“At least you have been able to smell the sea all these years,” he said.
“Yet I remain a terrible housekeeper,” she said, standing. Collecting the dirty clothes that she and Riker had discarded on the living room furniture, she moved around Damion into the hall.
“You were not raised to be one,” he said after her.
“You can sleep there.” She gestured back at the sofa. She balled up the clothes and tossed them on top of the washing machine, closing the shuttered doors on the dirty laundry.
How she hated washing clothes. As independent as she’d grown in this world, she failed to find any redemptive feeling in such mundane tasks. Back home, the brownies would complain and grumble about the filthiness of the clothes, yet at the same time attended to the washing of them with single-minded rigor. But she had no such servants here, just a machine that had a bit too much iron in its guts and threatened to give her a headache every time she washed her clothes. This whole world was filled with iron. When she’d been exiled here, many had considered it a death sentence, but she’d fought through the initial sickness and found ways to survive, mostly thanks to the others also in exile.
Damion eyed the couch dubiously, tugging at the constricting collar of his T-shirt. One of the conductors had probably given him the clothes. Those who helped their kind escape the Lands into this world usually kept a stash of human apparel for newcomers. The dress she’d been given when she’d first crossed over had been ill-fitting and hideous. She’d looked like a clan of imps stuffed into a polyester paisley sack, attempting to pass themselves off as a person—and failing.
“The fact is, coz,” she said, “I have no need of fealty. Yours or anyone else’s. Why would I?”
“I heard,” he said in a rather slantwise fashion, “that you’ve found yourself a Prince.”
She sighed and picked up a rag from the sink, half-heartedly wiping up the crumbs, pushing around dirty coffee mugs and bottles of water, crumpled napkins and plastic-ware, containers of muffins and donuts, a bag of oranges.
“He found me, actually,” she said, corralling the crumbs into her hand and then dumping them and the rag into the sink.
“There was a Prince in this world?”
She nodded, snagged the muffin container, and carried it the five feet from the kitchen to Damion. Popping open the lid, she held it out to him.
“Blueberry,” she said.
His nostrils flared a bit. His lip curled.
“You’ll get used to human food,” she said, taking one of the cakey muffins for herself and plunking the container down on top of the pizza box.
“Who is he?” Damion asked.
She sank into the burnt-orange, molded chair that had been given to Riker by one of his “girlfriends.” They were always giving him things—before their boyfriends came prowling around, looking for bikes to destroy.
“His mother was one of the western Raes,” she said. “Her sister took the family and left it to their father to kill her. Drowning is how they do it in the Lakelands.”
“Swamp-scum,” he said with a sneer.
“But he couldn’t do it.” She tucked one leg under her and slung the other over the arm of the chair, balancing the muffin on her knee as she picked at it. “He helped her escape instead. After she arrived, she met a warrior, a defector. And they produced a Prince.”
Damion nodded, the polished gray surface of his eyes turning distant. “If we could stop these inheritance killings, we might not have such a shortage of Princes to begin with.”
“But then we would have even more Raes,” she said softly. “If they didn’t kill each other vying to become Radiant, they’d just end up dead fighting for the Crown during the Ascension.” She cleared her throat, the dark clouds piling up in her head. “Not that it matters to us,” she said, setting her half-eaten muffin on the coffee table. “What happens in the Lands isn’t our concern. Welcome to exile.”
His glum expression was made gloomier by the scars. They marred both his cheeks, the left worse than the right, where the wounded flesh had healed into a knotted web. They sliced across his nose and even his lips. His forehead remained mostly unscathed. It looked as though Lavana had tried to slice him into ribbons, like she’d toyed with him rather than simply killing him, which would’ve been more honorable.
“You have a Prince,” he said. “And you have the right to challenge Lavana to become our family’s Radiant. It has been ten months since my mistress took the High Road, there are only three months left for you to put yourself forward before the end of the year.”
The urgency was apparent in his eyes, as well as his voice. A year—thirteen months in the Lands—from the day the last Radiant died was all a claimant had to put herself forward.
She wiped the crumbs from her jeans onto the scuffed, fake wood floors. “I’m exiled, Damion.We’reexiled.”
“You were exiled by the Radiant. But my mistress is gone now. You have a Prince. Lavana doesn’t. That alone—”
“Riker has never even set foot in the Lands. He has no idea what it means to be a Prince. He really doesn’t even understand why he feels compelled to stay with me.”
“So, what are you saying? You don’t love him? What Radiant has ever loved her Prince? That’s not important. So long as you have one, that is all that matters, and you know it.”
He pushed aside the pizza box and sat on the coffee table—which groaned in protest—and looked her in the eye.
