Epilogue
The oil in the lantern is burning dangerously low, and I pray it will last the length of this letter. It’s the final correspondence
I need to complete before retiring to bed, but if the prime minister doesn’t have it by morning, it’ll be my staff that has
to deal with his ire, and I’d really rather avoid a confrontation.
“You’re making the rest of us look bad.” I look up to find Emmett leaning against the doorjamb, wearing a loose white shirt,
his formal coat discarded hours ago.
The lantern burns out with a snick, leaving the fireplace on the far side of my study the only source of light. Emmett laughs
gently and pulls an extra well of oil from the cabinet by the door, crossing the room to my desk.
“One of us has to work around here.” I nudge his elbow as he pours in the fresh oil and reignites the lantern.
He leans down and places an affectionate kiss on my head. “I’ll have you know I spent all morning in the mews examining the
new carriages for Lydia’s first trooping of the guard.”
“You love the horses—and then you spent the rest of the day chasing the children around the garden. I could see you from here!” I bite back the smile pulling at my lips.
After nearly twenty years of marriage, Emmett still manages to surprise me every day, but I was never surprised at the doting father he became.
Each and every one of our children has him completely wrapped around their fingers.
“Not true,” he retorts. “Lydia’s much too tall for me to chase now.”
“That trait came from your side of the family.”
Lydia, our oldest, turns eighteen next week, and will begin her official duties as a working royal. She won’t come out in
society as a debutante like I did. I ended that practice the first year of my reign.
Like every girl her age, she has the opportunity to determine her own future. We gave her the choice to become a dancer or
a poet or a banker, or even to permanently join her aunt and namesake at court in the Otherworld, where she has enjoyed many
happy holidays, but she insisted she wanted to go into the family business. It didn’t particularly surprise me or Emmett,
as Lydia has always been the most responsible of our children. Her sixteen-year-old sister, Elizabeth, is her opposite. She
told us last week she intended on becoming a pirate or a dressmaker, or a dressmaker with her own ship, like some kind of
floating modiste. She spends much too much time with her aunties Marion and Faith, who encourage her, but Emmett’s no better.
He’s already enrolled her in sailing lessons.
I finish the last sentence of my letter and sign it with a flourish while Emmett perches on the edge of my desk, watching
patiently.
When I am finished, he arches a brow, and after all these years, it still gives me butterflies. He looks just the same as
the day we met, with the addition of a few smile lines around his hazel eyes and a dusting of gray at his temples.
“I never get sick of looking at you,” he says.
“You’re a shameless old flirt, Emmett De Vere.”
He bends down and kisses me, too long and too passionately for a room with an open door where any one of our multitude of children could walk in.
He pulls back, his eyes shining. “Just one of the many things you love about me, Ivy De Vere.”
I rise from my desk, smiling. “I know, I know. Did you interrupt my work just to seduce me?”
Emmett holds the door open for me and I step through past him. “Seducing comes later. The children want you to say good night.
Pippa has demands.”
“She always does.”
“She takes after you in that way.”
Emmett and I walk hand in hand, down the long, carpeted hall of Kensington Palace, into our private family apartments.
“When do Greer and Joseph arrive from Scotland?” Emmett asks. My childhood best friend, Greer, was presumed dead after Queen
Mor staged a suicide during the competition for Bram’s hand. But Greer and her stable boy Joseph were successful in fleeing
over the border to Scotland. She came back to visit England two years into my reign as queen, a wiggling baby in her arms
and her doting husband by her side. The day she arrived in my throne room remains one of the happiest of my life.
“Tuesday morning, they’ll be staying with us for a week.”
Emmett shakes his head. “I don’t like the way their second son looks at Elizabeth,” he says in a mock whisper.
I roll my eyes at him. “You should be more worried about the poor lovesick boy. She’ll eat him alive.”
We reach the drawing room, aglow with firelight and filled with the laughter of our two middle boys, who are sprawled out on the carpet playing with Emmett’s childhood toy soldiers.
Our children might be being raised under the same roof as my husband once was, but their childhoods bear no resemblance to the iciness of his own.
