Could Tarron not see it?
It was small. Less solid than others she’d seen—just a wisp that soon swirled into a shape that resembled a weasel, long and lean and cunning, before it froze as well.
Once again waiting for a command?
The prince called her name.
No—hersister’sname.
Images of Nora flashed through her mind, and she remembered, in that instant, what she had come to this realm to do. It felt almost as if the shadow had come to remind her of what she couldstilldo. She was alone with the prince. Solturne Hall was no longer in sight. This shadow…could she command it? Set it upon the prince? She had done that as a child back home, after all, accidentally possessing that man when she’d needed to protect Nora from him…
Here was another potentialaccident,and isn’t that what she’d planned for?
She only had to set things in motion. And then she could go home to Nora, and leave the fae world behind.
But at what cost?
She gave her head a hard shake. Turned away from the shadow. She could feel it staring after her as she walked back to Tarron, sat down beside him, drew her knees up and rested her chin on them.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said, softly. “What about your brother? How is he feeling?”
“Hard to say.” The prince scooped a handful of stones up, skipped one across the water. “I’m worried about him, though.”
“You’re very close to him aren’t you?”
He clenched the rest of the stones in his hand. Trying to crush them into a fine powder, judging by how tightly he gripped them as he bluntly said, “If anything happens to him, I will personally storm the Shadow Court and demand answers from the monsters there.”
She thought again of Nora, of the things she would have done for her.
And she was realizing, however reluctantly, that she and Tarron were more similar than she ever would have guessed. Two young royals thrust into a situation that neither of them had particularly wanted, just trying to keep the peace and protect the things closest to them.
This was not how it was supposed to go.
He was supposed to have been a complete monster.
“You look deep in thought,” Tarron commented after a few minutes of silence.
She tilted her head toward him, studying him, squinting against the sun rising at his back. “You just…you aren’t what I was expecting, that’s all.”
“What were you expecting, precisely?”
Oh, what a dangerous question.
It took her a long, careful moment to think of a safe answer. “My life has been filled with stories of your kind, you know.”
He arched a brow. “Do tell.”
“All of the fae in all of the various courts have some things in common. They’re…difficult. Easy to offend, fond of tricks, lovers of deadly games and cruel bargains. So many stories of…beastlybehaviors. I thought my coming here was going to be the end of me, one way or the other.”
Or the end of my sister, rather.
“Beastly, hm?”
“To put it mildly.”
He laughed—thatstupid, beautiful laugh. It seemed more pure, less guarded out here in the cool morning air, and so far away from the more proper places of Solturne Hall.
“In my defense,” she said, “you acted beastly towards me more than once when I first arrived here.”
