Chapter Twenty-Eight
TWENTY-EIGHT
I meet him in the garden, under the same sliver of moonlight as the first night we met.
This time, the moon is waxing, not waning, and everything is different.
The scrap of paper was easy enough to hide in Cashel’s room while he was at a dinner reception I missed by pleading sickness. I used the same secret passage Wolf led me through. Because here’s the thing about tunnels: There were no other footprints to obscure the path he and I had left behind.
Two candles and my own stubbornness got me there and back.
Now I watch the way the mist twines over our boots, stalking along the torn roots where the rosebushes used to be. Cashel eyes me with cool, cautious curiosity. He keeps his distance, but that broad-sword could cross the feet between us with one lunge forward.
“You wanted to talk?” His sapphire eyes follow me, both arms crossing over his chest.
The jewels on his fingers glitter in the moonlight.
I swallow, and shove away the tendrils of fear threatening to latch around me. “Before I tell you, I need to know.” Our gazes meet, and his is a hook. “You said in your room that your father went too far, even before… what he is now.”
Cashel’s mouth tightens into a thin line. One hand goes to the hilt at his side. “I did.”
My breath hangs in the air, a fading puff in the chill.
There’s no going back now.
“Would you be different?” I whisper, and his gaze slashes toward mine. “If you were king?”
The crushed grass beneath his boots crunches. He strides toward me, until we’re close enough for me to count the facets in each ruby set into the silver collar of his cloak. Pure, dangerous hunger chills his stare, and his words are sharp. “I would do everything differently.”
Old Ones, I want to believe him. Relief is a wave crashing through me as I look up and hold his solemn stare. “Like what?”
Say the words. I want to hear him say the words before I bring him into this.
Cashel cocks his head, a dark gleam in his eyes.
“I would reverse my father’s order to drain the Wells,” he ventures, never taking his gaze off me.
Watching every shift in my expression, every muscle, like he thinks I could run him through with a blade at any moment.
“I would let the mages return and bring magic with them, so we could protect Eireann from anyone who would hurt us.”
Neither of us says the Cymreans, but we both know exactly who he means.
Slowly, carefully, I reach into my pocket.
The vial of magic is no bigger than my thumb, but the drops inside of it are shimmering midnight, and Cash inhales sharply at the sight. Raw fascination brightens the sapphire of his eyes.
“How did you get this?” The way he looks at me… it’s dangerously close to awe.
Pride swells in my chest. This will work. It has to work.
“You said you wanted to help.” I don’t answer his question. “I need you to plant this on Oona, but I can’t tell you anything more than that.”
Cash reaches out for the vial. I pull it back, just an inch, and his eyes snap to mine. “Then tell me: Is there more where this came from?”
That much I can give him. “Yes.”
The crisp, spicy scent of him reaches me as a cold breeze rustles through the vines and the ruined ground where the High Queen’s white roses used to grow.
Sandy hair falls into his face, but he doesn’t bother to push it away. A cautious prickle runs down my arms. He’s breathtaking, like a winter’s night.
Cash is ice to Wolf’s fire.
Silver to his sharpened steel.
But if being the daughter of a weapons trader has taught me anything, it’s that I’ll put my trust in the one that makes the stronger, deadlier blade every time.
I refuse to flinch from the probing shards of his stare. “Are you in?”
Cash’s eyes lock on the vial. Wonder, awe, desire… they all blur together across his moonlit features. Slowly, eyes flicking up to mine, he reaches for the vial. I let him take it and watch as his fingers curl tightly around the glass, and his eyes harden.
“I’ll do it,” Cash says solemnly. “But I need something from you, too.”
A hundred pairs of eyes narrow on me all at once.
And I know one thing with every fiber of my being as I grit my teeth and step over the threshold into the banquet room with Cash at my side for the High Queen’s birthday feast.
Every person here wants me dead.
“This is a bad idea.” Talon walks close enough behind me that their low words carry to my ears over the sudden gasps, the quick intakes of shocked breaths as the nobles spot me at the prince’s side.
“Yeah,” I whisper back through a forced, tight smile. “I know.”
It was also Cash’s one condition to hide the magic on Oona—me being here as a distraction for the nobles and his stepmother while he plants the vial of magic that, as he had put it with a cold smile, will humiliate her when the gardai find it during her birthday feast.
