“Well, it’s easy to be controlled when you and your sisters all have matching enchanted shoes.” Imelda wiggled her bare toes at the fire.
Understanding clicked through his thoughts, and shame warmed his cheeks.
“What did he want?” he asked gently.
Imelda met his gaze over the flames, and he felt momentarily stunned to silence as he watched the firelight limn her hair and turn her eyes incandescent.
“To protect us. He loved us, you know. He just had a strange way of expressing it. I think he thought that if we looked and acted alike, someone wouldn’t be able to choose which of us to harm, and would thus leave us alone.”
Ambrose let out a low laugh. “You know, I think my father wanted the same for me and my brothers, not so he could protect us, but rather so he’d have a matched set of perfect sons. I always managed to disappoint. My brother could cut off the head of a dragon with ease, but I ended up giving one a paid-benefits position in the castle. My other brother could charm sirens to sleep, but if I sang, a giant kraken would mistake me for her long-lost son, and I’d be stuck grappling with it for ages and somehow emerge with a new trading contract over the seas.”
Imelda laughed. “Really?”
“Oh yes. My father was…well, let us say that he was not pleased.”
“Why not? Sounds like you just made things better for your kingdom, not worse.”
Ambrose would’ve liked to think the same thing. But that was not how his father saw it.
“I suppose it’s simply not how things are done.”
His father wanted all his sons to be powerful, and to that end, his only lesson was that anything given could be taken away, and one must have the will and power to right the situation.
For a good deed, he would sit at his father’s right-hand side. For a bad one, he’d take his meal in the kitchens. Once, he was rewarded with a puppy. Then he was punished and had it taken away.
His father had taught him distance.
If he could want so little, then very little could hurt him. If he learned early that everything could be taken away, then he would be attached to nothing but the pursuit of power.
When Ambrose was a child, he’d actually dreamt of something so powerful it could never be ripped from him. Years ago, he’d thought perhaps it might be true love, the kind sung about in courtyards or scribbled about in poems. But all he had to do was get married to discover how that, too, could be snatched away as easily as a handful of coins.
Things could always be taken from you.
Ambrose turned his head to the night sky, quietly willing the dawn to come faster. He didn’t like being left alone with Imelda. It disquieted him, and he’d hardly been with her for more than a day.
“So your father would leave you outside the castle, and mine wouldn’t let me out,” Imelda remarked thoughtfully.
“We sound rather pitiful.”
“We soundalive. That bed would’ve eaten us.”
“Well, then, here’s to us.”
They didn’t have anything for a cup, so they used Imelda’s utterly pristine pair of crystal shoes.
“To having what we want,” Imelda said.
“To unenchanted shoes,” Ambrose added.
“And dragons that pose no moral conundrums.”
Ambrose smiled. “And siblings we can be as similar or dissimilar to as we like.”
“And to never,eversharing a bed together again.” Imelda shuddered.
Ambrose grinned, clinking his shoe to hers. But as he did so, he felt a twinge of awareness that he couldn’t push aside. He didn’t want to remember how she’d felt in his arms when they’d skimmed down the wall of the inn. How she’d smelled of smoke and burnt sugar. Or how, right now, the firelight edged her unruly curls and painted her skin gold. Perhaps it was a blessing that he didn’t remember what it was like to love her. Emotion was a dangerous temptation, one that only brought loss.
“Never again,” he said.
