He shoved her back and she laughed. “You’re so paranoid!”
“If you’re going to kill me, then bloody do it!” he shouted.
“I’m not trying to kill you, idiot! I’m your bodyguard!”
“There wasn’t anyone in the hedge maze but us! There isn’t any way on or off this island without being seen, and how could an assassin get into this room to plant the Lucent Pine sap? Youhaveto be the assassin because if it’s not you, it’s Zephyr—and Zephyr would never hurt me.”
“It wasn’t me!”
“Then how? How did they get into this room? It has to be you!”
From the corner, Anton whimpered, curled up behind a curtain.
“I don’t know,” Magdala said, her voice trembling. “I don’t know how they escaped.”
“Because they didn’t! You told me yourself you’re friends with Huxley, that you knew Julian. He paid you to mess with my mind and then have me killed by some ‘accident’, didn’t he?”
“I’m not trying to kill you, you lunatic! If I were, I would have done it by now!”
“You tried!”
“I didn’t try! Not that I don’t want to try twenty hours of the day!”
He laughed bitterly. “Oh, really? And what is it I do that fills you with these murderous desires?”
“For one, you’re slovenly.”
“I am not slovenly,” he retorted. “I am … organic.”
“So is a pile of skat, but we still don’t bring that into the house, do we?”
He advanced on her, his face alight. Magdala’s rage rose to meet his, hot and burning, full of desire for his spirit, and his house, and something else she wouldn’t admit to herself …
“And what makes you so much better than me, Devney? What makes you worthy of looking down your nose at the future king of Allagesh?”
Magdala snorted. She needed to say something that would make him back away from her. He was drawing too close, and she was liking him too much. “And how are you going to find time to be king when you have frog ponds to propagate and moles to dig out of the soil? Are you going to go to balls all covered in dirt? Will you wear shoes to your coronation?”
Asherton lifted one eyebrow. “I didn't think you were the kind of woman who cared about those things.”
This knocked her back a step. “I’m not … but the people are. And that’s why they don’t respect you.”
“The people,” he said, his voice louder and harsher with each word, “do not respect me because I am a bastard. They do not respect me because of who my father was andbecause a mad woman brought down a fake curse on me. I would think, being the child of a Russuli, that you would understand.”
Magdala did not like his reasoning. She did not like that he was right. She did not like the growing conviction that he was the hero of this story, and she the villain. “The people hate you because you don’t act like a king.”
“Would you rather I acted like a king? Should I ignore you when you’re in the room, stomp about in satin and velvet while I destroy the island so it will look expensive and pretty? So it will make me look wealthy? Is that what you want?”
A whimper distracted her. Anton was sitting on the floor at her feet, his leaves wrapped around her leg.
“We shouldn’t fight in front of Anton,” she said. “It scares him.”
“You started it,” Asherton mumbled.
“No, you started it when you accused me of trying to assassinate you.”
“No, you started it when you held a knife to my throat!”
“And you held a knife to mine!” she cried.
