“Mmm. Smart girl.”
Silence descends. My pulse hammers with such force that each heartbeat drills into the roof of my mouth. Meanwhile, Amriel’s gaze slips over the high collar of my dress, my crescent moon pendant, my voluminous skirts.
“Shadows,” he murmurs. “You’re so different than I imagined.”
I do a slow blink, my anger derailed by the subject change. “Different? How?”
“You’re just not what I pictured. I’ve had so many decades to think about you. So many ideas about who you might be. But your smell…” He closes his eyes, breathing deep, filling himself with my essence. When his lashes part again, that golden glow hits me like a force. “Nothing could have prepared me for it. And your face…it’s not what I anticipated.”
I frown, wary. “How so?”
“I was so worried you’d look likeher. But you don’t. You only look like yourself.”
My eyebrows pull together. “Her? Her who?”
“Your ancestor. Alanna.”
I rear back at hearing that name leave his lips. Alanna was my great-great-many-times-grandmother. The Aethrolian queen who found her way through the Wildwood and accidentally sparked a war.
The same woman who used her Grace to curse him.
Goddess, I’ve been so preoccupied since coming here that I haven’t stopped to consider the obvious—that Alanna once stood in this castle, possibly in this very room. Maybe with the very same king who now looms before me.
The realization leaves me unmoored, like I’ve missed a step on a staircase. “You…knew her.”
“I did.” Amriel’s mouth twists. “To my eternal regret.”
“Regret? Why regret? Because she cursed you during the war?”
He ejects a short, sharp exhale, the skeleton of a laugh. “Oh, Princess. Notduring. Before. How do you think that infernal war got started?”
I go still. Amriel started the war himself. As for Alanna…
“I don’t understand,” I say, piecing my words together slowly. “Alanna came here for peace.”
He huffs. “No. She showed up one day, full of ideas about how we should unite the kingdoms by marrying. Which I declined. I told her I wouldn’t wed someone who wasn’t my mate, and that angered her.Enough that she crafted this curse as my punishment. As for the war…well, that was me punishing her in return.”
I shake my head in bewilderment. Aethrolian history books talk of Alanna’s diplomacy, of her mission to establish relations with the fae. No record exists of her proposing marriage to their king.
No, it wasAmrielwho first resorted to violence. And now, as I survey him, I believe it. Something brutal and desolate lurks behind his eyes, an emptiness that chills me.
I grind the balls of my feet into the floor, drawing strength from the solid stones. “That’s ridiculous. Alanna came here in goodwill, and you gave her bloodshed.You’rethe one who started the war.”
Amriel’s smile curves into something cruel. “Is that what they’re teaching you in that dreary little castle of yours? That I’m the villain in that story?”
I push away the doubt prodding at the back of my brain. Aethrolian history lays out Amriel’s role in black and white. “Yes. Because youare.”
He laughs bitterly. I almost shrink in the face of his reaction, but he relieves me of the need by whirling and sailing away, the tang of winter berries trailing in his wake. He makes for the room’s far end, snatching up his wine on the way, draining a quarter of it in one go.
He collapses behind a wide wooden desk—the only sizeable furniture here, apart from the apothecary cabinet behind him. An array of bottles and gadgets fill its cubbyholes, most of them unfamiliar to me.
“You’re right, of course.” He aims a baleful glare at me from across the desktop. “Iamthe villain. But despite what you’ve been told, Alanna was no angel. She laid her curse in such a way that only my future human mate could break it, and she was so arrogant about it, sosmug. She thought that when I finally found you, it would hurt me to send you into the Wildwood. That it would pain me to put you in danger. That I’d be torn between breaking the curse and losing my mate.”
I absorb that with a frown.
“What she didn’t realize,” he continues, swigging from his bottle, “was that two hundred years ofthis”—he waves a hand at himself—“would render me incapable of caring. That by then, I’d be long ruinedby what she’d done. That in casting her curse, she’d already won. Not even a war could change that.”
I shake my head in protest. His description of Queen Alanna doesn’t square with what I know. My great-great-grandmother was a peacemaker, a visionary. Not the vindictive woman he speaks of. “But Alanna was a hero. The books say?—”
