Chapter 5 Sophia
SOPHIA
Ispend the night learning what my body does in a Fae court.
It doesn't sleep. It lies in the dark with the sheets kicked off because the heat in the room is unbearable even with the windows open and the fire in the grate burned to nothing.
It runs hot. It aches in places I've never ached before—between my hips, low in my belly, a deep pulse that comes and goes with my heartbeat and won't be ignored no matter how still I hold myself.
I press my thighs together and that makes it worse. I roll onto my stomach and that makes it worse.
I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling and breathe the way my grandmother taught me. It doesn't make it better. It just makes me aware of how hard I'm trying.
My cunt is wet. It's been wet since the great hall. I've changed my underclothes twice and the dampness comes back within the hour—a slow seep that's not sweat, not anything I've experienced before. My body is producing something it's never produced and I don't know what it is.
I'm not going to think about the way his gold eyes found mine across thirty feet of crowded hall as though he'd known exactly where I was standing.
By dawn I've slept for perhaps two hours. I wash in cold water and dress and strap the blade to my thigh. The ache between my hips hasn't faded. I ignore it the way I ignore pain, the way I ignore fear, the way I ignore everything that's not the job.
The festival gardens open at first light.
I've studied the layout from my window—terraced stone and crystal, fire-flowers that bloom without soil, paths that wind between hedges of dark growth lit from within by fire-blooms, their roots burning low enough that the early light barely reaches them.
The gardens are where the guests walk before the formal events begin, where the political conversations happen that are too delicate for the great hall, where a minor landowner might reasonably wander while waiting for an audience with the king.
Where a minor landowner might reasonably be alone with the king.
I have a technique. My grandmother calls it the kiss—a compound applied to the lips, absorbed through skin contact, designed to bypass Fae regeneration the way the blade-poison does but slower, subtler, harder to trace.
I've used it twice before, both times on Fae males in human territory.
Both times it worked within the hour. The target's magic fails first, then the heart.
It looks like natural decline. No one has ever connected either death to a woman who kissed a cheek and walked away.
I apply the compound in my room. It tastes like copper and nothing else.
I press my lips together and check myself in the mirror—the dark wine colour is indistinguishable from fashionable lip stain, the kind a lady wears to catch a king's attention.
Lady Sophie Moreau would wear this. Lady Sophie Moreau would hope for a private moment with the king in the festival gardens and would blush when she got one.
I walk out into the heat of the morning and I find him.
He's standing at the far end of the upper terrace, alone, leaning against the stone balustrade with a wine glass in one hand and the particular stillness of someone who has been alone for a long time and prefers it.
The early light catches his horns and the fire-sheen on his dark skin and I notice, because I can't stop noticing, that the ache between my hips tightens when I see him.
A clench. Low and hot. My body recognising him before my brain has finished deciding whether to approach from the left or the right.
I approach from the left. There's a fire-flower hedge on that side that partially screens the path from the lower terrace.
If the compound works the way it should, he'll show no distress for twenty minutes.
By then I'll be in my rooms packing. By the time someone finds him, I'll be on a carriage heading east.
"Your Majesty."
He turns. Gold eyes on mine. His heat hits me from six feet away—not metaphor, not nerves, actual heat pressing against my face and my bare forearms and finding the skin at my throat and sitting there.
My nipples tighten. My cunt clenches. I hold the cover smile and walk toward him and I'm a professional and my hands are not shaking.
"Lady Moreau." His voice is low and unhurried, the way everything about him is unhurried, the way nine centuries of being unkillable makes every gesture an exercise in patience. "You've found the gardens. Most guests prefer the great hall."
"I prefer the quiet."
"So do I."
He looks at me. Not the way he looked at me in the great hall—that was across a room, quick, a flick of gold eyes that caught me and released me.
This is close. Six feet. He's looking at my face the way someone looks at a blade they're considering purchasing—not the edge but the craftsmanship, the balance, the hand that made it.
His gaze moves over my features without hurry and I hold still under it because holding still is what I do best and because if I move I'll either reach for the blade at my thigh or take a step closer to him and I'm not certain which one my body will choose.
"You didn't sleep," he says.
It isn't a question. I don't answer it.
"The heat takes some adjustment," he says. "For humans." A pause. "For some humans more than others."
I take a step closer. The cover requires it—Lady Sophie Moreau, drawn to the king, a little overwhelmed, working up the courage to make a personal appeal for her border dispute.
The step brings me within four feet of him and the heat of his body presses against me like being wrapped in something heavy and I can smell him—smoke and iron and char underneath, something that tastes like fire when I breathe it in—and the ache between my hips pulses hard enough that I have to lock my jaw to keep my face from changing.
"Your Majesty, I wanted to thank you personally for welcoming me to your court. The Ember Court's generosity is—"
"Stop."
I stop. Not because the word is harsh—it isn't. It's quiet. Amused. The kind of word a male uses when he's heard the opening of a speech he doesn't need to hear the rest of.
"You don't need the performance," he says. "Not out here. Tell me what you actually came to say."
