Chapter Eleven
Lunelle ran her hands along the cover of Kwan’s manuscript, the steam from her tea rising over the first section.
A People’s History of The Flare.
She had stared at the words for an hour already, hoping to enjoy the palace to herself at the late hour. She’d spent much of the day unfocused, and a lengthy conversation between her mother and Arcas after dinner had only left her even more unsettled.
She had also attempted to sleep to make up for the prior evening’s interruptions, but it was of no use. There were too many questions and so very few answers.
“I’ll be along soon.”
Lunelle looked up from the manuscript, setting her pen down as she waved the steam rolling off her cup away from her. She tugged a half-drafted letter to Astra over Kwan’s book.
“Good evening, Mirquios,”
she said, stretching her back lightly over the chair.
“Evening? It’s the middle of the night. Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”
Lunelle shrugged. He stopped at the edge of her table, pulling his cloak off and laying it over his forearm.
“My sense of time is completely thrown off with the Sun and all of Pluto’s Moons. Add in an all-nighter with Yallara and I’m afraid, to be frank, I’m fucked.”
Mirquios barked a laugh at this, his eyes lighting up at her harsh language.
“I don’t think I’ve slept properly since leaving Mercury,”
he confessed.
“May I join you?”
“Please,”
she said, straightening up her pile of parchment. She signaled to Lura across the terrace for another teacup. She’d tried to send her maiden to bed hours ago, but after carefully watching her all day, Lura’s concern was clear.
Mirquios eyed the teapot suspiciously.
“Merely chamomile this time,”
Lunelle assured him.
“How boring.”
He draped his cloak over the seat across from her and slid into the chair.
“My sister hasn’t responded to a single letter this week,”
Lunelle muttered under her breath, gesturing to her unfinished missive.
The king nodded.
“I haven’t had much luck, either.”
Lunelle watched him, his bright eyes half closed at the late hour.
“She’s always been bad at keeping up with her correspondence. If I know her, she’s not even in Lunaria at this point. The second my mother left the court, she probably darted off to gods know where.”
“Luxuros is with her, he doesn’t tolerate trouble.”
He took the cup Lura offered him and slowly inhaled the floral steam.
Lunelle snorted.
“I fear my sister won’t tolerate him.”
Mirquios released a held breath.
“The commander did seem a bit… apprehensive about staying back with her. I’ve watched the man charge headfirst into armies thick as night, but your sister gave him pause.”
Lunelle smiled against the rim of her teacup. “Good.”
Their eyes met, holding onto one another’s secrets across the table.
“You and your sister both have a way of looking right through men, don’t you?”
Mirquios asked as Lura set cream and sugar between them before fading back into the terrace shadows.
“Have you met our mother?”
Lunelle giggled.
For the first time since leaving the Lunar Court, a lightness welled within her, the weight of the worlds falling from her shoulders. Her eyes dropped to his folded gloves on the table as he poured his tea.
“Where were you coming from?”
He paused for a moment, seemingly debating with himself on the best answer. Or, she realized, if he could trust her with the truth.
“How much do you know about the political tension in Pluto, Princess?”
Her fingers clutched her teacup tighter, fighting the urge to drop her gaze to the pile of writings below her letter.
“Enough to know that wherever you were, the prince wouldn’t have been happy.”
Mirquios nodded. She waited for him to confess his association—to let her in—but he left it at that.
“How much influence do you think you have over him? The prince?”
Lunelle unconsciously checked over her shoulder for her mother’s watchful stare as if Mirquios had been sent to test her.
“Me?”
He tilted his head.
“He seems to seek out your opinion. That has to be worth something.”
“Once,”
she said.
“But that doesn’t mean he’d listen again.”
Mirquios shook his head.
“Not just once. I’ve watched him carefully, Lunelle. In every room, he looks for you. When he speaks, he waits to see if you nod.”
Lunelle’s cheeks flushed pink.
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“I don’t believe that for a second,”
Mirquios laughed.
“You’re far too observant. If I’ve noticed, surely you have.”
Lunelle deflected.
“He does not seem interested in anything that threatens what little stability he can cling to. From what I’ve gathered, the… unrest… is just another thing he doesn’t have a clue how to handle. And despite your implications, I don’t think he takes me all that seriously. I am a way out of trouble for him, nothing more.”
“Then he’s even more of a fool than I originally suspected,”
Mirquios said through sips of tea, stretching his neck gently.
