“Where’s your cloak?”
She glanced down.Bollocks.
“I left it by the fire.”
“Should we turn back?”
She shook her head. She didn’t want to turn back. She didn’t know what was happening, but she did know they were alone –reallyalone – for the first time since that moment on the training room floor. Alone after an endless day of soft touches and long, weighted looks, both of them loosened by the heady effects of the cider and sweet spices.
She wanted to see what would happen, even if a voice in her head hissed thatnothingwould happen. She half imagined the voice wasn’t hers at all, but her ancestor’s; the lost Princess walking between them, Kai’s heart forever clenched between her smooth marble fingers.
Adeline shivered again.
“Take my cloak, then.”
She stopped beneath a broad, bare tree. Kai came closer and the swinging lanterns cast an unearthly glow upon him. Midnight hair, green-gold eyes, moon white skin. He had never looked more like a fairytale creature than he did in this precise moment.
“Won’t you be cold?”
Kai smiled. “There are few winter nights that compare to centuries encased in ice. I rarely feel the cold anymore, Princess.”
He undid his cloak and shrugged it off, holding it up to her. When she didn’t move he tilted his head imploringly. Adeline went to him and he swept the cloak over her shoulders; she sighed a little at the sudden warmth as the fur lining settled against her back and absorbed some of her shivers. Kai drew the fabric tighter around her shoulders, and nudged her chin gently so she would look up at him while he fastened the clasp at her neck. His long fingers brushed her throat and she seized on the goosebumps that threatened to erupt across her skin.
Kai’s eyes met hers, and all at once she was reminded of their first meeting, in the courtyard. When she had fastened her own cloak at his neck and he had met her with those same electric eyes.
His lips curved a little; reading her, she realised.
“Bit big,” he said quietly.
Adeline didn’t remember deciding to speak; the next moment she simply heard herself blurt it out.
“It was you.”
Kai frowned. “What?”
He was drawing back warily, but his hand hovered at the clasp of the cloak, and she caught it against her chest, the words surging through her faster.
“I lied before, about what I saw in Iseult’s book.”
He paused where he stood, a half-step back from her. He didn’t pull his hand away. “You said you saw yourself in the Princess?”
“That part was true.” She hesitated. “I lied about the Prince.”
Under the dark frown, his hazel eyes ticked sideways as though searching through memories. “The short Prince with the big nose?”
“Yes, him. I mean,nothim. That’s not who I saw. It was… someone else.”
The frown remained. Then–something dawned over Kai’s features, and for a second his lips quirked like he might smile, but his face remained placid. His voice was light with polite interest.
“Someone you recognise then?”
She looked down at his hand in hers. He rubbed his thumb along her knuckles, coaxingly.
“Yes.”
“And?”
She sighed. “Cider makes you insufferable, do you know that?”
