As I poured myself a cup of tea to take back to the bed with me, a noise outside drew my attention to the window. When I crossed to the frost-coated glass and peered out, I found it looked down onto a snow-covered courtyard with stone walls surrounding it. Beyond those were rocky cliffs that dropped away into dark water filled with large chunks of ice. A tall man in a black cloak stood below the window, chopping wood. He looked about the right size to be Victor and he moved with the same kind of deadly grace that my new husband carried himself with, but he had his cowl pulled up for warmth and I couldn’t see his face. I settled on the window seat to watch him work since I had nothing else to do, wrapping my hands around my cup of tea and pulling my wings around me for more warmth.
The axe he used for chopping was longer handled and much larger than what I’d seen used before, and the way he wielded it with such force and precision made my skin prickle. But then his tool changed! I leaned forward, trying to get a better look at it, but only managed to fog up the window so that I had to wipe it clean to be able to see again. His axe was smaller now, I was sure of it—still the night-dark color of the previous tool that he’d used, but the shape and size were completely different. I sipped my tea and watched, puzzled, while he tossed the smaller pieces of wood he had split aside, placed another large log on his stump, and then the axe in his handtransformed againinto the larger weapon. After a few moments of chopping firewood, his hood dropped back, and I could see the man below was indeed my new husband. His magical tools were fascinating, but I was even more mesmerized by his movements. They were methodical, powerful, and practiced, but the force behind them was undoubtedly lethal. I pulled my wings a little tighter around me.
Back and forth he went, splitting a large log into smaller pieces, and then trimming the largest of those into even smaller pieces still, his tool changing size and shape as he went. The stack beside him had grown considerably when he flicked his hand and his cloak disappeared entirely, like mist on a hot day. There was nothing but trousers covering him as he stood in the snow, his breath fogging around him and the pale skin of his back glistening and damp as it dipped and curved over his muscles while he bent, stretched, swung, and stacked. He must have somehow heard my quiet gasp, because he turned and looked directly at me, finding me peering at him through the window, startling me just as much as he did when he materialized out of nothing—which is what I’d decided he must have done the previous times I’d woken to find no one. I knew theVeardurhad magical powers involving the creation and disappearance of things, but I’d never understood it. A vague recollection of his mount—a horse?—suddenly appearing before us in the night as we left the palace tugged at my memory. There were a great many things about theVeardurthat I’d never understood. It was said they could create their own Gates, and that they came for the dead. In very rare cases, they would occasionally guard people when requested—if they decided amongst themselves it was a worthwhile endeavor. They were feared, honored, and revered among the high fae. I’d only caught a glimpse of one a single time in the courts, long before I’d entered a room half-filled with them and then married one. His gentle treatment of me yesterday had lulled me into a false sense of normalcy, but seeing him like this today, completing such a mundane task in such an extraordinary way made me remember how little I truly knew about him.
His piercing blue eyes met mine for less than a second, lancing through me with a jolt of lightning, before he turned to answer the call of someone at the courtyard gates. I shrank back from the window, embarrassed to have been caught staring, but couldn’t pry myself away completely.
The woman at the gate was far shorter than Victor, perhaps even shorter than me, but with a wider frame and stout build. She appeared stooped with age, and gray hair peeked out from under her cowl, but despite her evident seniority she still looked strong and hale. Behind her was a similarly sturdy-looking pack animal that might have been a donkey, held loosely by a rope attached to its halter. Victor’s cloak reappeared upon his body the instant he turned to her, and he made his way to the gate to open it. He spoke to the woman, but I couldn’t make out what was being said. I couldn’t see her eyes from here either, but from the way her face was tilted as they talked, it didn’t seem as though she was looking at him. Was she afraid? I didn’t think she appeared to be, with a smile on her face as she lifted a cloth-wrapped bundle from her animal and held it out for Victor, just slightly off from where he stood. He spoke to her again and took the package from her, setting it down in the snow beside him and stepping after the woman with his hand held out to her as she turned away. She waved him off, causing his shoulders to hitch up, and when he said something else, she turned back to pat him on the arm, and then waved him off again. He stood and watched, visibly distressed, as she turned back the way she’d come, and he didn’t budge until she’d led her plodding donkey all the way back across the narrow bridge that led from the gate. Even after he bent to pick up her package, he stayed and watched her closely until she was past the narrow ridge that wound around the face of the rocks and out of sight.
Once she was gone his shoulders finally dropped and he pulled his hand down his face. His cloak billowed around him as he returned to the pile of wood he’d been creating, gathering an armful of split logs and carrying them, with his bundle, out of my line of sight. A few moments later, he entered our room. His expression as he greeted me showed a measured curiosity, a sparkle of something in his eye that he tried to keep subdued. His gaze flicked over me in the same clinical assessment I’d always received from my healers as he saw me sitting on the window seat, still clutching my tea.
“Are you cold?” he asked, setting his parcel on the tray with the tea as he eyed my tightly held wings. “I brought more wood for the fire.”
“I’m fine,” I answered automatically, working to loosen my muscles so that my posture was less stiff. It was a little chilly in the room, but I didn’t want to admit that my bearing had more to do with nervousness than temperature. My elder sister had always been the brave one between us, the one who could launch herself into any situation with her head held high, not me. The two of us had always known that we would be arranged into political marriages. She’d looked forward to it; I’d simply accepted it. But this… wasn’t what that was. My deteriorating health had caused my family to make a different choice—for which I was grateful—but I wasn’t sure how to behave in this new situation. I’d expected to be betrothed to someone for a period of time and get to know them, be married to them over an elaborate ceremony during which we were able to become used to each other’s presence at the very least. I would do my duty to my kingdom and represent my people’s interests and bear an heir for my new husband but otherwise probably not feel much for him in any way that mattered.