“I always knew it would happen—that I’d be on the throne, married,”
she sighed.
“But I suppose I imagined it happening on my own terms. Not because of a war.”
His brows floated upward in surprise.
“You wished for romance?”
She bit back a laugh.
“No. Of course not. Romance is for the less fortunate,”
she sighed.
“I just thought I’d feel more ready for it. And transparently, I thought I’d settle down well before Astra. Then you came along.”
She waved at him from across the table.
“You’ve completely thrown my timeline.”
“Oh, well, my sincerest apologies, Princess,”
he mocked.
She dropped her gaze, tucking her brows together.
“I do not mean it as an insult. I just… I thought when Astra finally came home, we’d have some time together. I lost three years with her. I never dreamed she’d leave Lunaria for good.”
Mirquios nodded, his fingers crawling over his chest as she spoke.
“I want my sister to be happy, but I also do not wish to deprive the world of the good she could do if she had the right resources. The right freedoms. I always imagined that I’d take the throne and restore my court to the paradise it once was—to bring back the magic we’ve all been barred from. I’ve spent years dreaming of unleashing Astra in all her glory. I’m envious that you’ll be the one to witness the Fire Queen’s Phoenician rise.”
He took this in, his eyes examining the teacups between them.
“Does your sister know of your plans, Lunelle? Does she realize how you see her?”
Lunelle let a long, dark breath loose. A silver tear pooled at the corner of her eye, and she fought the urge to flick it away.
“Does any little sister know the lengths their eldest would go to let them shine?”
“Your sister is not the only one worthy of having what they want, Lunelle.”
She twisted her fingers against her dress.
“My sister will get what she wants because she knows what she wants.”
“And you do not?”
Her eyes fell once again onto her stack of papers, at the ghost of the strange tome she’d been given.
“Or, are you simply too afraid to admit it?” he added.
Lunelle blinked, lifting her tea to her lips. It was decidedly that one, wasn’t it? She knew it as she watched his inescapable eyes blaze into her. In the very far recesses of her mind, she wondered if Astra noticed the lines at the corners of his eyes, the ones that promised a lightness at the ends of hard evenings.
For a moment, she wasn’t sure what was more of a threat to her. The manuscript within her reach, or the king just out of it.
“Does it hurt?”
she asked, pointing to his chest as he pushed against the space between his lungs.
Mirquios tilted his head.
“Does what hurt?” he asked.
“The Tether?”
His hand dropped from his chest and wrapped around his teacup.
“Yes,”
he settled.
“I suppose it does.”
“I’m sorry,”
she offered, though she wasn’t sure she meant it.
They fell into a comfortable silence as she focused back on her letter, his eyes watching her hands float across the page.
“You’re tired,”
Lunelle said without looking up. She could feel the energy shift in the air.
“Or perhaps I’m boring you.”
Mirquios chuckled, setting down his teacup.
“I find you… peaceful. Never boring.”
She allowed one side of her mouth to accept the compliment in the form of a half smile, the letters making less and less sense as she rambled. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“Perhaps we both should stop fighting it,”
the king said.
Lunelle’s eyes snapped up to his from her parchment. “Pardon?”
“Sleep.”
“Ah. Yes,”
she mumbled.
“Perhaps you’re right.”
She quickly gathered her things, hardly giving him an audible farewell before disappearing from the terrace.
She’d almost made it back to her room, half asleep already, but a shadow moving in the library caught her eye.
Lunelle poked her head in through the door to see a set of hunched shoulders wrapped in blue velvet.
“Does the prince not sleep?”
she asked, setting her things down on the table nearest her. Arcas was tucked in the window’s cushioned seat, a book in his lap as he stared at the flowing silver pools beneath.
“The prince does not sleep well,”
he laughed. His eyes flickered to hers.
“Are you all right?”
Lunelle wanted to laugh. She was not all right. Not the least bit. The panic in her chest as she’d realized she felt anything but a casual disinterest in her sister’s fiancé set her on edge, and she was more interested in throwing herself into the silver pools for relief than she was in admitting it. She moved closer to the window, maintaining an acceptable amount of space between them.
In her dream the other night, the pools sparkled in a way that felt otherworldly, and she was pleased to find they held their shine.
“They’re so beautiful,”
she whispered.
“They’re a dream,”
he sighed. She turned, his eyes fixed on her face. Arcas tossed her a tilted smile and held up his hands in surrender.
“I don’t know how it works.”
