Page 57

The queen extended her arm, examining the coins in her palm impassively before tipping them all at once. Gisele flinched as they splashed and sank beneath the water. There was something disturbingly ritualistic about the action, as if the coins were an offering.

The queen turned away, and the king took her arm. They left the garden, their conversation moving to other topics.

Gisele stayed rooted to the spot until the gate closed behind them.

“Gisele?” Mal’s eyes were glowing in the dusk.

“This is my favourite rose, you know,” she told him, ignoring both the kindness and question in his eyes. She poked at the freshly clipped stems. “It must have bloomed while I was away. Look—you can see someone’s trimmed it back.”

“I’m sorry you missed it.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t. Didn’t miss it, I mean. I hadn’t thought of it at all until just now, with it right in front of my nose again.” She hadn’t missed it. She hadn’t missed her parents, either, or all the gold of Isshia. This was her garden, but it wasn’t home anymore.

She drew Mal away from the trellis, towards the tower. He was angry on her behalf, she could tell even though he was shielding his emotions.

She wasn’t angry. She was glad, she supposed, to hear that the gold was safe, and glad that her mother had, in her own way, appreciated what Gisele had done. Mainly she felt adrift.

There was something different about her tower, but it took her a long, blank moment to realise exactly what until they reached the base: a mourning flag hung over the door. Her limbs abruptly filled with lead. That had been an offering to the dead, before.

Mal, behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist, and she didn’t question the offer of comfort, only turned her face into his shoulder.

“They think I’m dead,” she said. It didn’t make it any less surreal.

A shiver rippled through the bond. “You aren’t dead,” he said fiercely. “And soon you’ll be able to tell them that.” He hesitated. “Do you want to tell them tonight?”

She shook her head. “No. Not until this is over.” I don’t want to rise from the dead as a failure.

She hadn’t said the last part aloud, but Mal responded to it anyway, so she must have been thinking of it strongly enough for that not to matter.

“You are not a failure.” His voice rung with conviction. “And if your family asks, you can truthfully tell them you successfully dragged your terrible fae sorcerer back to the Mortal Realm and made him do your bidding.”

She had to chuckle at this description. “So terrible. They’ll no doubt be appalled at the state of your neckcloth.”

“What’s wrong with my—” He had half-disengaged himself to check before he realised she was joking. “My neckcloth is entirely in order,” he told her haughtily.

She stepped in front of Mal and opened the door using her own brass key, driven by a strange urge to block his view and run ahead and hide anything incriminating.

Which would be what, exactly? You were a spinster whose main hobbies were gardening and researching fairy stories.

It wasn’t as if there was pornography on display; that was all carefully hidden.

Our Lady, what if the maids had cleaned out her things and found that rather educational series of pamphlets stashed inside her etiquette books?

I hope they’d put them to good use, in that case.

But when the door fell open, her sitting room looked untouched, as if she’d stepped out only minutes ago. Well, aside from the dust , she noticed, dragging her finger across the mantelpiece.

“Why would they think you dead? Did they think I would kill you?” Mal asked, stepping into the room behind her.

“It makes it easier, I suppose.”

“Easier for whom ?” The anger vibrating through him spilled into his voice.

She was busy reassuring herself the etiquette books hadn’t been moved from their dark corner of her bookshelf.

Why hadn’t she burned them before she’d left?

It really ought to have occurred to her that her rooms would most likely be cleaned out if she failed to return.

Boern must know she wasn’t dead, though, mustn’t he? She wanted to think so.

The incriminating books were still in place, but someone had been through her bookshelf.

There was an old encyclopedia of folklore missing, and at least two other titles, at a quick glance.

Others had been replaced out of order. It made no sense to her, unless—her heart sped up—someone had been looking for clues to where she’d gone?

But she’d told them where she was going in her note.

“I don’t think they truly believe me dead,” she said slowly, “or my things would have been gone through and redistributed by now. In any case, that mourning flag means we won’t be disturbed here.”

Mal was looking around with interest, though his fur was still bristling.

The lowest level of her tower held her sitting room, where she would have entertained guests if she ever had any.

She found herself seeing it anew through his eyes.

You could feel the aching loneliness in the tower’s bones, the imprint of a single personality built up over years—just one.

The armchair moulded to its owner’s body while its pair stood untouched.

“What’s upstairs?” he asked.

“A workroom and, above that, my bedroom. Can you check your calculations from here?”

He nodded and let Zingiber out again. Zingiber sprung onto the coffee table almost at once, deeply unimpressed with his treatment. He wasn’t a mail packet to be bundled about, he informed them. He’d also been promised fish.

With a weary sigh, Mal unpacked a jar of smoked trout from his satchel. Zingiber accepted this tribute as his due and then curled up in the middle of the worn armchair and went to sleep with injured dignity.

“Could my desk be the location now?” Gisele suggested. “The one made of the old walnut tree? It’s upstairs in my workroom.”

They went upstairs. Mal touched the desk with a thoughtful expression, the gold flecks in the wood matching his left iris.

“I think if we move this back to where the old tree stood, it will best match the locational condition.” He ran his fingers along its surface.

It was beyond strange to have him in this space, touching her things, admiring the rows of glass jars filled with herbs, reading the titles of discarded books.

Gisele contemplated the desk, a not insubstantial item of furniture. “That’s going to be difficult to explain if we’re seen. Perhaps we’d better wait for full dark, in case of more surprise evening visitors.”

