendors were knocking elbows or competing with each other, and seemed to be spread at random with a shoemaker to my left a ways, and a pancake chef a long way ahead of us, to my right.
We wandered the streets, tasting almost every food we saw—Espen had tucked far too much money into the pocket on my silky dress. No one looked like they were starving, and Lavee murmured to me that she had heard that the fortune Espen inherited from his parents was mostly directed to the army and feeding the poor until they were able to feed themselves. Their taxes were almost nothing, but the king’s fortune was disappearing quickly, according to the rumors.
The people were happy, though, and the commoners seemed to believe in Espen as their leader.
