Page 24

I tense but cover it quickly by adjusting the quilt. “Why would you think that? How could you think that?”

“I don’t know, Vasalie.” He threads a hand through his now-mussed hair.

“First, you cause a scene on the Welcoming night. You tell me it’s because you needed to take a risk, and I want to believe you, but then, in the garden, you force me to hide you from a foreign general, no less, and refuse to tell me why. ”

“He has nothing to do with this!”

“What is it, Vas? Did you steal from him? Offend him? I should march you right to him and get the truth from his own lips. I will, if you don’t talk!”

“Leave it alone,” I warn, fingers curling into the sheets.

“There are no secrets here,” he says, gesturing between us. “Not if we’re partners. Not if you hope to convince me I should trust you enough to keep you here. You should already be gone.”

My voice goes cold. “My past is mine. To share at my own discretion.”

“Not when you were conveniently beside the man who was poisoned, for Fates’ sake!”

I give him an incredulous look. “Was I not poisoned myself?”

“The ice beneath you is thin, Vasalie,” he growls. “And it grows thinner still.”

“Copelan, please—”

“ Speak. ”

All the frustration and fear clogs my throat until it feels like I’m going to throw it all up.

“He’s my father !” I shout, dumping the words into the space between us like a pail of ice.

I rise from the bed, using the window to steady me, but blood hurtles through my veins, fast as a riptide.

My eyes swim with the threat of tears. “I ran away. I don’t know what he’ll do if he finds me, but I am not going back. ”

His voice. I hear it, even now, invading my thoughts. Stop me, Emilia, and you will rue the day you set foot in my home . . .

When I turn, Copelan tracks the line of my tears, one by one, his eyes wide.

I slump against the windowsill, then slide to the floor. “I didn’t know he would be here.”

Copelan approaches tentatively. He bends and gathers me into his arms once more, carrying me back to the bed, and it’s such a tender gesture that I don’t know what to say. I can only look at him when he places me upon it and eases next to me. “Would he harm you, Vas?”

He . . . cares.

I want to pull him closer, to curl into him and forget this whole conversation, because yes, my father would harm me; I don’t know how, but he would.

When I don’t reply, Copelan curses. “I can’t allow you to stay if you’re in danger.”

My heart skids to a stop. I grab his hand, willing him to relent. “He won’t recognize me. I was barely thirteen the last time he saw me, just a girl. Regardless, my costumes offer a suitable disguise. He merely caught me off guard.”

“Even still—”

“You can’t send me away,” I plead. “This is everything. It’s all I have. I have nowhere else to go.”

Once more, he shoves his fingers through his hair. Seconds pass, each longer than the last. Then he startles me once more when his hand curls around my jaw, only to fall away.

“I had a partner my first year at the Gathering,” he says.

His voice breaks over the last word, like a wave against a jut of rocks.

I glance up. He fiddles idly with a string on the edge of my quilt.

“The former Master of Revels hired both her and me as soloists that year, but we worked so well together, we decided to combine our efforts—much like you and I now. The Master of Revels wasn’t pleased at first, but after that first night, we were the most requested performers.

It was our idea to end each week with a performance to honor the attending nations, which garnered us heaps of favor.

It’s the reason the Master of Revels later recommended me as his replacement for the next Gathering once he was set to retire. ”

“What happened to her?” I ask softly.

“She . . .” He wipes a thumb across the bow of his lips. “She made a mistake. A na?ve, foolish mistake, and it cost her her career. Deprived me of a partner.”

I blink at him. “Mistake?”

He swipes a sharp gaze toward me. “She involved herself with a Crown. Sought after his attention and—” He pauses, shaking his head. “And I never saw her again.”

It makes sense, now, the way he’s been acting.

He snags my hand, rough at first, but then his grip softens.

“You will understand why I am as careful as I am, especially with the company kept here at the Gathering. I don’t want you to end up like her.

All it takes is being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Trusting the wrong someone. You don’t realize how easily that can happen. ”

Except I do.

“How long ago?” I say, voice frail.

“It was nine years ago. We were young, careless. Barely eighteen. Kids who thought we were in love.” It looks like he wants to say something more, but his jaw tightens, as if he’s screwing it shut.

