“Please forgive our overenthusiasm.” He sauntered to the counter and found a small brass bell beneath the mess. He rang it, a crisp note chiming through the shop. “It isn’t often that a royal visits our small, humble town.”
“No worries,” Prince Javi answered breezily.
“Especially during our festival,” the mayor added, tone ominous.
But it piqued the prince’s interest. He straightened, eyebrows lifted high. “What festival?”
The mayor grinned, and once more Risa was struck by howwrongit looked. Teeth too straight and too white and too large for his too-small mouth.
“Every year, we celebrate our wonderful little town of Cairn and all the good luck we have been blessed with. And you, Prince Javi, have saved us!”
Risa rolled her eyes. As if he needed more to add to his cache of things he did not earn or deserve.
Prince Javi settled back in the chair, pleased by the news. Something else fluttered behind his satisfied smile and the cocky rise of one brow. It felt achingly familiar, though she couldn’t quite place it.
“I have?”
The mayor nodded. “Absolutely. Without you, we would have had to cancel our wonderful festivities!”
Nothing about the townspeople and their actions hinted that there was any possibility of shutting down the celebration. It wouldhave been easier to stop a wayward carriage, or an airship crashing to the ground. Not that she’d had any experience with either scenario. She’d never even ridden in a carriage, let alone seen an airship.
Brunie hissed at the mayor—or the prince, there was no real way to know. Risa’s distinct feeling of wrongness returned. The feeling that if she couldn’t get Prince Javi to follow her out now, they might never leave.
The mayor must have sensed her growing distrust. Or perhaps he was fluent in cat and understood Brunie’s warning. Whatever it was, he bounded over to the door with surprising agility and blocked it from view.
“You see,” he said, gaze fixed on Risa, pinning her where she stood, “we are celebrating our four hundred and seventy-fifth year of beinglucky. Our eternal spring of sunshine and cloudless skies is only possible thanks to our god. Yesterday, our god found us worthy of another prosperous year and granted us a day of rain. Today we thank him for his generosity. But we need a knight and a maiden to crown! And it isn’t very fun when they’re from our own town. Super boring.” The mayor’s eyes twinkled. “Our god will be so pleased with you both.”
Risa may not have been a liar, but she certainly could spot a crock of bull miles away, mostly because she had witnessed Farmer Juan hide his bulls in a distant field before later claiming Risa’s bad luck had vanished them all. Much like in the tavern scam, the insurance provider did not believe him.
“Prince Javi,” she warned, ignoring the chilling glare the mayor leveled at her.
“Well…” The prince considered it for a moment, glancing ather with a guilty look. “I do need to be on my way… Don’t want to be late to my own wedding.”
The mayor shook his head. “Think of this as an engagement party! You will make a most dashing knight, and then you’ll be free to go tomorrow morning.”
Prince Javi turned to Risa with a pleading look. “Come on. They need me. I mean, us.”
There was an earnestness in that look. An open and unfiltered revelation in his expression she didn’t expect. For years, stories of his rakish behavior and insouciance had fueled her impression of him, had morphed him into the worst of the worst: someone who had everything he wanted and still remained greedy for more. The past day spent in his company had confirmed his self-centeredness. But now she found the image did not match the one looking back at her.
Heat zapped across her skin, the same feverish frisson that came with Brunhilda’s spell and left her breathless.
A woman teetered out of the back room carrying an armload of gauzy gray fabric. She was identical to the mayor, only stretched long rather than wide: same watery brown eyes; same crease between her brows; same thin, nonexistent lips; same long, slender nose. Their only marked difference was the coarse ashen hair piled neatly atop her head, perfectly coiffed.
“What a fabulous surprise, Mayor!” she sang in a big voice, her gaze sweeping over the prince, Risa, and the hideous cat at her feet.
“My sister, Miss Rivera, co-owner of this fine establishment,” the mayor explained to them before turning to his sister. “We have our knight and maiden fair,” he sang, gesturing at them with a wide sweep of his arm. “And garments of silk they need to wear.”
Risa guessed they were back to singing.
When Miss Rivera turned a too-wide smile onto her, she swore a dark shadow lurked behind her watery eyes as she raked a hungry gaze down Risa’s form.
“She’s perfect.”
Everything was a blur after that.
The mayor hurried out of the shop with Prince Javi in tow, Brunie escaping after them. Miss Rivera, humming an unrecognizable ditty, hooked an arm through Risa’s and dragged her up a flight of stairs that Risa hadn’t seen before.
The strain around Risa’s chest was all she could think of. It pulled at her the moment the door closed behind the prince, and grew more insistent with each passing breath. She did not register the barren second floor lit by sconces or how every door on the landing was closed tight. Nor did she notice the path of drag marks worn into the floorboards around the balustrade. When Risa stumbled onto the final landing—an attic with a door the same color as the scarlet shingles of Cairn’s roofs—she finally managed to blink through her unfocused vision.
