His eyebrows lifted at the sight of her. “Leanora—hello.”
“You seem surprised to see me. Should I have requested an official meeting with you?”
“No.” He frowned. Started to say something, but then seemed to think better of it and instead pressed his lips back into a smile. “No, you’re always welcome in here.”
Will I be welcome when you know the truth?
She was determined to find out. Eventually.Eventually, she was going to have to tell him that truth. But in the meantime, there was the matter of those prisoners. They might have been guilty of subterfuge, but so was she, and now she needed to know…
Would he show them mercy if she asked him to?
It was a test of sorts. One she had spent the entire day plotting and planning for.
“Is everything all right?” he asked.
“I was just…worried about the prisoners you mentioned this morning.”
He snorted. “Worried?”
“What are you going to do to them?”
“Never mind that.” He was carrying a stack of papers in his hands, and now he distracted himself from the conversation by walking over to his desk and dropping the papers onto it. After arranging them neatly next to a feathered quill, he turned to the shelf behind the desk and began searching and sorting through the books on it.
When he glanced back at her a minute later, he seemed surprised again—and perhaps a touch annoyed, now—to find her still staring at him expectantly. “You don’t need to concern yourself with it,” he insisted before turning back to the shelves.
“You wish for me to just look the other way while you deal out whatever brutal punishment you please?”
“You grew up in a royal court of your own, did you not?”
“I—yes.”
“And that court, I presume, had its share of dirty deeds that needed to be dealt with.”
She glared at him. Not that he saw it, as he kept his back to her.
“So you should have at least some understanding of how these things work.” He paused just long enough to tilt his gaze toward her, and then returned to his searching and sorting. “We make examples out of the ones we’ve captured, and then the rest of them think twice about starting a war with us.”
“Maybe they don’t trulywantwar. If you could just allow them to talk, to—“
“Oh, but theydidtalk, after some persuasion.”
“Persuasion?”
He didn’t elaborate on how he hadpersuadedthem. He only nodded and said, “And do you know what those bastards told me?” He withdrew several books from the shelf and dropped them onto the desk. Slammed them, really, and then he stepped around to the front of that desk and leaned back against it. “They said they had come for my bride.”
Her heart sank horribly in her chest.
“So tell me, my bride, why would they come for you if they did not intend to start a war with me?”
Because I am Shadow, not Sun.
Did they know that, somehow?If theydid, if they had come here because of her…
“I think you should at least give them a fair trial.”
He laughed.
“Did I say something funny?” Her voice threatened to shake, but she somehow kept it steady “Or is compassion and true civility a joke to you fae?”