Nine years. That was long before I came to Illian’s court. I was sixteen and still working at the Melune while Copelan was here, performing at the Gathering and falling in love.

“I’ve never been in love.” I don’t know why I say it. Perhaps because it feels so far from reach.

Copelan releases my hands, and cold air washes over my palms. They feel empty, just like the heart that’s being hollowed out in my chest. I may have found a way to save Gustav, but for how long? And what will Illian have me do next?

Knuckles brush my cheek, tenderly pulling me from the misery of my thoughts. When I glance at Copelan, my pain is there, reflected in his gaze.

But his expression shifts—subtly, like a darkening sky. He tucks an errant curl behind my ear. I pull in a breath. Half the time, he looks like he wants to shove me off the island, but now . . . now I go utterly still because he doesn’t move his hand. He lets it linger by the shell of my ear.

It drops to my neck.

My throat bobs as his thumb grazes my jaw, my clavicle. It’s calloused, but that roughness feels . . . good.

“Copelan,” I breathe. It comes out hoarse.

His thumb lingers there for a moment before he lets it fall, like it pains him to remove it.

He purses his lips before saying, almost reluctantly, “I’ll send for a sleeping tonic.

Take it after your meal. You should rest. Laurent will check on you this evening.

” He slides off the bed and draws my curtains to a close.

“Recover with haste, Vasalie.” A little smile curls his lips as he reaches the door.

“Wait.”

He pauses, a hand on the frame. I shouldn’t keep him; I know it. But I say it anyway. “Stay. Just for a little while.”

Copelan hesitates. His eyes shift between mine, searching for something. He must find it, because he comes back, settling down next to me, careful not to shake the bed. He rests his large back against the headboard.

Tentatively, I take his hand. I examine it, twisting and turning it, running my nails along his palm. He lets me.

“Tell me more about you,” he whispers.

“What do you mean?”

“Your family. Not your father, but the good things. Your childhood. What Brisendale is really like.”

Home.

I reach back in my mind, searching for a time where I was happy.

And for the first time in so long, I let myself remember. The good, instead of the bad.

The first time I saw Emilia, not the last.

I’d been hiding in my mother’s old closet. My father was downstairs. If he had known I was missing from his wedding reception—or that I had skipped the ceremony—he hadn’t cared.

I don’t remember my mother, but there was something about the smell of her gowns back then, familiar like a lullaby I knew by heart.

So I stayed there, curled up in a heap in her closet, resolute, uncaring; I didn’t need a stepmother, and certainly not the prissy, haughty actress my father met on his latest trip, or so my lady’s maid had told me. Jealousy, I later realized.

But then a woman, no more than twenty-five, barreled into my hiding place, a vision of white velvet and fur, pearls dripping from her ears like snowdrops.

Can I hide here a while? she’d asked, and when I nodded, she breathed a sigh of relief and climbed in with me.

Then she pulled a basket of pastries from her skirt, telling me she’d liberated them from the reception.

You have to eat some of these, she’d said.

Because if you don’t, I’m going to eat them all, every last one.

And then I’ll feel awful, because I’ve already eaten two slices of cake and sugar doesn’t exactly agree with me, because .

. . look. Just look at my hands. I’m shaking like a wet dog.

We ate until we made ourselves sick, our fingers sticky and dresses splattered in powdered sugar, and it wasn’t until I heard my father shouting for his missing wife that I realized who she was.

I don’t want a new mother, I’d said.

She’d answered, I know, but how about a friend?

A smile breaks out at the memory, so wide it hurts.

I think of the days we spent by the hearth, Emilia braiding pearls into my hair and telling me her favorite fairy tales.

I think of the ice-fringed pines, the snow that never melted in winter, even under the harsh, noonday sun, and how Emilia always played in it with me, despite her deep hatred for the cold, because she knew how much I loved it.

I think of the quilt I dragged with me everywhere I went, even outside, because Emilia had made it from her collection of costumes from her time as an actress.

I think of the scarves we fashioned into fortresses until my father forbade it—but even then, we’d simply wait until he left for his post.

I think of Emilia’s smile, broad and freely given, and how when I was angry, she would pinch my cheeks until I laughed.

And I tell Copelan—all of it.