Page 30 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

It’s grown darker over the river, and her features are unreadable, yet somehow I feel she’s aswrecked as I am while I watch her dip beneath the water. She sinks down into the river until only her shoulders and her face are visible.

I remain slumped against the bark, my forearm aching from where my teeth left a print. I’m still watching her, unable to move.

Finally I straighten and tie my trousers, my muscles still taut and shaking.

I have never kissed her, never properly touched her, never even confessed aloud that I want all these things and more—that I’d raze this entire palace to the ground for the right to be the one who touches her.

I wait in the shadows until she’s finished her night swim. Not until she’s cloaked and wandering back through the orchard toward the palace do I dare to move. I follow from a distance, just to make sure she returns safely.

As she slips through the garden door, I bow—alone, in the dark, to a woman who’ll never see just how completely, ruinously, devotedly I am hers.

She’s become the sovereign of every crumbling thing in my life, and I have just been crowned her most willing fool.

Chapter 10

Seravyn

It’s been seven days since the river.

Seven days of glances across the great hall, across the garden room, across the breakfast table on the rare mornings Aldric makes his appearance. Seven days of Ren bowing too low and rising too slowly, of his eyes finding mine and then deliberately looking away. Seven days of my own heart betraying me, beating too fast when he enters a room, all but stopping when he doesn’t. Of my body being wound too tight, hands lifting my teacup just to give them a purpose, smoothing a fold of my skirt that doesn’t exist because if I don’t, I might reach for him.

Seven days, and we haven’t said a single word to acknowledge what happened between us at the river.

I know I saw in the reeds. I wasn’t a shadow, or some trick of the moonlight. And there’s a part of me—wild, reckless, hungry—that wants him to know that I saw himthere, leaned against a tree, stroking himself, and it set me on fire. That my body called to his across that river like the tide to the moon, every rock of his hips tethered to my pleasure.

It’s the wanting. To want and tobewanted. In such a destructive, uncontrollable way, that the only option is to lose oneself to the maddening need of it no matter the consequence.

I want to know that Ren wants me in this way.

Yet there’s another part of me that hopes he can’t possibly know. Because what good would come of it?

It was one moment—just one moment carved into the dark, that neither of us needs to speak on.

The silence is so much louder anyway.

Much like the palace today, that teems with courtiers and servants, like a beehive that’s been kicked.

Aldric rides out at dawn four days a week now. Banners snapping, his retinue laden with guards and advisors. The eastern provinces have moved past rumors. There’s a name attached to the revolt now: Lord Bramwich of the iron holdings, whose mines border Kravenholt’s. Aldric drags his war council to the border on these days, returning by sundown with darker moods and a shorter temper.

I’ve succeeded in avoiding the king since his unwelcome intrusion into my bedchamber. And it would be a relief that he’s gone so often, except for the impending wedding that haunts me around every bustling corner of the palace.

Three weeks has bled into two, and the entire court haschosen to focus on the celebrations over any chance of war. The Lord of Misrule festival falls a week before the wedding ceremony, and Aldric has decreed it’s to be the most extravagant ever celebrated.

There are dressmakers and pastry chefs. Minstrels are soon to arrive from a kingdom over. There are crates being hauled through corridors, and footmen running with lists, and chambermaids polishing every mirror.

Right this moment, I’m being dragged through the bedlam by Isolde, who walks ahead of me through the long gallery, a slate clutched against her chest that outlines the day’s obligations as we hurry toward another dress fitting. Right after, the tasting of the wedding cakes. Then a consultation with the chamberlain about the seating of the Threnmere delegation. There’s also the selection of the floral arrangements. Aldric has specifically requested crimson,allcrimson, which has thrown the florist into a panic.

I’m nodding with Isolde as she tells me all this?—

Until I see him.

Ren is leaning against the wall of the gallery, just outside the arched entry to the lesser hall. He has his head tipped back against the stone, his eyes closed, the jester’s hat dangling from one hand at his side.

He looks wrecked.

The chaos moves around him, and he remains still against the wall in his motley.

Something inside my chest twists.