He nodded. There was something intense humming through him, almost but not quite verbalised. “I hope—” he said abruptly and broke off, and she knew his choice of words hadn’t been casual.

She drew closer. “What do you hope for?”

His eyes were deep pools. “It’s unfair of me.”

“You’re being too nice in your sensibilities. Tell me.”

He took a deep breath. “I hope that, whatever happens after tomorrow, if this works, you will still want… to see me. Even if you plan to re-assume your proper place here in Isshia and never think of Faerie again. I hope that you won’t hate me, without the magic drawing us together.

I hope that we will still be… friends, at least.”

“That’s all you hope for?”

He exhaled a laugh. “Hardly, but that’s all I dare to hope aloud at present. What do you hope for, princess, beyond freedom?”

“I don’t know. I hope for much more than that, though,” she admitted.

He smiled, his eyes shining. “Always so much braver than I. I would follow you anywhere, you know, if you asked it of me. I want to make you happy more than anything.”

She put a finger against his lips. “Don’t.”

He went silent, but he could not hide the emotion in his eyes. She kissed him, desperately, full of all the things she was too afraid to say.

“Do we need to do anything else before dawn, other than move the desk?” she asked, pulling back.

The several blinks it took him to be able to comprehend language once again were gratifying.

“No,” he rasped.

“Good.” She dropped to her knees, and he inhaled sharply.

“ Gisele .”

She loved how he said her name, like sunlight after frost, meltingly precious. She also liked how he’d gone motionless and the heady feeling of control as she unbuttoned him. There was something powerful in having him like this.

I want you , she tried to tell him, with hands and mouth and lips. A madness fevered her blood, with her mouth on the thick length of him, his groans urging her on. She could feel him, physically and psychically, submitting to her onslaught.

“Gisele, let me— You. Please ,” he begged, hands in her hair.

“Not yet.” She couldn’t stop, tracing each line of gold, learning how he shuddered when she took his knurl in her mouth.

It wasn’t enough; she wanted everything he could give.

Distantly, she knew what she wanted couldn’t be found in this, but with his body bending to her rhythm, she could pretend, for a moment, that it was the same thing.

She broke away. “No, stay,” she commanded when he tried to follow her.

He fell back against the desk, panting, his red curls damp with sweat, his eyes cat-large, his member throbbing red-and-gold. He looked half-crazed. “ Gisele ,” he said, as if it were the only word he could remember.

Finding what she sought, she returned, the bottle of oil in one hand. His eyes widened, then shuddered closed as she ran one slickened hand over his bollocks. She took him once again in her mouth, one hand tracing lower. Mal made a breathless sound when she breached him, arching into the intrusion.

“I can’t— I’m going to?—”

“Do, then,” she said, twisting her fingers relentlessly.

The bond-vibration ran white hot, the pleasure shocking. She drank it down, drank him down. She felt flushed everywhere, sweat painting her spine.

When she looked up, he was watching her with the awe of someone beholding a deity. A pulse of an emotion she couldn’t recognise hummed through her, strong enough to make her heart race. Hunger, too, unslaked by his own climax.

“Can I?” he asked, and before she had even finished nodding, he had her up on the desk, her legs dangling to either side of him as he knelt before her.

She gave a startled squeak, heard his chuckle against her most intimate parts.

“I think I have earned this,” he purred and began to lick.

Her hands scrabbled for something to grip and didn’t find it, the wood too smoothly polished. He held her thighs steady, her legs spread obscenely wide as he suckled. She whimpered, shivering as he explored her.

She didn’t consciously decide to bury her hands in his hair, holding him against her, but she was far beyond deciding anything, insensible to everything but rising pleasure.

He kissed her greedily, as if he would drink her down, savouring every helpless sound she made.

It was her turn to babble as his hands caressed her skin and his tongue pushed into her.

His mouth was relentless, finding and committing every part of her to memory.

He played her body as a master musician would his favourite instrument, drawing her to glorious, inescapable crescendo.

She came with a cry, and his mouth gentled but didn’t stop, circling over too-sensitive flesh until the surge of pleasure peaked a second and then a third time, smaller waves overlapping the first.

She pushed him away, gasping, “Enough, enough.”

I cannot get enough of you .

She didn’t know if it was her thought or his, too limp with pleasure to untangle anything at all.

He carried her up to the bedroom—which she distantly noted as an impressive physical feat even through her own state of pudding—folded himself around her body, and dropped a kiss on her shoulder.

The warm, soft emotion emanating from him made her turn to face him.

His pupils were still too large to be mistaken for human.

“I adore you,” he whispered.

She frowned at him. “Mal?—”

“Don’t worry; I won’t say more. I just wanted you to know that, at least.” He cuddled into her.

She leaned into him, elated and troubled in equal measure.

She wanted to trust in the emotion she wasn’t currently letting him verbalise.

She didn’t know if she could. It wasn’t even about trusting him , really.

It was that she didn’t trust anyone, at bone, not to let her down.

She couldn’t bear for him to tell her he loved her and for that to prove inadequate, too, after everything.

Better to be measured and careful and not risk too much in a fanciful leap of faith.

Mal worried she would hate him when their bond was gone. What if the opposite happened?

Mal’s breathing evened out, but she couldn’t relax into the same. The unsettling, unfamiliar image of Mal in the crystal ball kept reappearing, of him before he’d lost his name.

People who loved me felt differently, after.