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And that resonance she heard when they were channeling, sometimes. He seemed both more and less himself, here on the floor in front of her.
Slowly, with effort, Lore lowered her eyes to the Sainted King’s.
He took a deep breath. “I don’t think this should really be a surprise,” he murmured, meant for only her to hear. “And not just because of what the court thinks. This is meant to happen. Us. You feel that, too, don’t you?”
And here was another echo from their recent past, that plaintive note, almost begging. Tell me I’m not alone in this.
She’d had an answer, then. Now she couldn’t find one.
But the sight of him like this, laid bare and earnest, felt like something beautiful and awful, something no mortal eye was meant to look on and no mortal heart could hold. This was one more step in a dance, as inevitable as everything that came before it. There’d been something about him from the beginning that called to her and made her want. Something about both of them, him and Gabe. And maybe this wasn’t exactly where the wanting pointed, but gods, it was as close as she could hope to get.
She looked into Bastian’s eyes, glinting dark. She nodded.
Behind him, Gabe stiffened.
Bastian reached into his doublet, pulled out a ring. The band was braided gold and silver, much like his throne. The diamond had a nearly golden cast to it, shimmering like a piece of captured sun.
“Before my gathered subjects.” His voice was still quiet, but the room had grown grave-silent, and his words carried to every corner as he spoke rote phrases, decided centuries before. “I ask that you, Lore, take my hand in marriage and become the Queen of Auverraine.”
It sounded strange, for there to be no surname in the pronouncement, a gaping hole that everyone had to notice.
If they were just Lore, just Bastian, it wouldn’t even be a factor—they’d be together already in every way that mattered. She knew that. But they were a King and a deathwitch, two channelers of leftover god-power. And though the titles shouldn’t matter, though something like this should be just about people, it couldn’t be. Not now, not when the titles were so damn heavy.
But still, she wanted.
“Yes.” She barely felt her mouth move, but she heard herself answer. “Yes.”
And the ring slid over her finger.
And he kissed her. And Lore kissed him back.
While his lips were still on hers, while the crowd whipped itself from shock to cheering, her eyes opened and looked at Gabe again. His lips were parted, his cheeks flushed. One hand raised, fingers twitching toward her and Bastian.
Then he turned and left the room.
CHAPTER TEN
There is always something different to want.
—Fragment from Marya Addou, Malfouran poet
Her hands were on the tree again.
It didn’t take her long to recognize it was another dream. As soon as her eyes registered sensory input, she knew.
Lore expected fear, along with that knowledge, expected panic to drip icy down her spine and make her limbs clumsy. Having the dreams meant that her forest wasn’t working, that the influence of a dead goddess might be seeping into her mind, no matter that Bastian didn’t believe it. But no fear came.
Maybe there’s nothing to be afraid of, she thought, but it was a faded thing, fleeting as smoke. In this dream-world with her dream-mind, the words hardly made sense together, something the person she was here had no context for.
Her hands—palm unscarred, paler—caressed the bark in front of them like it was a long-gone lover, a thing she’d never expected to touch again. Her mind felt split down the middle, dream-her and real-her, each with a different set of thoughts and memories and beliefs. Dream-her was louder. Dream-her thought if she could concentrate hard enough on this tree, narrow all the noise in her mind to only the feel beneath her fingers, maybe she could forget.
Forget what? real-Lore asked, another bare impression of thought that barely made an impact. There was no answer.
“It was kind of him.”
A voice she both recognized and didn’t. She glanced over her shoulder.
Her eyes wouldn’t quite focus on the figure behind her, glancing off at all the salient points. Tall. Broad-shouldered. His hands were freckled, but his face was a wash of light and color, like water thrown across a canvas that hadn’t dried.
