Page 28 of Heart of Fire (Royal Ice Dragons #3)

HANNA

The next day stretched before me with nothing to do. It was an unexpectedly welcome change. It felt like I had always been running, always on a mission, since Kaelan came back into my life.

It was a strange and beautiful feeling to have nowhere to be.

When I woke up in the morning, Dare was still sleeping. I studied his face, with its beautiful sharp angles and his lush lips parted slightly.

I liked to watch my men in their sleep…when they weren’t guarded; I understood why they had walled themselves off against the pain their lives had carried, but it still hurt to be constantly slamming myself against those walls.

I had told him how sure I was that Kaelan would welcome him, but there was a part of me that wasn’t sure.

We both knew Kaelan was a jealous bastard. But he’d welcomed Thorne.

A small voice nagged me, reminding me that Kaelan had also beaten Thorne to the verge of death before he discovered his gracious side. Kaelan had owed Thorne. And Thorne had made it obvious that he wanted nothing in this world but me.

I didn’t know if Dare was capable of wanting anyone in the same way Thorne did, but I knew that he wasn’t capable of admitting it.

I chewed my lower lip. I had questions about all of them, and my question about Kaelan was if I really did have the control over him that I’d claimed.

After all, Kaelan and I had precious little time that we had spent together when we weren’t playing some deadly game.

Dare’s eyes opened slowly. His hair was rakishly messy around the hard planes of his face. “I can feel you thinking.”

“My brain is not that rusty with disuse that it should have woken you,” I teased him.

“You’re worrying.”

I didn’t want to answer him, so I just leaned over and kissed him. “There’s nothing to worry about. Not once we’re on the Isle.”

He raised his brows but didn’t argue with me.

“What should we do today?” I asked, and suddenly I realized that I wasn’t really sure what to do with Dare.

If we weren’t fucking…what did we have to talk about? I wanted to just have an easy conversation, but both of us were ringed in by swords. I didn’t want to remind him that he’d had to choose me over his home, or brush up against all the trauma of losing his parents. I didn’t want to touch all the trauma I had around my borrowed title as Princess.

There was only one thing I could think of to do with Dare, and he seemed to be thinking of the same thing, because as he kept kissing me back, his hand slid up my thigh, hitching up my night dress beat by beat.

We ordered breakfast in. It was just as delicious as dinner, and we managed to make it just as sweetly depraved.

When we made it up onto the sunny deck, so late in the morning it was almost lunchtime, I went to find Ginelle. I tried to get her to talk to me, but she was so shy and quiet.

I invited her to lunch with Dare. The three of us ate after the crew, and I tried not to make eye contact with any of the staff. This was a hired ship. I didn’t need to be reminded so much of what I had seen when Kaelan’s ship went down. But being on the sea haunted me.

It was a little easier to make meaningless small talk with Ginelle there, but I could tell Dare wanted to talk to me. Ginelle seemed to open up a bit, at just the wrong time, and began trying to bond with me over tales of past shopping trips as Dare stared at us both with abject boredom written across his face. I kicked him under the table. He retaliated by gripping my thigh to hold my leg still—too close, too high, too heated. I kicked him again, feeling an unwelcome throb of longing anyway.

As soon as Ginelle excused herself, Dare grabbed my arm and steered me onto the deck. Not, disappointingly, into our bedroom.

“You should contact your family and tell them that we’re coming.”

“We should see just how good my brothers-in-law are at their job,” I disagreed.

Dare crossed his arms. “Are you being recreationally ridiculous, or is there a reason for this reluctance?”

“We don’t need them in order to get Ginelle medical attention. Or to work with the necromancer.”

“Yes, but that’s hardly the only reason not to have the crown on our side.” He raised his brows. “Or for you to see your family.”

I chewed my lower lip. I knew how uncomfortable Kaelan had felt in moments seeing how close-knit my family was. They had given him a strange sense of loss and jealousy. And Dare had every reason to feel that too. “You can’t step back in time and unlock a door. We can always go to my sister and say, just wanted to drop in for a visit. But if they know we’re there, she’ll act like she has every right to make decisions about what we’re doing?—”

“As the queen? How rude of her.”

“But she’s not just the queen. She’s my sister. You have no idea how overbearing she is, Dare. How overbearing they all are.”

He cocked his head at me. “You don’t like following anyone’s orders.”

I rolled my eyes. “Neither do you.”

“No, but I think you forget that I have lived my entire life following royal orders anyway. It makes little sense to have an ally and to not avail myself of their help.”

“Can you please trust me?”