It was all catching up to me now, as I sat here staring at a wide-eyed, pink-cheeked, bare-chested man who looked like the standard for masculine beauty wearing an oddly shifting cloak in astrangelyquiet castle, that I was faced with a much different reality. Were there no staff at all? Why was he the one doing all the tending to me? Feeding me, cleansing my hair, bringing me wood—chopping it even. I was unused to this level of attention from any one person, and it made me feel… Well, I didn’t know how it made me feel, but there was something fluttery in my chest and seeing the way the light from the windows played across his torso, casting shadows in the taut lines of his abdominal muscles, and the way his waist narrowed and dipped in just above his trousers… The room was suddenly much warmer than it had been the moment before, and he still hadn’t built up the fire.
He set the logs in a neat stack on the hearth and added the last one to the coals before returning to his bundle and untying it. The cloth fell open to reveal smaller packages of food stuffs, all packed neatly in little clay pots wrapped in paper for protection. “Our cook had prior arrangements today, but she brought our food herself instead of sending it with a runner like I told her to,” he explained in an indulgent grumble, but I didn’t understand what he meant.
“Prior arrangements?” I asked dumbly. Even if she had been granted a day off work, wouldn’t it have made more sense for her to cook his food here and then leave for the day instead of carting it by donkey from elsewhere? “Doesn’t she live here?”
“No one lives here,” he said absently as he opened a low cabinet in the back of the room and retrieved some porcelain dishes.
I blinked at that, feeling very slow. We had several palaces that we moved between throughout the seasons, but our staff always came with us. No one lived here, ever? I supposed that would explain why it was so quiet.
He must have seen my confusion, because an eyebrow lifted in what might have been amusement. “This isn’t my home. It’s the closest holding my family owns to Faery. It’s usually vacant unless we need to stay here for some reason, so I chose to stop here while you recover. We tend to prefer our privacy, and it’s easier for us to employ a local family or two to come in temporarily when we’re here. Helda cooks for us when we’re here, but when we’re not, she has other things to do.” He filled two plates with food and carried them to me, handing me one and settling on the other side of the window seat with the other. “I am also capable of cooking for us, but not as well as Helda,” he said wryly.
I quietly turned that information over while I studied the food, wondering where we would go from here and why he would know how to cook, but not wanting to pepper him with too many questions. He smelled faintly of salt air with a hint of sweat—reminding me that he also chopped his own wood—and I found myself glancing up at his bare chest through my eyelashes. He ate in silence, and I noticed his food did not match mine. I had an array of choices, but he had a pile of steamed greens with thick stalks covered in some kind of light brown sauce.
“You seemed concerned for her,” I noted as I poked at my food, eating a bite of everything whether I knew what it was or not. I loved the deep timbre of his voice and wanted to hear more of it, to learn more about him and this place he’d chosen to bring me to.
“She is completely blind,” he stated quietly as he pierced another stalk with his fork. “But she has been since birth, and she doesn’t want assistance. I respect that, and the fact that she has lived in these mountains her entire life, but I would feel—” he paused for a moment and looked upset, searching for a word, “unhappyif she plummeted from one of these narrow ledges on an errand for me.” The last bit was delivered in a decidedly grumpy tone, and I couldn’t help but be struck by the strangeness of his surly elocution of such a morbid statement. He seemed as if his emotional reaction to such a tragic event were even more disturbing to him than the hypothetical event itself. “Maids and cooks will come in as we need them, but otherwise we will be left alone,” he said with something like relief.
I frowned at him. “You have no guards?”
“I am the guard.”
Chapter 12
Celeste
“Ihavearequest,”I told Victor timidly over dinner.
“Anything.” His quiet response was immediate and sincere as he looked up from his food. The feeling of butterflies in my stomach made it hard to continue.
“I would like to tidy my wings,” I said when I found my voice, reaching up without thinking to run my fingers down one of the pinions on my left wing.
My husband’s eyes snapped to my fingers and fixated on the motion with an intense concentration that made me shiver. But then he seemed to realize what he was doing and brought his eyes to meet mine with a little furrow on his brow that showed he didn’t understand. Of course, he wouldn’t.
“I can use hair combs for straightening them, but I don’t have any wing powder,” I explained, already anticipating how much this was going to baffle him after the conditioner confusion.
He must have seen the amusement in my eyes, because he narrowed his own eyes at me, weighing my words as if I might be making up such a product. I wondered who had been brave enough to tease this man with made up products and how often, that this was his first response.
I took pity on him and assured him, “I’m not making it up. I promise.”
He turned his head just enough to look at me out of the corner of his eye, an expression I found oddly adorable. “And what does this ‘wing powder’ do?” he asked.
“It powders my wings,” I told him while utterly failing to keep a straight face. His eyes squinted even harder at my admittedly suspicious behavior, so I relented. I didn’t really know him well enough to tease him, husband or not. “It helps with water resistance and general maintenance. Any colorless mineral powder used for makeup would probably be fine.” Wing powder as a specific product probably didn’t even exist here.