I look at his face. His gold eyes are steady and he's almost smiling and he isn't mocking me.
He's giving me an opening. The professional in me takes it—I step closer, close enough to touch, close enough that the heat of him is everywhere, and I put my hand on his arm the way a grateful woman touches a powerful male who might help her, and I rise onto my toes and press my lips to his cheek.
It goes in. I feel the tingle at my lips—the strike of a match—and I hold for two seconds. Three. Long enough. I pull back and drop my gaze and say, "Thank you. For your kindness."
I wait for him to sway. To blink. For the hitch in his breathing, the first flutter of his magic failing.
Nothing. Not a flicker.
He looks at me. His gold eyes are bright and steady and his mouth curves into the first real expression I've seen on his face—not a smile, exactly, but the shadow of one, the kind that lives in the lines around old eyes and means something I can't read.
"The compound on your lips," he says. "Copper base, with—is that nightshade distillate? And something else." He tilts his head. "Foxglove. The foxglove is what targets the regeneration pathway. That's clever. Most people use hemlock for that step and hemlock is blunt. The foxglove is elegant."
My stomach drops through the floor.
"The application method is even better," he says.
He hasn't moved. He hasn't stepped back.
He's standing four feet from me with my poison on his cheek and he's looking at me the way my grandmother looks at a well-forged blade—with recognition.
With respect. "A kiss. So the target doesn't think to check for a chemical delivery because the contact is intimate.
That's beautiful work. Where did you train? "
My hands want to shake. I'm not letting them.
"I don't know what you mean, Your Majesty."
"You do. And it won't work on me—nothing designed for standard Fae regeneration touches an ancient. You'd need something keyed to fire magic." His gold eyes hold mine. "That knowledge has been dead for six hundred years. Or it should have been."
He reaches up and wipes his cheek where my lips touched. Looks at his fingers. His expression hasn't changed—still that almost-smile, still that steady warmth that's not warmth, that's heat, that's a fire burning low and certain under old stone.
"Exquisite," he says.
My stomach floods with heat. It rushes through my chest, sits behind my ribs, spreads low.
My face burns. My cunt clenches hard enough that I have to lock my jaw to keep my expression from breaking.
I hate it. I hate the way the word sounds in his mouth. I hate that he means it.
I hate that no one in my entire life has looked at my work—my real work, the killing, the craft of it—and called it beautiful.
My grandmother's never used that word. She's said adequate and sufficient and you survived, so the technique held.
She's never said exquisite. She's never looked at what I made and seen anything worth admiring.
He's admiring me. Not the cover. Not Lady Sophie Moreau. Me. The part that makes things and ends things and has spent twenty-six years being told that the making and the ending are the same skill and neither one deserves praise.
"The blade at your thigh is also exceptional," he says. "I can feel the quality from here. The fire magic in this court responds to good metalwork and yours is singing."
My blade. The one I forged at three in the morning in my grandmother's workshop.
The one that's been humming against my leg since I walked through the gates.
He can feel it. He knows it's there and he knows it's mine and he's telling me this while my poison dries on his cheek and his gold eyes watch my face for the reaction he already knows is coming.
"I purchased it from a dealer in the eastern territories," I say. My voice is level. My pulse is not.
"Of course you did."
He picks up his wine glass. Takes a sip. Sets it down. Everything unhurried, everything deliberate. Nine centuries of patience in the set of his shoulders, in the way he sets the glass down without a sound.
"I'm hosting a demonstration in the Royal Forge tomorrow morning," he says. "For the festival guests. Metal-shaping, fire work. The kind of thing humans find impressive." He looks at me. "I think you would find it more than impressive. I think you would understand it."
I should say no. I should go back to my rooms and regroup and plan the next attempt and put as much distance between myself and this male as the court allows.
My grandmother's voice is in my head—do not let him close enough to reach—and he's been close enough to reach for three minutes and I haven't drawn the blade and my body is leaning toward him the way it leaned during the waltz, a fraction of an inch that I can't seem to control.
"I would be honoured, Your Majesty."
"Ignatius," he says. "You are in my gardens and you have just tried to kill me with a kiss. We are past titles."
I turn and walk away from him. I don't look back. I walk the length of the garden path and through the glass doors and down the corridor and into my rooms and I lock the door and sit on the edge of the bed and press my hands flat against my knees.
Exquisite.
The word sits in my chest like a coal. It burns.
Not the ache between my hips—that hasn't stopped since the great hall and I'm learning to carry it the way I carry pain, as background, as something I won't look at directly.
This is different. This is in my ribs, behind my sternum, a heat that has nothing to do with the fire magic in the walls and everything to do with the way he looked at my work and called it beautiful.
No one has ever praised the deadliest thing about me without fearing it.
I sit with this for an hour before I can sleep.
When I close my eyes I see gold. When I press my thighs together the ache sharpens and I clench my jaw and hold still and don't touch myself and don't think about his voice saying exquisite and don't think about what my hands want to reach for when he is close.
I don't think about it. My body thinks about it for me.