Dare frowned down at me. The wind tossed his hair everywhere, and it made me want to reach up and touch him, to smooth it down and to run my thumb over the hard plane of that cheekbone. But I didn’t feel like I could when he was looking at me that way.

“It’s not a matter of trust. Don’t make everything into a matter of trust, Hanna.”

“This is my sister,” I reminded him. “This is my kingdom.”

“Is it?” he asked me with arched eyebrows.

I shook my head, feeling as if I were disloyal if I admitted the Isle wasn’t home anymore.

My home was with these men, terrible though they might be.

“Fine.”

“Trust me. It’s better if you don’t meet my brothers-in-law.”

His brows arched. “You think that they won’t like me?”

“I think they won’t like the fact that I married you without them ever meeting you.” I could picture Honor’s reaction too.

“We can undo it,” he said.

I stared at him. He had made that entire impassioned speech, he had gotten down on his knees and begged me for forgiveness. He had pleaded with me to marry him. His urgency, his desperation to protect me, his love had all felt so real in that moment.

Since then, our love had seemed so glittering, so solid and tangible, that it seemed unreal we’d ever spent a moment denying its existence.

But Dare and I both knew how to act to get what we wanted. He’d been afraid for our lives, for what it would cost the village if we weren’t married.

Maybe it had been a trick.

Or maybe not a trick—because that was a cruel way to see Dare—but maybe he would’ve said anything in that moment.

It felt as if the ground had just heaved under my feet, even though I kept the same expression on my face.

“We could,” I said, my voice perfectly neutral. The voice of a well-trained spy, giving him no emotion to work with. No indication which way I felt.

He was watching me closely. He’d always seen through me, and I smiled up at him, wondering what he was seeing now.

What did he really want?

If I told him that I wanted him, would it put too much pressure on our fledgling relationship? Did he feel trapped with me? My words the night before, promising to keep him trapped, floated back to me and made me wince.

Really…it was too early for us to be married. We didn’t even confess that we loved each other yet. Maybe we were dancing the right steps for us, but they were all out of order. Sooner or later, one of us would get stepped on.

My hair was blowing into my face. I tucked the strands back behind my ear. The sun felt good on my face, despite the cold wind coming off the ocean. I couldn’t wait to be back in the sunshine and warmth of the Isle.

“I can’t wait to be home,” I told him.

He smiled in a way I couldn’t read and nodded his head.

I didn’t know what to make of him sometimes, and suddenly, I just wanted to be alone. To try to think my own thoughts without his maddening face that seemed to take up all the space in my mind, until I couldn’t think of anything else. Until I couldn’t even think of whether our marriage was just a trick, a game, or not…

And if I wanted it to be real.

If we severed the bonds of magic between us, the ones we’d had to put in place so quickly, it wasn’t as if we were stuck that way forever. If it made sense in the future, someday, if it turned out we did love each other…we could always marry.

So, why did my stomach bottom out at the thought of unwinding my vows from him?

* * *

The next day, we knew we’d arrive back at the Isle in the early afternoon.

I couldn’t stand to eat the midday meal, pushing my food around my plate while Ginelle told me a seemingly endless story about purchasing new gowns. It seemed like yet another story she’d rehearsed, but she still blew all her lines, smiling apologetically at breaks before she began to ramble on again. I felt a painful, empathetic squeeze that made me laugh at all her jokes anyway.

But nothing could have held me at that table once the call came. “Land in sight!”

There was no denying the way my heart leapt when the green, lush forests of the Isle came into view above the shimmering blue of the ocean. I leaned against the railing and feasted my eyes on all the different shades of green. It was so beautiful, so different from the Ice Kingdom.

And as I watched the shoreline, I could feel Dare watch me. He leaned on the railing, not close enough for our elbows to brush, and yet somehow commanding so much of my attention even when I never once looked his way.

“We should get off at the first port,” I said. “The closer we get to Honor…the less opportunity we’ll have for any peace and quiet. This should give us a day or two before my brothers-in-law track me down to scold me.”

Dare didn’t argue with me. “All right.”

“I know a necromancer near the port anyway,” I said. “And the healers in Terren are very good.”

“Fine,” Dare agreed.

He was altogether too agreeable with everything I said. It didn’t feel natural.

We got off first, and Dare left Ginelle and me—not without a sense of reluctance I could feel, as if I’d be kidnapped off the street or murdered as soon as he took his eyes off me. But I pushed the feeling away to order a horse and cart.

The driver fidgeted impatiently as the sailors wrestled our heavy trunks down the gangway. Dare folded his arms over his chest, keeping a watchful eye on the corpses.

