I feel her sigh. “I missed you too.”
I pull back and look into her eyes, so like mine. “Do you love him?”
“Which one?” she asks, horribly. It’s the worst possible response.
“I meant Bram, but either... both?”
“I loved who I believed Bram to be.”
I don’t want to ask the next question, but I have to. “And Emmett?”
She pauses, searching for the right words, her face so full of tender fondness, it makes me ache. “He’s my best friend.”
“That’s all?”
“For two years, we are all the other has had. He’s the only person I could be honest with, and him with me. What we’ve had to do to survive here...” She trails off uncomfortably.
The sadness in her voice makes me want to cry.
“I love him so much, Lydia. I’m afraid he no longer loves me back.”
She places both hands on my shoulders. “I’d been here three months before I saw Emmett. He’d spent all his time before thatbelow my feet in the dungeons, though I was ignorant to his presence in the Otherworld. He strode into the dining room, rail thin, bruises under both eyes, and you know what the first words out of his mouth were?”
“What?” I ask quietly.
“He said your name. Whispered it like a prayer is a more accurate description.”
“Why would he do that?”
Lydia smiles sadly. “He thought I was you. It’s a very large room and I was rather far away. No one who says your name like that could have forgotten you. You’re rather hard to forget, I think.”
I look to the floor, unconvinced. “Thank you.”
She takes a step back and looks me up and down. “I’ll send Eloree, my lady’s maid, in to ready you for bed. You can trust her, but no one else. In the morning, we will plan, but you need your rest.”
I nod, too exhausted to protest.
Lydia walks out the door and moments later a lithe faerie girl with sunset-colored hair that falls to the backs of her knees strides into the room.
She sprays my hair with a fine mist of oil that smells like rose petals after rain and looks at me with her overlarge eyes through the mirror.
“You look so like your sister,” she says in a soft, high voice.
“We get that a lot. She’s prettier, though,” I answer.
“She is,” Eloree says without hesitation. I don’t know if her bluntness is a characteristic of the Others or if it’s just her, but I find it endearing.
I raise my arms and she slips a nightdress the same blue as the light on the ocean, constructed of a floaty silk, over my head.She then passes me a wax-stoppered bottle with a light blue liquid inside, shimmering like the Milky Way.
I look up at her questioningly.
“A sleeping draught,” she explains, and before I can protest, she unstoppers the bottle and tips it between my lips.
The draught tastes like a cold winter wind and I cough, trying not to swallow it, but it slides down my throat like oil.
I swat her hand away. “Don’t do that,” I sputter between body-racking coughs.
She looks at me with her uncanny, overlarge eyes. “Oh, most of us at court take them. The revels go on for so long.”
