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I sat up and started unlacing the splints.
It hadn’t been quite the full day Cyara had told me the healers predicted I would need, but I didn’t care. I wanted them off; I wanted off of that damn bed, and I wanted a blade in my hand. I needed to stab something—or someone—desperately.
“Your Majesty,” Cyara rushed forward, nearly dropping the tea tray she carried in her hurry to get me down onto my back.
“Veyka,” I reminded her, an unflinching command. “I am done laying here. I amfine.”
I couldn’t hide the wince as I bent my arm to rip the splints off the other, but I ignored it.
“The healers will be back this afternoon,” Cyara said. She didn’t try to stop me again, but she did slide a dubious glance towards the closed bedroom doors.
Arran had disappeared through those doors last night after I broke his heart.
Based on the persistent but not overwhelming pull in my chest, I guessed that he hadn’t gone far.
I ignored it, as I had been all night. “Where are my knives and scabbards?”
Cyara’s turquoise eyes turned downright incredulous. “You cannot—”
“I can do whatever I damn well please. I am the High Queen of Annwyn,” I gritted out, swinging my feet around to the floor.
I paused to take a few breaths. Not because I was afraid to test my weight.
My handmaiden circled the bed, the tea tray still in her hands, and fixed me with a look that was positively terrifying.
I glared right back.
Instead of battling with words, she set the tea tray gently on the side table, opened the drawer, and pulled out a hand mirror. Which she then held directly in front of my face.
I flinched harder at my reflection than I had at the pain.
“This is why I made you a Knight of the Round Table. You’re as irritatingly protective and fierce as any of them,” I grumbled.
I was a mess.
No, that was putting it too kindly.
I was a fucking disgusting, Ancestors-damned mess.
My hair, which had been plaited and adorned with tiny rose clips for the Joining, looked like a tangled nest for some fearsome, blood-loving bird. A few of the clips remained, but detangling them from my hair… I shivered. The cuts on my face were mostly healed, but they distorted my normally pale skin with slashes of brighter pink.
It is shocking Arran wants me as his mate at all, looking like this.
The jest wasn’t even funny in my mind.
Cyara put aside the mirror and folded her arms across her chest, staring down at me with eyes full of challenge, wings quivering. The strangeness of it struck me—my tiny handmaiden, looking down on me rather than up for once, with all the command of a queen in her eyes.
Yes, I’d been wise to make her a Knight. Even if I was stupid about everything else.
“I will help you bathe, change into a night gown, and then back into the bed.”
“Cyara.”
“Veyka.”
I regretted insisting she use my name rather than my title. “I am fine.”
“Good. Be fine in the bed.” Her wings flared slightly over her shoulders. I knew what that meant. I’d watched that movement a thousand times as she ordered her sisters around.
