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I blinked and sat tall in my chair. “A young man?”

The king smiled. “I know lovesickness when I see it.”

Oh, gods. If it wasthatobvious to the world and Lope still hadn’t said anything... what did it all mean?

“There... thereisa girl,” I said.

He hummed in thought, his eyes searching the crowd. “Is it someone here? That girl, Madeleine, expressed her fondness for you. And over there is a young woman named Angelique—”

“Not someone here.”

A servant passed close by, and I waved him over to gratefully take a glass of sparkling wine. I sipped on it and let the warmth and the bubbles rise in my cheeks.

“Whoever she is, I can certainly arrange a meeting if it would please you.”

“We are, um, rather well acquainted already.”

He raised a white eyebrow. “You don’t mean that servant you brought with you?”

I wished the Underworld would split the earth apart and drag me away from this. “Father, it’s... it’s not all that important.”

“It certainly is. How it vexes you!” He leaned closer, a friendly smile on his pale face. “I am not worried about her station. Hearts are mysterious things, are they not? Loving regardless of logic or reason.”

I had reason. I hadplentyof reasons. When I grew sorrowful and she laid her head against mine. The way she listened so intently to any of my troubles, no matter how trivial. She never dismissed my feelings. Even if my anxieties about my mother or my future or my story ideas were far less fearsome than the Shadows she faced every night. Lope always treated me as the most important person on Earth.

“Does she love you in return?”

I responded with a long sigh. She respected me, yes. But I was the daughter of the countess she served. Perhaps that respect was mandatory.

The dancers now danced in pairs, spinning around one another in slow circles as they gazed into one another’s eyes.

“I once thought I knew,” I murmured. “But she has never bared her feelings to me, and I’m not sure if it’s because she’s shy or because I’m mistaken, or perhaps she’s waiting forme, or perhaps she wants to remain friends—”

“How long have you been fond of her?”

My cheeks burned. It was hard to describe. “We’ve known each other about five years. I’ve always loved her, but the way I felt about her, it... changed, recently. Like one day I was seeing her clearly when I never had before.”

“And she was the one who accompanied you all the way to Le Château?”

“Yes.” Yes—she must have loved me, at least then, risking so much on my behalf. With a twinge in my heart, I remembered holding her in the field just outside the palace, how pale she’d been, the shocking scarlet of the blood running down her face.

“If it’s been so long,” he said, “she has had a thousand opportunities to confess her love to you. Even if she was a coward, she could have written you a letter, could she not?”

I bristled. “She is no coward. She has nearly given her life for me.”

“That is her role, as a knight.”

How simple he made it sound. A king ruled. A painter painted. A knight fought to the death. But nothing wassimple about Lope or my feelings for her. They were as tangled within me as the roots of a tree. An inseparable part of me.

The king gave my hand a gentle squeeze. “Perhaps it’s for the best,” he said. “Noble as your knight may be, it seems plain to me that she has no intention of offering you the affection that you so clearly deserve.”

My heart split into sharp fragments. I didn’t want to believe such a thing.

But his words... they echoed my own fears. They did not sound like lies.

Lies were wrapped in soft, beautiful cloaks. The truth was cold and harsh. And this one cut deeply.

The Lope I kept imagining in my head, she was just that, some character that I had created. The way I pictured her, courtly and swooning and reciting poetry to me in a rose-filled garden—that wasn’t her. Lope was the girl whose back was always turned to me, ready to fight another battle. The one who never called me by my name, no matter how many times I asked.