“That was my first uneventful sea voyage,” I told Ginelle, driven by some distaste for silence, apparently, because I already knew talking to her wasn’t likely to be fruitful.

“Sea voyages are usually very dull,” she said.

“A dull sea voyage is a gift from the gods,” I joked.

“Do you think the gods give you gifts?” she asked off-handedly.

The question prickled. I’d had so many conversations about the gods lately, and all of them seemed to imply the gods would hate me. “They gave me the ability to shift. That was a gift. So I must not be out of favor.”

She smiled blandly, emptily, just like usual.

As the first trunk was heaved onto the cart, which groaned in response, the horse cast an offended look over its shoulder at the weight on the wagon. It would be a lot with the three of us and the corpses and the trunks.

Dare rolled his eyes for the sake of the driver. “I told her she didn’t need to pack everything she owned, but she never listens to me.”

As they wrestled with the second trunk—a monstrous thing adorned with brass fittings—one strap burst. The sailor who was heaving it up let out a curse as the trunk dropped, narrowly missing his toes. The trunk teetered on the edge of the cart.

I leapt forward, but before I could try to push it back onto the cart, it hit the ground with a sickening crack.

The trunk’s lid popped open, and an arm rolled out against the cobblestones.

The sailors looked from the corpse to us, in shock.

“A stowaway!” I exclaimed. “What did he do with my dresses?”

Dare gripped Ginelle’s elbow and steered her toward the carriage. She stumbled, still looking over her shoulder at the corpse, but he apparently didn’t need her assistance. He handed her up into the cart, quite forcibly. She was still gawking at the body as he pushed her inside.

I leapt up onto the driver’s space at the front of the carriage. He hadn’t seen the body yet, and he gave me a confused look. “Miss, ladies usually ride in the back?—”

“I just realized we’re in a rush,” I told him, leaning back with one hand braced on the top of the cart.

I kicked him square in the chest. He fell to the ground, but I raised my magic to buffer his fall.

Then I had the reins in my hand, and as Dare leapt into the carriage, we were off and racing.

“That was a good attempt about the stowaway,” he called to me, leaning out. “You realized it was all unnecessary, right? As is all of this?”

“I know,” I said, as sailors took up chase after us.

I snapped the reins, urging the horse into a gallop. The cobblestones blurred beneath us as shouts of alarm rose in our wake.

I dared a glance back and saw one of the sailors frantically telling his story to a perplexed-looking guard. For fuck’s sake. You can’t even smuggle one little corpse from the Ice Kingdom.

“You could have just said who you are, and people would have been tripping over themselves to help you pack up a corpse.” He sounded very mild-mannered for someone who was hanging out the window of the carriage as guards were chasing us down in pursuit.

“Yes, that occurs to me now, but you started it. I thought we were running.”

“Force of habit! I can’t help acting like a criminal when I’m startled.”

“Well, neither can I,” I said, urging the horse around a sharp left turn. The carriage went up on its wheels, and Dare vanished from view with a muffled curse and a thump, only to reappear moments later, his expression indignant.

“Did you do that on purpose?” he accused.

“How petty do you think I am?”

I wasn’t sure how he managed to raise his eyebrows with the speeds we were going. “Do you really want me to answer that, love?”

It must have taken too long for the guard to try to find compatriots to give chase, and the sailors certainly weren’t committed enough for a huge amount of exertion—I usually felt the same—because soon, the chaos faded behind us. Once we’d traveled down several wide city streets, I clucked to the horse and relaxed the reins, letting him fall back into an easy pace. The horse still glared at me over his shoulder, reminding me that I was lucky he hadn’t bashed the cart into the stone wall of a building to get away from me.

For the first time, I could focus on the familiar city around me. We were on a street lined with stores, with a wide strip of greenery bigger than the ship between one side and the other. In the grass, children ran and shouted at each other. I smiled. It was good to be home.

“We’ll drop you off at the healers, and we’ll visit the necromancer,” I told Ginelle, who was white-faced and shaking.

“You can’t just leave me! I’m in a completely foreign land, extremely ill, and now, a wanted criminal.”

“I doubt any of them remembered your face,” I told her.

Dare gave me a look that said I was not as helpful as I thought I was.

I sighed. I hated when my impulsive decisions had inconvenient consequences, which unfortunately is the nature of impulsive decisions.

“Fine, we’ll come with you to the healer, get a course of treatment set up, and then you can come with us to the necromancer.”