Lunelle blushed a deep crimson. If he’d really been there in her dream, where else could he be?
“But I did not mind it,”
he said softly.
Something about the way he stared at her hit a release valve in her chest. She liked the hunger in his eyes. It made her forget what a fool she’d been just moments ago.
“At least you mostly behaved yourself,”
Lunelle laughed, her brow arched as she sat back on her heels.
“Though perhaps I’m a little disappointed in that.”
Arcas sighed, leaning his head back on the wall behind him.
“You always say the exact opposite of what I expect.”
“That’s because you’ve painted a portrait of me in your mind that is not remotely accurate.”
“How do you figure?”
He crossed his arms, eyeing her as she relaxed against her side of the window.
“You think me a stiff princess, groomed to be perfectly compliant to her mother’s wishes. Here to smile demurely and court befuddled princes.”
“Befuddled,”
he scoffed.
“That’s generous.”
Lunelle only tilted her head in response.
“You are none of those things, then?”
“I’m some of those things,”
Lunelle sighed.
“But I am so much more.”
Arcas thought about that for a moment.
“What is it you really want, Princess?”
he asked. The question needled at her, like a sharp breath caught between her ribs.
“I want people to stop asking me that,”
she huffed.
Arcas leaned forward, the smoky scent of him wafting over her, tempting her to sort through the layers of it.
“Perhaps… if you just took what you wanted, no one would have to ask.”
His eyes fell over her lips—she watched the calculations flash across his face as he measured the distance between them. On any other night, she might have excused herself and retired for bed, the weight of her exhaustion dragging her down. She might have come up with a clever way to turn the conversation on its head and left him pondering the many facets of her.
She might have at least leaned away from him, silently dismissing the plans he drew against his knee, his fingers nervously twitching against the fabric.
But tonight, she rather liked the idea of taking something she wanted. And she wanted to know if the venom in his heart tasted as bitter as she suspected.
Arcas leaned forward, sending her back against the wall. Her heart stuttered as his eyes seared into her.
She warred with herself. Perhaps her dream had been in pursuit of something romantic, and the foreign nature of admitting she might actually enjoy that simply confused her senses.
What if all those feelings Mirquios stirred within her were merely that—a yearning for any of it? Not with him specifically, but a jealousy for what he surely had with her sister.
It made sense, didn’t it?
Arcas could be a sort of release for her—but what if she did feel more for him? The shock of it alone might have muddled her mind in her dreams.
Arcas edged in closer, the smoky scent of him drowning her now.
“Your mother seems to think we’d make an advantageous match.”
“Of course,”
she said quietly, his heartbeat picking up as he moved closer still.
“I think we’ve got the physical chemistry for it.”
Arcas leaned over her, his long lines stretching against her soft curves. She had to crane her neck to hold onto his gaze, a light pink blush rising over her as she wondered what the muscles in his neck felt like flexing against her hold.
He exhaled.
“But, I cannot tell how you feel… and I’ve found I’m rather fond of hearing what you think.”
He was too close now, too near for her to concentrate on assembling the scattered thoughts that floated away from her. Perhaps she would have felt differently in a garden where the air blossomed with early sweet florals instead of the curling heat between their mouths.
Perhaps she wouldn’t have felt her pulse quicken beneath her skin, just a breath away from his fingertips.
But then again, even in her dreams, hadn’t she choked on the same suffocating tension?
And at any rate, she wasn’t there now.
She was very much inside, pinned against a wall, drowning in the strange alchemy of the Plutonian prince once again.
“I will not come any closer,”
Arcas murmured, his voice dropping into a devastatingly low register.
“Unless you ask me to.”
Blood rushed to the surface of Lunelle’s skin, painting her in a pale pink as she sifted through an explosion of racing thoughts.
Maybe Arcas was exactly what she needed.
He wasn’t tied to her by Fate’s mysterious strings, but just maybe the freedom to move forward and crash into him was worth more to her in that moment than the gods making the choice for her.
He must have felt it course through the slip of space between them. The decision she made, the giving over of herself. He must have heard it in the way her breath caught against her throat—his crooked grin certainly implied he’d noticed the shift.
“Your move, starling,”
he whispered.
Lunelle pushed into her knees, rising to meet him with a slow caution that dissolved entirely by the time their lips met.
Arcas found her hip through her dress, wrapping gently around her as she leaned into his touch. She let him rain over her, wandering over his chest, dancing quietly along his neck, searching for any space to hold onto him.
