AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She raised her sword to examine the blood-covered blade. “It would seem your security is lacking, faerie knight.”
Chapter 16
Ipushedthestrangeyellow fruit around my plate, still unsure what the grape-like food was called.
We sat in Dagda’s room, at the large desk that, from the precarious piles of parchments stacked along the side wall, he’d hastily cleared for this meal.
Tension lingered between us, so thick it coated my tongue in a bitter sourness.
A day had passed since the assassination attempt. Badb had allowed me to take over right before Dagda burst into the room. While the guard untied Roisin, Dagda had paced and paced. Prowling, searching like he was afraid we had missed something. A dull panic laced his movements. As if he were trying to tamp it down but couldn’t help himself. Then he’d declared that I would move into the bedchamber next to his.
And so I had. Mostly because I knew every moment in that room I’d see the blood seeping out of the stranger, visualize his pale, dead face, laying on my bed. Picture the phantom stains on the marble floor.
Not to mention how, in a drunken stupor, I’d almost let Dagda take me.
Roisin had been so shaken from the attack that after she’d helped me clean up, I’d given her the rest of the night and all of today off.
My attacker was the same man who’d set the wards on my old chamber, which was why he’d so easily manipulated the magic placed on my quarters. Fresh wards were now cast on my new room. I shifted in my seat. As long as I trusted the random person who set them.
My new room was a dwarfed, plainer version of the old, but somehow the guards had fit all of Morrigan’s dresses into the smaller armoire. They’d even found a spot for her potion cabinet.
Dagda’s fork clinked against his plate. “I want to assign you a new faerie knight.”
I glanced at him. “I have a faerie knight.”
“Yes, but she is not here. Her lineage, the House of the High Ones, has many—”
“I want Palon,” I said.
“Palon is not of her house. If we were to assign one outside of the House of the High Ones as a faerie knight, we shall break the longstanding custom. It may cause—”
“I want Palon.”
The lanterns in his room cast a soft glow over the squareness of his clenched jaw.
I leaned back in my chair. “While we are discussing changes. The unspoken policy to not discuss the battle with the Fomori isn’t the cure-all you seem to hope it will be. It only leaves tensions simmering beneath the surface. And places me in danger.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Question them again.” A muscle in Dagda’s clenched jaw twitched, but I plowed ahead. “Time has passed. They aren’t expecting us. If Niamh’s liars brew is still around, we can take them by surprise, they won’t be able to use it—”
“I will not, after three years, turn this court into an inquisition. We are held together by such thin ties that the distrust created would drive us to war. It shall rip our kingdom apart.”
“So we sit around and wait for another attempt on my life? I thought I was your great love, Dagda, and now you—”
His silverware dropped to his plate, and he rose. “Do not tell me how I feel about you. When I found out what happened to you yesterday, I…” Air seeped out of him, and he ran a hand over his face. A wild, fearful panic flashed through me so harsh and deep it stole my breath.
“What happened during the twenty-one years I was gone?” I asked.
“What?”
“Everyone said you did nothing but pine for me. That you let the kingdom grow weak because of it, but Illya suggested there was more to the story.”
He glared down at his food. “I did pine for you.” A tremor ran through him. “Do you ever tire of fighting it?”
He looked at me with such agony.
Something inside me recoiled. “Fighting what?”
