Chapter 45
Stella’s brand of glamour is both like and unlike fae. When we return to my study, I give her dozens of prompts, telling her to glamour her face to appear like a sister’s, to glamour her clothes, her voice, her expressions, her scent. She struggles the most with the last two, probably because her sense of smell isn’t as strong as a fae’s, and it twists her mind a bit to make one expression but imagine herself making a different one. Once I suggest it is like forcing yourself to smile when you don’t want to, or keeping your composure when all you want to do is break out into laughter, it clicks for her. In those ways, her glamour is very similar to a fae’s.
What I quickly discover, however, is that her glamour abilities extend beyond even my own. When I tell her to make herself look like Edvear, she does it. Hardly a minute later after another command, I find myself staring at my twin. Which is vastly unsettling, even as my brain turns over this new development.
“How strenuous is this?” I ask, Stella’s reflection revealing what a mess I am.
“It’s . . . fine?” She sounds almost uncertain, as though she’s not sure if she’s missing a piece of information.
“You’re not struggling to maintain the glamour?”
“I don’t think so?”
At my order, she holds the glamour for ten minutes, then twenty, with no sign of flagging.
It’s astounding.
“We can glamour ourselves as other people,” I tell her, unable to stop myself from pacing the small length of the room. “But rarely can a fae maintain it for more than a few minutes. Yet you walk around like it’s nothing!”
Her glamour melts away, to my relief, revealing Stella’s drawn brow. “It felt the same as glamouring my clothes.”
She may not have magic that can split the world in half, but what she has comes as naturally to her as breathing. With a few careful glamours, she could pass completely as fae. Longer ears, a disguising of her scent, and a bit more height, and she could easily join revelries, and none would be the wiser. Her glamours have a stamp like any other, but we fae are so used to glamour we notice its absence more than its presence.
We could use this.
We could really use this.
In fact, this might be the missing piece we need.
“You have your thinking face.”
Her voice startles me back into the present. I blink, realizing that I’ve made my way to my desk but am pacing behind the chair instead of sitting in it.
Stella smiles.
That smile catches me off guard. It’s a sweet smile—one of understanding. One that says she can read my mind, and she likes what she finds.
“I . . .” I trail off stupidly, not sure why I started a sentence when I had nothing to say.
She marches to my side. She’s wearing one of her new dresses: a lovely blue day dress with a square neckline, long draping sleeves, and a skirt with beautiful, gauzy layers of fabric. For once, only half of her hair is up in a bun, leaving the rest to cascade down her back.
She takes me by the elbows, and I let myself be pushed into my chair and a quill pen shoved into my hand.
“I see that clever brain of yours working,” she says, finding me a blank sheet of paper and laying it in front of me. “So let it work. I will go practice glamours with Edvear.”
I drop the pen, catch her round the knees, and scoop her up into my lap as she gasps in surprise. “I will do what you say,” I murmur against her ear as I pull her as close as I can. “But first, you must give me a kiss.”
“If we start kissing, we won’t want to stop. Which simply isn’t productive.”
Mountains of Ildrid. Why can’t she stop being so unintentionally adorable?
Her breathing hitches when I splay one hand possessively across her waist and bring my face to hers so we are nose-to-nose. “I’m not letting you go until you kiss me.”
She stares at me, her eyes so large and rounded. I’m beginning to think she might have cast a spell over me. Because even though she will probably leave me, even though the weight has not shifted from my shoulders, I can do nothing but soak up whatever sweetness we have left.
When she closes her eyes and brings her mouth to mine, the most exquisite delight fills my soul and burns through me like a heady wine.
She is all that matters. The High King, the throne, revenge—none of it matters anymore. Only her.
Only her.
She pulls away just as I am trying to catch the back of her neck to deepen the kiss. Protest rumbles in my throat, but I know she’s right to scramble out of my lap and scurry halfway across the room. Her face is bright red even as she tries to compose herself—forgetting her glamours already.
“You need to work,” she says sternly, straightening her spine and lifting her chin. “And so do I.”
I don’t reply. I just smirk at her like a silly fool and let my gaze take her in from head to toe—which has its desired effect of making her even more flustered.
With a flounce of her skirts, she turns around and marches out the door. “You are not helping.”
I’m laughing when she closes it behind her.
Once she’s gone, however, my mind returns to the matter of her magic and my ever-present problem of the High King. I’ve toyed around with various plots over the years. It’s easy enough to enrage or distract Faradir; it’s the matter of removing him that has continued to give me difficulty. My last plan collapsed with Faradir’s plan to raze the human lands. I cannot kill him without giving up my claim to the throne—which is less of a price than the rest of the fae would face as a penalty for the same crime. But what is the point of deposing him if no one can then sit on the throne? Thus, I’ve stayed focused on tricking him off the throne—nullifying his own claim via him breaking his own laws. But Faradir is clever and careful.
What if . . .
Could Stella kill the High King? Can he see through her glamours like he can see through mine? Or could she be invisible to him?
My quill hits the paper, and before I know it, I’m completely enveloped in possibility.
I think I know what to do.
I think I can get the High King off his throne. Before Lulythinar. Before I’m bound to decimate the human armies.
Maybe—just maybe—I can do it and keep Stella as my wife.