“Mama, Edmund is using magic!” Henry shouts as I walk into the room.
I look to see Edmund laughing uproariously, a little toy soldier beside him marching across the carpet. Fennick gifted it
to him on a recent trip to the Otherworld, and I find it a little creepy, but Edmund adores it.
“Stop complaining and use it back, then.” I scoop up a clever little butterfly toy from the mantel and pass it down to him.
It was also a gift from Fennick, who has absolutely no respect for the peace of my household.
Henry tosses it at his brother, and it takes off flying, sending them both squealing and running in a full circle around the
drawing room.
“And you say I rile them up.” Emmett sinks back onto the sofa and smiles over at the boys.
“Don’t bump me! I’m reading!” our second-youngest, Amelia, cries from the window seat, where she sits most evenings, with
a blanket on her lap and a book in her hand.
“Fifteen minutes, then bed!” I call in her direction.
“Let me finish this chapter!” she retorts without looking up.
I sigh fondly and plant a kiss on top of her head. I’d better get Pippa down before I attempt to wrangle the rest of them.
“Good luck in there!” Emmett calls as I walk down the dark corridor to the children’s rooms.
“Don’t let the rest of them push you around while I’m gone.”
Henry jumps onto his father’s lap and Emmett lets out a good-natured cry of pain. “It’s impossible. We’re so outnumbered.”
Pippa, our youngest, is only six—but the fieriest of all our brood. She’s sitting bolt upright in bed as I enter her room,
with her favorite doll clutched to her chest.
“You made me wait.” She’s got Emmett’s dark hair and my wild curls, but her bright eyes are all Lydia. Sometimes it feels
like I’m looking at my sister in miniature. I wouldn’t be surprised if Pippa one day chose to leave England for the Otherworld
and find some land in need of a queen, just like her aunt.
We’ve made no secret of our personal past or our nation’s history to our children. It would be impossible not to, what with
the frequent holidays to the Otherworld and the history dripping from the walls of Kensington Palace. Emmett and I made a
conscious decision not to scrub the evidence of Mor and Bram from our home. Their portraits still hang in the great hall,
and the throne room is still painted with frescoes of the Otherworld. We kept the statues in the garden, and though most of
the money has my face on it now, there are still a few bills and coins circulating that portray Mor instead.
No matter how badly things ended, Bram was once Emmett’s brother, and it was important to him that our children knew Bram
was loved. On nights that are particularly cold and stormy, Emmett will gather our children around the fire and tell them
stories of the time Bram taught him to play billiards or the fight they once got into on my behalf at a gambling club. That
one is a particular favorite of the boys.
“I’m sorry, darling.” Pippa’s soft mattress sinks as I sit down next to her. I pat the space next to me and call, “Come here, Piglet,” until the scraggly little dog bounds from where she was lying by the window and leaps up into bed next to us.
Pippa climbs onto my lap and cups my face in her tiny hands. “Mama, I missed you all day.”
I press a kiss into her soft cheek. “We had lunch together, silly, and tea after that.”
She frowns, her brows crinkling over those warm brown eyes. I brush a tangled curl out of her face and begin a loose braid
down her back.
“I know,” she sighs. “But I want you with me all the time.”
“I want that, too, sweetheart.”
She reaches up and touches where I’m plaiting her hair. “Papa does a better job than you,” she says. “Yours always fall out.”
I laugh. “You have a very talented papa.”
Once her hair is finished, she climbs off of me and settles back into her pillows.
I look toward the teetering stack of books by her bedside. “What story tonight, my love? Only one, and then it’s lights-out.”
She nibbles at her bottom lip with her baby teeth and I already know what she’s going to say. It’s been the same for months
now.
I pull the book with the worn green cover from where it sits at the top of the stack. “Faeries of the British Isles, again?” I ask incredulously.
I thumb through the pages, their illustrations now long faded with time. “Which chapter would you like?”
She burrows into my shoulder and presses her lips to my ear, her sweet voice asking what it does nearly every night. “Tell
me again, the story of the faerie king.”