“There was this little blue flower I fell completely in love with. It lives under the earth, but if you put your hands to the ground, it would bloom under your palm and twine around your fingers.” Adeline looked at him then, squeezing his arm. “Did that grow here, before the Frost?”
“I’ve never heard of anything like that. It growsunderthe earth?”
She nodded, then hummed thoughtfully.
“Maybe it’s the heat from your skin that draws it out. I’ll have to ask my father what it’s called.”
Kai frowned. “That almost sounds like –”
“Ade!”
Up ahead, Iseult had stopped at the mouth of a clearing, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet while Ger made wide, arching waves with one arm, beckoning and impatient.
Adeline rolled her eyes, though there was no ire behind it.
“I suppose we’d better hurry.”
The stream was the same one they had passed earlier, with children roaring and whooping, skidding into each other and collapsing into giggling piles of flailing limbs. Gerard found another stall beneath a bough of pine branches, and came back with an armful of thick steel blades on leather straps. Adeline bent to help Iseult strap the smallest pair to her boots. Gerard held a pair out to Kai.
“Thank you, but I’m quite content to watch from the banks.”
“You don’t want to skate with us?”
Iseult turned round, imploring eyes on him, and he crumbled inwardly. He didn’t want to disappoint the girl - or really, by extension, her sister - but nothing would convince him to step onto that ice. He had no desire to feel the splinter and grind of it under his feet; he knew the feeling too well already. It juddered his bones every morning that he woke up shivering, forever fighting his way from the frozen embrace of the lake.
Mercifully, Adeline intervened.
“The King can hardly skate and watch your dance all at once, can he Iz?”
And so Kai stood, an awkward sentry among the chaos and merriment, arms tucked behind him and back straight as a rod. The Princesses twirled up and down the stream like spinning tops, with Ger clumsily darting after them. Twice the Gard landed on his backside at Adeline’s feet and she raised her lovely face to laugh up at the clouds; Kai was surprised that the warmth of her laughter didn’t melt the grey from the sky. He must have stared too intently because she looked around as though someone had called her name, and her laughter slowed until she was simply smiling. She tilted her head to one side as they locked eyes.
Kai hastily reached for the timepiece the Queen had gifted him, and fumbled it; too eager to look as though he hadn’t been studying the curve of Adeline’s throat and the cascade of curls pooling into the hood of her cloak. He stared intently at the little clock face without really seeing it - but then his eyes focused and he gave a short start. All this time he’d been mooning like a lovesick youth after the Princess, when he should already be halfway to meeting his people.
“Do you have to head off?”
Adeline had skated over to the bank. Her cheeks were pink, her curls loosened and lifted in the breeze so they formed a dark halo around her face.
Kai dragged his eyes back to the timepiece, nodded, and tucked it away. “Yes, I’d best go meet Ceri and the others.”
“Oh. Well, thank you for coming with us, I know Iseult loved having you here.” She smiled, and turned to go.
Invite your Princess, Ceri had urged him.
“Adeline?”
His own voice in his head tutted at him, even as Ceri’s voice hummed approvingly.
She spun on the spot, a small shower of ice arching from her bladed boots.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to join us? Gerard and Iseult are welcome, too, of course.”
Her smile split her face.
“Yes, Kai. I’d like that very much.”
???
It was not, as Kai had worried, a separate and conspicuous meeting of the Merrow. Ceriwyn and the others had gathered in that same clearing where Eisalaan folk danced and revelled. Some of the younger Merrow had attached themselves to other groups of youths, and Kai even saw Alun weaving a pretty Eisalaanian girl around the crowd of dancers.
