Chapter 30
Chapter
Thirty
SILVER BLADES AND COURTLY GAMES
K obold got your tongue? Darkan purrs as I take my time deciding what to say about age eighteen. Well, what not to say, as my father’s hearing has not done me the favor of getting lost for an hour or two.
Eighteen. . .was a wild year.
Though I feel dozens of avid gazes trained on me, I avoid even a casual look down the table at predatory Fae eyes, their mystical garb turned ghoulish by the shroud of night.
This is a pointless conversation, I say. He’s a liar and bully. He simply wants to torment me, like pulling wings off a butterfly, while maintaining the appearance of taking the honorable road.
You deciding what is and is not pointless or honorable is laughable.
Why are you being cruel?
What is cruelty, Aerinne? Could it be hoarding damning information from a father about his son for your own self-interest from one side of your mouth, but on the other side protesting the Prince is a liar and bully?
I’m thrown off. Whose side are you on?
It isn’t a matter of sides, Aerinne. It’s a matter of clarity.
If you delude yourself into thinking you are good and he is evil, then you will soon begin to justify other atrocities you commit.
How do you think the High Lords become tyrants?
Do you believe they begin that way? Or do they begin with telling themselves, ‘but my evil is for the greater good?’
I’m utterly still in my seat, unable to defend myself against the blunt force of his truth.
I’m a hypocrite for feeling attacked, and with numbing clarity I do understand I’m no better than Renaud.
It doesn’t matter if the Prince has committed thousands of years of murders—his many doesn’t excuse my one.
I don’t want to keep the secret. I don’t know what to do. I don’t—I don’t know how badly he’ll react. How his reaction will hurt Faronne. I stare at my plate blindly, desperately, skin once again going clammy. Am I evil, Darkan?
Of course not, Nyawira. His voice gentles.
You would bleed out on the street before you deliberately hurt an innocent.
This is what I am telling you. No one is ever all of one thing, most people are shades of gray .
If you continue to think of the Prince as simply an enemy, you will never learn to understand him.
All or nothing thinking will not serve you in the long run.
“If age eighteen offers scant amusement,” the Prince says, “we can dispense with it.” Absently, he lifts his wineglass, fingers caressing the clear stem, and it fills with liquid. “There is always twenty-one.”
Close. Too close. I’d think it a threat if I didn’t know better .
“Or choose a year yourself, Lady of Faronne.”
Baba watches us, eating as if he enjoys the meal—not a care in the world.
In the dubious sanctum of my mind, I wrap my fingers in Renaud’s shirt and shake him like a rag doll, then fling him into one of the massive trees strung with the annoying twinkle bell lights.
The white gold glow casts an ethereal light, highlighting the starkness of the Prince's cheekbones.
His blood would shimmer like liquid jewels.
If I don't know better—and I do—I'd think he’s luring me into a confession.
What does he think he knows?
And if he knows. . .why am I still alive?
Unless he's about to pull a Carrie on me. I watched that movie three times in New York, and decided the author was Fae.
Pressure increases another drip.
“When I was eighteen,” I say, the clink of dinnerware surrounding us, “Montague sent an operative to seduce me for the first time. Fun times. He was my first intimate partner.”
There’s a sudden clatter against my father’s plate. I suppress a wince.
At least I didn’t let that male stick his cock in my vagina, though we did plenty of everything else.
I also didn’t betray any secrets, and I still nurse insult my enemy thinks me that dumb.
As if I would betray my House over pillow talk.
Either they’d wanted to humiliate me, or they hoped I'd be vulnerable while in New York for university with Juliette, outside the supervision of Faronne and in theory primed to make all sorts of poor decisions .
We had. Just not the poor decisions the enemy hoped to take advantage of.
“Bad breakup?” my nemesis has the gall to say.
“Oh, the worst. I slit his throat before he could slit mine.”
Baba drains his wineglass.
“The breakup could have been worse then.” Renaud’s light tone matches my own.
Drip.
“But tell me, who succeeded where he failed?” A split-second flash of something. . .feral. . .in the Prince's eyes.
“Are you inquiring about my body count?” I ask in American English, because “body count” in Everennesse means something far more literal, and far more bloody.
“It is rather high, Maitū.” Baba gives a pleasant smile. No threats here folks. None at all. “The city well knows how decisively Faronnesse respond when threatened.”