“Shouldn’t we move on to an entirely new city?” Ginelle asked. “There have to be other healers, other necromancers?—”

“She’ll just end up in trouble there,” Dare said airily. “We may as well stay.”

“I was overexcited,” I defended myself.

“And now we’re criminals. Ten minutes after stepping foot on shore.” He didn’t sound particularly distressed.

We ended up waiting with Ginelle for her treatment. She seemed especially pathetic and shaken now, sitting in the healer’s expansive sandstone lobby, and I found myself struck by the need to entertain her.

I tried to make small talk with her. Dare looked at me, cocking an eyebrow, judging me for something. I didn’t know what, but I still stuck my tongue out at him.

“What are you doing?” he whispered to me when she was called back to see the healer.

“I feel sorry for her,” I mouthed back.

She stopped at the doorway, and her gaze sought mine. “Would you come with me?”

“Sure,” I said, feeling Dare’s judgment at my back as I leapt up and went off with her. But she was so dull and annoying that I felt bad about how I reacted to her.

The healing rooms here were cozy, with a bed and a fireplace and all the potions, poultices, and equipment tucked away in wooden cabinets; windows stood open to the street outside and the warm, fragrant breeze.

“So you think you have the wasting illness,” the healer, a tall woman with kind brown eyes, said. “Tell me about your symptoms.”

“I’m…feverish, often,” she said. “Weak. Sometimes I faint.”

“Those are the common symptoms,” the healer said.

“I’m afraid I’m going to die.” Ginelle’s eyes filled with tears suddenly, and I felt a lurch of sadness and unexpected affection. “I know some people die…”

“You’re young and in good health, and we do have a treatment,” the healer said.

“That doesn’t always work, does it?” Ginelle asked.

The healer inclined her head. “Sometimes it seems as if life is fading away for the sick even though there’s no underlying cause we can determine. There’s nothing in the blood, nothing that should make someone die. We’ve become convinced that the wasting illness is actually a weapon.”

Ginelle’s head jerked up, and so did mine. The healer had our full attention now.

“The illness is magical in its creation, and the cure is magical as well.” The healer’s eyes crinkled as she faced Ginelle. “You will be better in a week, my friend.”

“Good,” Ginelle said, but she looked troubled, instead of relieved as I would’ve expected.

I sat with her during the first part of her treatment, while they were trying to draw a magical poison out of her body. The healer frowned at her results.

“What is it?” I asked, sensing something wrong.

“It’s not working yet,” the healer admitted softly, with a glance at Ginelle. “But that doesn’t mean that it won’t in time.”

She seemed weaker than ever as the two of us walked slowly back into the lobby. Dare rose when he saw us, and together, the three of us made our way back onto the street outside. It was a sidestreet, so it was narrow and twisted; people streamed by, and we made our way into the crowd as if we were flowing down a river.

Above us, wooden signs swayed in the breeze, advertising the businesses lining the street in an unlikely mix: The Drunken Scholar Pub , The Forbidden Bookstore , The Enchanted Silk Shop .

“We’ll have to visit the necromancer late tonight,” I said. “For now, we should get some dinner and a place to stay.”

Dare nodded. Then, without warning, he spun me around and pulled me close. One strong arm wrapped around my waist, pressing me against the solid warmth of his chest. His other hand cupped my face, tilting it upward.

For a moment, time seemed to stand still. His eyes, usually sharp and calculating, were soft now. Then his mouth was against mine.

His lips were surprisingly soft, a stark contrast to the rough stubble that grazed my skin. My hands clutched at his shirt, pulling him closer. He deepened the kiss, licking into my mouth, each stroke urgent.

The world around us faded away, and for just a moment, I forgot about the danger, the corpses, everything but the feel of Dare’s mouth on mine.

Just as suddenly as it began, it was over. Dare pulled back, leaving me breathless and more than a little dazed.

It took me a second to register the rustling sound above us, and another moment to realize what had just happened.

Dare crumpled a piece of paper in his fist. It was one of the many magical notice posters that lined the street, their images changing rapidly to display various announcements and wanted posters.

My heart sank as I took in the contents of the flyer Dare had torn down. Three faces stared out at us. On the left was my would-be assassin, his features even more distorted in death than they had been in life. His eyes, blank and lifeless, bored into me accusingly.

Next to him were crude renderings of Dare and myself. I frowned, studying my own image. They’d drawn my nose too sharply, my eyes too close together. I hadn’t left that long ago—had I been forgotten in my own kingdom?

Dare handed me the magical flyer with a wry smile. “Well, you are right about one thing. No one thought of Ginelle.”

“No one ever does,” Ginelle said, a little glumly.