“Haveyouslept?”
“I will.” Maybe.
He nods at the bed. “I’ll keep watch.”
I hesitate, because it’s tempting, and I trust Nikko at my back. I trust everyone I brought with me. I just...don’t trust anyone else in the palace.
But my sleep is never peaceful. Horrors from the battlefield like to haunt my dreams, especially when I’m anxious. I doubt beingherewould make that any better. My hand absently sketches a sigil in the air, a force of habit from when I’m stressed, but there’s no flame to draw. The sigil barely glows before vanishing, and I frown.
Nikko is looking at me with something akin to pity, and I curl my hand into a fist.
“I wish I knew what her goal was,” I say. “I wish...I wish her brother hadn’t interrupted us quite so quickly.”
“Why?”
It’s a good question. I don’t fully have an answer.
I frown. “Because...”
My voice trails off. Because she might have been spying, but she didn’tseemlike a spy.
A scratch against stone sounds from above. It’s barely a whisper of sound, but I jerk my head up.
Again, nothing. This is ridiculous. It’s probably just birds roosting in the snow.
Maybe my instincts are screaming about nothing at all.
The thought is striking. Perhaps I really have spent too many days along the front lines of battle. I’ve been looking at everything like a plotted attack, as if Astranza’s royalty sought to lay a trap—as if armed men might storm in from above at any moment.
I realign my thoughts and attempt to reevaluate the way the princessentered the room, the way the other woman scolded her on the steps, the way she was rearranging the flowers behind us. She couldn’t have known who I was. No one knew whoshewas.
When Prince Dane appeared, he was scolding her. He gripped her wrist so tightly. I heard the sound she made.
Of course I’m not hurting her.
That’s what Dane said. But theprincessnever answered.
For hours, I’ve been wondering if Princess Marjoriana devised this as a plan to get access to me or my soldiers, as if her scheme was part of some master plot to work against Incendar. As if she hoped to hear secrets that she would later report back to her brother or father.
But for the first time, I consider another reason a princess would feel the need to sneak and hide—and it has nothing to do with subterfuge.
“Wake Sev,” I say to Nikko. “There’s still work to be done.”
Chapter Seven
The Princess
Dane has been yelling at me for an hour.
It’s been going on for so long that my ladies eventually held up a sheet so they could help me change out of the maid uniform and into something more appropriate for a princess. Now I’m at my dressing table while two of them braid my hair, Charlotte supervises, and Dane continues ranting behind me.
I have no idea what he’s saying. I stopped listening forty-five minutes ago.
Instead, I’m thinking of Maddox Kyronan. His oddly compelling accent. His golden-brown eyes. The way he ordered Dane to let go of me—after I basically accused him of torturing his people.
Did he hurt you?
My heart skips a little, and I tell my heart to knock it off. He’s a rough-edged soldier with a reputation for violence. I don’t know him. He doesn’t know me. But no one other than Asher has ever given a passing thought to the way my brother addresses me.