The Prince places a piece of bread in his mouth as if someone reminded him this is what one does at a banquet. He barely eats, so why bother with the pretense?
“I'm more interested in names,” he says, a touch too casual, almost bored.
Riiiiiight.
I wish I could answer his questions with silence instead of this perversion of light bantering between frenemies—but if I don't engage he'll escalate his attempts to draw me out, and I don't want to know what escalation looks like from this male.
“I don’t kiss and tell.” Drip.
“Nor should you,” Baba says. “Despite my decades in Everenne—and the influence of your beloved mother—you know your old father still believes such things should remain private between consenting adults.”
“Hmm.” Renaud tilts his head at him then slides his gaze to me. “Dare I inquire about age twenty? Or is that too close to twenty-one? You seem to dislike that year. Curious.”
He can't know. He can't. What kind of father—from all accounts he was a decent one, but then when did Embriel ever challenge him?—would taunt someone over his son's murder?
No, he must've simply picked up on my unease and is toying with me.
We need a change of subject. Fast. “Is this a kink? Torturing your captive with banal small talk?”
A thin black brow lifts, familiar subtle mockery in the arch. “I am pleased to reveal my desires if you are minded to offer yours. Perhaps we will discover common ground.”
No doubt from his voice, from his eyes, that such common ground will be neither platonic nor philosophical.
Drip.
“My favorite involves the blood of my enemies.” I’m proud this is the sweetest my voice has sounded in my life to date, though my life will admittedly be shorter than expected.
My father closes his eyes. He’s begging for it, I want to snap. The Prince weaves silken strands that entangle me the more I struggle, he the hungry spider in the center of his masterful web.
Blue eyes glint in a still too pale face as an evening breeze sighs through his hair, his scent a taunt.
“A commonality, though I find taking the blood of a willing companion more to my taste. But perhaps such shared interests are to be indulged unrestrained in a more private locale. Unless it’s an audience you crave, my Lady, though I never did like to share. ”
Baba’s mask slips; his eyes snap open and he looks at the Prince. It isn’t friendly. He recovers a second later.
Drip.
This is. . .flirting. Sitting across from an enemy, trading quips of blood and death, is an Old One's idea of flirting.
Nora did warn me.
I told Baba to leave me home. The invitation was addressed to me but. . .details. As a half-human, I could have pled illness. The plague used to be a thing.
Drawing breath to retort, I instead hold back.
It’s a catch-22; allowing him to draw me out like this plays right into his hands.
Despite what Darkan says, I am more and more convinced telling the Prince about Embriel would be a mistake.
It won’t be an opportunity for honesty, bonding, mutual absolution.
I’d be handing him a weapon with no expiration date to use against me. A powerful weapon to justify much more than feeling up my skirt without consent. Anything he does to me, all he must say in response is “how is this worse than the murder of my only—noncombatant—son?”
Doubtless he wouldn’t use such civilized words.
I’d be a fool to tell him. Honesty is not always the wiser course.
The Prince is determined to punish good behavior as well as bad. He claims my clenched fingers, lifting them slowly to his lips, discretion apparently beneath his dignity. Who really has an audience kink, please stand up.
I snatch my hand away. He catches and presses it against the table, under his own—as if it's our bodies, and his bed .
Dripdrip.
“No response, Lady? I have at last captured your tongue. What shall I do to my prize now that it’s in my keeping?”
To. Do to.
“You aren’t eating, Nyawira, though we did. . . anticipate dinner earlier. Is there aught at the table you again wish to sample? Perhaps a hearty skewer you have not yet tasted.”
Drip drip drip.
Again, I attempt to pull away. The corner of his mouth quirks. He angles his head slightly away from Baba and blue-black hair shields his real expression—the blue gems twinkling at me with the delight of a cat who enjoys toying with its squealing, squirming mouse.
“I’m not hungry, Prince.”
His thumb caresses my skin. “Nor have I yet had my fill. I am ravenous for succulent meat dripping in juice, coated in rich cream. Meat to savour. . .to devour.”
I’m rigid. “Then maybe you should eat and not talk.” Not the way I meant to say that but I’m having trouble thinking. I’m having trouble existing.
“Ah. I will very soon take my meal in my bed.”
Driiip. Screech. Crash.
Another creature shoves me outside my body and snatches a paring knife. A panicked eighth of a second to wrest back enough control not to go for my hidden iron blade or his throat before I slam the weapon down through the hand ravaging mine.