I smiled politely at the joke—until I looked at Emrys to share in the jest. He wasn’t smiling. The table had gone quiet, and every eye turned toward me. Even Emrys’s stormy ones.
Lord Gordot leaned forward, determined despite Emrys’s undercurrent of violence. “How old are you, Lady?”
I hesitated. It was such a personal question. But I was still a guest here.
“Twenty-four, Lord,” I said finally.
His expression dipped into mild disappointment. It matched the ripple of emotion that rolled off him like wilted hope. “A bit older than I thought,” he murmured, almost to himself. “But with that many siblings, I still like my chances.”
Emrys became a coiled serpent—all pent-up energy ready to explode at a moment’s notice.
I placed my fork down slowly. “Chances of what exactly, my lord?”
Lord Gordot’s smile widened. “My boy could use some straightening out too. A firm hand. Someone like you—”
“Could show him the error of his ways,” Rydic cut in, chuckling as Lady Gwenna nodded in agreement.
I stared, pulse drumming. Had I…misread something? Had I missed a conversation that should’ve included me?
Lord Rydic folded his arms. “Now hold on, Gordot. On second thought, it might already be too late for our boys. I see an even better solution.” He lifted one heavy finger and pointed it directly at Emrys. “Firestorm. Take her to wife, and be done with it. We all know you need fixing.” That same finger swung to me. “The solution is sitting right there.”
I choked, swallowing wrong. Surely I hadn’t heard him right.
The inches between us were suddenly humming like they held lightning. I felt his gaze first on the lords then on me. Burning.
Nisien laughed lightly to diffuse the situation, but there was tension in it. “I do believe my brother’s appetite just fled.”
I glanced sideways. Emrys’s jaw was clenched, but his ears had the slightest tinge of red on the tips.
Still, the conversation had crossed a line, and I couldn’t let it go unchallenged. I straightened in my chair. “With respect, Lord Rydic, Lord Gordot, what is this about? I came to Darreth as a diplomat, not to be paraded about as a cure-all bride.”
The pause that followed was a heavy one.
Lord Gordot raised a placating hand. “My apologies, lady, truly. I just thought, with your hair down and…”
He trailed off as the entire room began to shake. The walls, table, dishes, platters, goblets all trembled under Emrys’s glare. Alarm, piercing like the sound of a blood-curdling scream in a quiet night, burst from every person in the room—even Nisien.
The force of such intense emotion was nearly overwhelming, and I felt myself starting to buckle under it.
But then Emrys stood with such violence that his chair shrieked against the floor. It slammed back into the stone with acrash. It didn’t shatter, but it was a near thing. The flicker of blue fire in his eyes warned of his inner battle. He was trying to control himself but failing.
And this time, his temper wasn’t a simple thing. The smallest crack had formed in his walls when he’d shot up from his chair. From it seeped a steady flow of righteous anger but none of the shame he usually carried around with him.
At first, I’d worried he’d been embarrassed by having my name associated with marriage. Yet if that was the case, he’d have said something cutting, and that would be that. No, Emrys was reacting this way because he was angryforme.
“Good…evening,” he bit out, like even speaking had cost him dearly. He turned and stalked out, the shadows of the hallway swallowing his darkness along with his form.
Lord Rydic waved his hand in the air airily and rolled his eyes in Emrys’s wake. They probably saw his hasty departure as a lapse in restraint. But I had a feeling it was actually a display of remarkable self-possession. Was I the only one, besides Nisien, maybe, who saw what Emrys was up against when it came to his curse?
With him gone, I looked down and winced. Soft, gleaming, and obviously styled, my hair flowed over my bodice in waves.
Catrin had set me up. Knowing her, this wasn’t a cruel joke. Perhaps she thought she was offering me an opportunity I needed. Or perhaps, she had too much faith in me.
“I…didn’t know that my hair held significance,” I admitted.
Lord Elid, the least talkative of the bunch, possibly because it had been his lands Nisien was attacked on, cleared his throat. “In Darreth, when a woman comes of age, she wears her hair down to formal events to show she’s open to courtship or an arranged marriage. It’s an old custom. We should’verealized you were unfamiliar.”
I swallowed through gravel. “Thank you for the clarification. And the apology. I… I didn’t know.”
