I rise from my desk, smiling. “I know, I know. Did you interrupt my work just to seduce me?”
Emmett holds the door open for me and I step through past him. “Seducing comes later. The children want you to say good night. Pippa has demands.”
“She always does.”
“She takes after you in that way.”
Emmett and I walk hand in hand, down the long, carpeted hall of Kensington Palace, into our private family apartments.
“When do Greer and Joseph arrive from Scotland?” Emmett asks. My childhood best friend, Greer, was presumed dead after Queen Mor staged a suicide during the competition for Bram’s hand. But Greer and her stable boy Joseph were successful in fleeing over the border to Scotland. She came back to visit England two years into my reign as queen, a wiggling baby in her arms and her doting husband by her side. The day she arrived in my throne room remains one of the happiest of my life.
“Tuesday morning, they’ll be staying with us for a week.”
Emmett shakes his head. “I don’t like the way their second son looks at Elizabeth,” he says in a mock whisper.
I roll my eyes at him. “You should be more worried about the poor lovesick boy. She’ll eat him alive.”
We reach the drawing room, aglow with firelight and filled with the laughter of our two middle boys, who are sprawled outon the carpet playing with Emmett’s childhood toy soldiers. Our children might be being raised under the same roof as my husband once was, but their childhoods bear no resemblance to the iciness of his own.
“Mama, Edmund is using magic!” Henry shouts as I walk into the room.
I look to see Edmund laughing uproariously, a little toy soldier beside him marching across the carpet. Fennick gifted it to him on a recent trip to the Otherworld, and I find it a little creepy, but Edmund adores it.
“Stop complaining and use it back, then.” I scoop up a clever little butterfly toy from the mantel and pass it down to him. It was also a gift from Fennick, who has absolutely no respect for the peace of my household.
Henry tosses it at his brother, and it takes off flying, sending them both squealing and running in a full circle around the drawing room.
“And you say I rile them up.” Emmett sinks back onto the sofa and smiles over at the boys.
“Don’t bump me! I’m reading!” our second-youngest, Amelia, cries from the window seat, where she sits most evenings, with a blanket on her lap and a book in her hand.
“Fifteen minutes, then bed!” I call in her direction.
“Let me finish this chapter!” she retorts without looking up.
I sigh fondly and plant a kiss on top of her head. I’d better get Pippa down before I attempt to wrangle the rest of them.
“Good luck in there!” Emmett calls as I walk down the dark corridor to the children’s rooms.
“Don’t let the rest of them push you around while I’m gone.”
Henry jumps onto his father’s lap and Emmett lets out a good-natured cry of pain. “It’s impossible. We’re so outnumbered.”
Pippa, our youngest, is only six—but the fieriest of all our brood. She’s sitting bolt upright in bed as I enter her room, with her favorite doll clutched to her chest.
“You made me wait.” She’s got Emmett’s dark hair and my wild curls, but her bright eyes are all Lydia. Sometimes it feels like I’m looking at my sister in miniature. I wouldn’t be surprised if Pippa one day chose to leave England for the Otherworld and find some land in need of a queen, just like her aunt.
We’ve made no secret of our personal past or our nation’s history to our children. It would be impossible not to, what with the frequent holidays to the Otherworld and the history dripping from the walls of Kensington Palace. Emmett and I made a conscious decision not to scrub the evidence of Mor and Bram from our home. Their portraits still hang in the great hall, and the throne room is still painted with frescoes of the Otherworld. We kept the statues in the garden, and though most of the money has my face on it now, there are still a few bills and coins circulating that portray Mor instead.
No matter how badly things ended, Bram was once Emmett’s brother, and it was important to him that our children knew Bram was loved. On nights that are particularly cold and stormy, Emmett will gather our children around the fire and tell them stories of the time Bram taught him to play billiards or the fight they once got into on my behalf at a gambling club. That one is a particular favorite of the boys.
“I’m sorry, darling.” Pippa’s soft mattress sinks as I sit down next to her. I pat the space next to me and call, “Come here, Piglet,” untilthe scraggly little dog bounds from where she was lying by the window and leaps up into bed next to us.
Pippa climbs onto my lap and cups my face in her tiny hands. “Mama, I missed you all day.”
I press a kiss into her soft cheek. “We had lunch together, silly, and tea after that.”
She frowns, her brows crinkling over those warm brown eyes. I brush a tangled curl out of her face and begin a loose braid down her back.