Maybe I should’ve told Talon before we got to the wide double doors of the same mirrored hall we were in for the First Look and found Cash waiting for me, arm out for mine to hook through. Talon would’ve told Wolf, though—and then Wolf would’ve insisted on being here.
And even if Talon was right and it isn’t Wolf’s choice to keep sneaking back into this castle, it’s my choice now to try to keep him out of just a little bit more danger.
There’s enough of it facing both of us already.
But if the nobles are seething at the hand Cash keeps on me, they won’t be watching the one he plans to use to slip the vial of magic into Oona’s pocket.
We arrive fashionably late, to cut the time between Cash planting the magic on Oona and the Lady of Shadows’ expected arrival with the gardai.
More time between the two means more of a risk Oona might slip a hand into her own pocket and find the vial of magic there before the gardai can.
Every step of this plan has to move fast, and go perfectly.
Old Ones, is it possible to forget how to breathe?
Every inhale feels impossibly tight against the laces of my gown.
Aoife lent me this one, and she follows a few steps behind Talon, sandy hair aglow in the candlelight.
I’m wearing pure black velvet, trimmed with braided strands of black pearls stitched into elaborate patterns of what look like the outlines of gems.
The only color I wear is from the oxblood garnets dripping from my ears.
Every knife I own—and then more, borrowed from Talon—is hidden up and down the backs of my legs and calves in form-fitting leather sheaths.
My dark hair spills over my shoulders, loose and free.
The neckline dips just low enough to verge on inappropriate—again, part of the ruse. I want Oona sneering those crimson lips at me when we get close enough to plant this on her.
Even if it means I had to twine my mother’s necklace around my wrist instead.
“You sure you don’t want to just…” Cash leans in close to brush his lips against the edge of my ear, a blatant display of preference that sets every tongue in the hall to hissing. “Keep this little vial for yourself?”
A feeling like ice blooms beneath my skin at the touch. For a second, I can’t tell if he’s joking, until he pulls back, and a smile cracks the cold mask he wears before the court.
“We’ve got this,” I whisper, and my pulse kicks into a thunderous jolt.
I’m not sure who the words are for—me, or Cash.
The cruel glances of noble after noble slide over me. All of them bow or sink into deep curtsies as Cash nears, leveling daggered glares my way from under their lashes when he passes.
Most of the nobles linger around the tables heaping with silver jugs of wine and stacked with enough food to feed half the city.
The tables groan under the weight of trays of mushrooms roasted in sherry and thyme, suckling pigs glistening in their own fat, trays of sliced beef and caramelized onions, and every vegetable I can name.
I think there might even be a whole deer shaped out of marzipan.
The one thing missing is the High King—and I’m not the only one who notices.
Countless eyes from the crowd dart back and forth from his empty throne, flicking between Cash and the High Queen, who sneers over the crowd from her smaller throne.
“He’s still not here?” I keep my voice low, so only Cash and Talon can hear.
Cash’s eyes flash to his father’s throne. He makes no effort to hide the suspicion narrowing his eyes as he levels them at the High Queen. “A stubborn fever, she claims.”
I don’t dare press him further, not with this many ears around us.
His jaw tenses at my side. “You ready?”
I shake out my skirts and glance over my shoulder to where Talon stays within arm’s reach of me. “As I’ll ever be.”
From her throne, the High Queen’s icy eyes slice to Cash, and I feel the moment she realizes I’m the one at his side.
Her double take might make me laugh, if we weren’t on the possible verge of a particularly terrible death.
If we’re caught, Cash would die too, however they kill nobles.
I don’t actually know—but they’re never brought to the Black Quay.
Me? I’d get a one-way trip.
Fear licks through my veins, cold and quick. I stand up straighter, press my chest out against the low cut of my dress, and feel the High Queen’s icy eyes narrow on me in loathing.
Good.
Even in the dense crowd, Oona is easy to spot.
Her raven hair shines; black diamonds glimmer at her throat.
She approaches from my right side, and I feel Talon shift their stance subtly enough that I know they’re prepared for an attack.
But she moves like silk, a cruel smile curving her painted lips.
My heartbeat is thunder.
Every eye in the room watches her approach, then slides from Oona to me as I force my mouth into a wide grin. I laugh as if this is the most wondrous night I’ve ever seen.
The nobles’ glances slide to me again and again, whispering and sharp with judgment. I feel their eyes roam down the deep neck of my gown, over my hair, left deliberately long and unbraided so it flows over my shoulders.
I keep a wide grin plastered to my mouth and let them judge me.