The crawling sear of his kiss sent all but one thought scrambling off into the ether as he backed her further into the wall—a near-silent whine leaving his throat that lit something inside her she had not kindled in a very long time.
It was that last remaining thought, however, that stopped her from inviting him into her bed—or hells, throwing her dress off in the library—that pushed her away from him after another moment of indulging his kneading fingers and hungry kiss.
That final thought—an unmovable, demanding thing—echoed off her skull as she bid him goodnight and darted into the hallway, letting the dark consume her.
The thought that as long as she did not open her eyes, she would not have to mourn the sapphire gaze staring back at her when she might have preferred emeralds.
The seams of the terrace warped and rolled in on one another as she moved across the glittering stone patio. The lanterns were not blue, but a softer, quieter lilac.
“Lunelle!”
Mirquios said, setting down his pen.
“It’s the middle of the night.”
It was indeed silent in the hall behind them. Not even Lura or one of the king’s many courtiers lurked in the shadows. But Lunelle was on guard after her interaction with Arcas.
“I’m too tired to sleep,”
she said, a weak smile unfolding as he stood.
“I wish I did not understand what you mean. I was thinking of taking a walk to clear my mind. Would you like to join me?”
Lunelle resented how much she did want to accompany him.
She paced beside him in a silence she soon resented, too. Not because it was uncomfortable, or even unwanted, but because there was only one other person in the world she felt so at ease in the quiet with, and she bore the king’s ring on her left hand.
But maybe here, in the safety of her subconscious, she could forgive herself for the transgressions bubbling against her fingertips.
They strolled beneath the cerulean haze of Pluto’s night sky. The rose bushes whispered to one another, gossiping about what a traitorous fool the Lunar princess was.
At least, that’s what Lunelle assumed they might say.
“My advisor overheard your mother and Arcas making plans today,”
Mirquois admitted, his words tense with the tone of a man who told himself he wouldn’t get involved.
“Did they?”
“It seems he is to be a Lunar champion.”
“Oh,”
Lunelle sighed, a rush of heat in her cheeks softer here, but she was sure she’d be consumed in flames if they were in a real garden.
“Of course. You know, with so much up in the air, I’d almost convinced myself that my trial would be delayed.”
Mirquios nodded, slowing his pace as they stepped under a meandering tree spilling gentle pink blossoms onto the pavers below.
“He’s not the worst fate, Mirquios?—”
She searched the king’s bright gaze, somehow even brighter here. She shrugged, unsure how she felt about anything at this point.
“So, you’ll marry him, then?”
“If that’s what’s best for the courts?—”
“What about what’s best for you?”
Lunelle sighed.
“What about it? You bear the same weight I do, Mirquios. You know desire and duty rarely intersect. You are fortunate that Fate chose to bless you.”
“So you do have desires?”
His lips curled upward.
She turned away from him, her arms crossing at her chest.
“It does not matter whether I do or don’t.”
She felt him, even through the misty waves of this plane, as he hovered just behind her.
“What is it you dream of? Is it Arcas? Because if you want to be with him, who would I be to interfere?—”
Lunelle spun to face him—she knew how close he was, but it still somehow took her by surprise, the crackling of static between them.
“Who would you be to interfere with anything about my life or my court?”
The king started, raising his hand to his chest.
“Lunelle, I am your friend?—”
“You are no such thing, Mirquios. You are a foreign king whom I’ve known just as long as I’ve known the Plutonian prince. You are my sister’s betrothed, but that does not make you somehow all-knowing of my desires or what is best for me or anything of the matter!”
She battled the urge to stomp her foot, maintaining her balanced posture despite the voice in her head screaming.
Mirquios took a moment, his eyes dropping over her face, watching for the truth of her. He leaned forward, dropping his voice to a whisper as if someone might interrupt them.
“I would keep your secrets, Lunelle.”
Her nose scrunched. He thought he would keep her secrets because he did not know how deeply buried they were. He did not know the ache forming in her Soul. He did not know she was beginning to fear he and her secrets were one and the same.
Did she imagine it? The way he rocked forward in his boots?
Surely, it was the nature of dreaming of men in gardens—the lines of time wobbled and blurred, imparting a subsequent effect on the lines between sisters and their betrothed kings.
“Lunelle,”
he breathed, a fingertip brushing against hers.
It was enough—the heat of such a betrayal—to shove her back into reality, where she wished desperately to unknow what she now firmly understood about her own Soul.