She felt his oath to her soul. And with that oath, the last of Lex’s energy waned. She sighed and sank into a deep sleep.
Lex opened her eyes, but Garrin wasn’t in the bedroom like he’d promised.
She threw back the covers, swung her legs off the bed, and looked down at the blush-rose dress she wore with what looked to be cut diamonds waterfalling down the length. It was beautiful, but what the hell? Someone changed her while she slept?
She hurried barefooted across the wooden floor to the door that led to the large chamber they’d entered from the hallway, but it too was empty.
Lex ran across the room and tried to open another door. It was locked, and her heart raced. She banged on the wood. “Garrin!”
No answer, nothing. Not even the sound of the wind whistling against the room’s frosted-over windowpanes.
She paced to the fireplace, hands clenched. Garrin couldn’t have been gone long. The fire hadn’t died down.
And then she saw it.
A foggy haze creeping along the floor toward her.
Lex backed up until her shoulders knocked into the corner of the mantel. “Help!”
Her heart pounded in her ears as the fog whirled and coalesced, causing the hair along her arms to stand at attention.
The fog grew taller until a male figure formed—sometimes blurry, and sometimes in sharp relief. Except for the face. The face was a blank mask.
She couldn’t see the color of his eyes or his hair, and especially not his facial features. But he wore a crown, and his voice rang clear.
“I see you.”
Lex screamed.
Lex woke abruptly, gasping for air.
Garrin jerked upright from a chair across the room and ran to her side. “What is it?”
“How many kings are here? Do they all wear crowns?”
“In Tirnan? Three: New Kingdom, Old Kingdom, and Dark Kingdom. Sunland has never had a proper court, and New and Old Kingdom have changed power since I returned. A queen rules New Kingdom. A young woman about your age they say isn’t even Fae, but Halven. The King of Old Kingdom was a soldier for most of his life. I don’t know if he wears his crown.”
“And your father?”
“My father wears a crown.” Garrin grabbed her hand. “What is it, Lex?”
She looked around frantically. “Paper. I need a piece of paper. And a pencil.”
Garrin crossed the room to a desk.
He brought back what she asked for, and Lex sketched out the shape of the crown on the man in her dream. The dream was important somehow. And it had felt real.
She held up the sketch. The drawing was of a triangle with a circle weaved into it. “Does the top of your father’s crown look like this?”
Garrin’s expression froze. “Where did you see this?”
“Your father knows who I am.”
21
Garrin grabbed Lex’s shaking shoulders. “My father knows you’re here because I told him we are to be married, remember?” Garrin didn’t know what had frightened Lex so, but his father couldn’t have entered her dream. He hadn’t that ability, unlike other Fae.
She shook her head. “The dream was real. How would I know what your father’s crown looks like?”
