Page 62

PRINCES OF ISSHIA

T hey were woken by a storm of agitated ornaments skittering loudly along the mantelpiece.

“Skymallow,” Mal complained, expressing much Gisele’s own sentiment and refusing to budge from where he lay curled tightly around her. The tempo of ornamental clattering increased.

“I don’t think it’s going to stop until we get up.” Gisele reluctantly wriggled out of Mal’s grip and sat up. Half the ornaments settled; the other half kept dancing. “Mal. I think you need to get up also,” she said, a laugh in her voice.

“I’m awake; I’m awake.” He grumbled his way to sitting, glaring at his house, and the noise finally ceased. “Now why?—”

“Gisele!” Someone was shouting her name, distant but getting closer. A strange jerk of recognition went through her. She knew that voice. Those voices , plural, she realised as the shouting grew closer.

“Where is she?” she heard Boern demand in a ringing tone of command. She knew how he looked in that mood, holding himself straight and imperious.

“Probably just woken up, with all the noise you’re making.” Apfela didn’t sound at all intimidated.

“If you have harmed her…” Boern’s voice dropped to a low threat.

“Oh, stop waving that stick about, idiot boy. You’re upsetting the house.”

“Upsetting the house ?! Show me where she is or I’ll upset a great deal more than that.”

“I’m not the bloody butler to be ordered about,” Apfela said acidly. “Convince the house to show your own fine selves if you wish.”

“What my brother means to say is that we would like very much to know that our sister is safe,” her youngest brother Seyfert said tightly.

“That door over there opened by itself! That way!”

The voices were coming closer.

Gisele had been frozen in blank astonishment, but the impending reality of the situation abruptly launched her out of bed.

“Put some clothes on!” she hissed at Mal, who was blinking in bemusement and also entirely naked.

She spun around, nearly tripping in her haste, and found her dressing gown, tying the knot just as a sharp knock sounded on the bedroom door.

“Gisele? Are you in there?” Boern again. Under other circumstances, she might have been touched by the concern in his voice.

The door opened.

Boern’s worried face sagged in relief, and before Gisele knew quite what was happening, she was being firmly embraced and also…

apologised to? The entire situation was so startling that she had difficulty processing what her brother was saying.

Maybe he simply wasn’t being terribly coherent.

She was also acutely aware of Mal in her bed.

She felt the moment Boern became aware of that fact also. He stiffened and stepped back, both flushing and glaring at Mal. A tiny flinch suggested Boern had observed the nipple piercing.

“And who, sir, are you?” he demanded, at his most imperious.

Mal, of course, was entirely unbothered by the scrutiny. He cocked his head, leaning back against the headboard. “I might ask you the same, seeing as you are in my house without an invitation.”

Seyfert, still in the doorway, put his hand over his mouth, stifling a cough that sounded suspiciously like a laugh.

Gisele firmly pushed at Boern’s chest until he stepped backwards. “This is Mal. For goodness’ sake, go and wait downstairs. I’ll be down in a minute.”

Boern had begun to puff up like a bullfrog with outraged impropriety. “You shouldn’t?—”

“Seems a bit late for the scandalised brother act, Bear,” Seyfert said. “Come on. We’ll let you get dressed.” He put a hand on Boern’s elbow and steered him away, but his sharp eyes narrowed briefly on Mal, conveying that he wasn’t nearly as light-hearted about this development as he’d sounded.

The door closed behind them. Gisele stared at it blankly until she was sure they were out of earshot and then collapsed into a fit of giggles.

Mal got out of the bed, picked her up, and matter-of-factly pulled her into his lap, stroking her hair as the laughter threatened to turn watery.

She cry-laughed into his shoulder because her family was here—or at least some of it—and for a moment Boern had embraced her as if she was the most important thing in the world, and she didn’t know what it meant except that she was glad to see him and it also hurt.

“Oh, my darling,” Mal was murmuring to her, which made her hiccup. He bore it with equanimity. “So those are your brothers, I take it?” he asked after she’d gotten her wayward emotions back under a semblance of control.

She gave a weak laugh. “Yes. I don’t know what they’re doing here. How did they even get here?”

“Shall we go down and ask them? Skymallow has shepherded them into the sitting room.” His gaze went distant, but he was smiling when he returned. “Nissa appears to be… either entertaining or threatening them? I’m unclear. I’m also perfectly prepared to throw them out, if you wish.”

Gisele shook her head. “No. I’d better get dressed.

” She began to wriggle free of his embrace, pausing when she noticed the new golden constellation adorning his skin, swirling up his rib cage.

He saw her looking and stretched his arm above his head to better show it.

“Zingiber,” she murmured, reaching to touch it.

“You brought him back to life.” She hadn’t grasped the full wonder of that, the fact that he could do things like that now.

He captured her hand and kissed her fingertips. “I didn’t thank you for what you did yesterday, saving me again.” He hesitated. “And for naming me when I did not know myself.”

She couldn’t read the expression in his mismatched eyes. “Do you mind it very much? If I’d known you were going to be stuck with whatever nickname I came up with, I could have been calling you Dominic Storm this entire time.”

He rose up on his knees and kissed her, fierce and without warning. “No,” he said, pulling back. “I am your Malediction, and I would have it no other way.” There was an unmistakable emphasis to the way he said it.

“Is it gone, the bond between us? It feels different now, but your eyes were both gold, briefly, before I renamed you. Now they’re as they were before.”

He canted his head, and the echo of old books and the tang of hot metal swirled in the air, the colour of his eyes becoming more vivid. “On my name, I release you from any debt remaining between us, from any bargain that binds.”

Nothing whatsoever happened.

“Was something supposed to change?” Gisele asked after a beat.

He shook his head. “Just making sure.” But there was something in his eyes.

“I did reconnect us in some way,” she guessed.

He sighed. “It’s not what you’re thinking. It’s not a binding.”

“I’m thinking that true names are central to fae magic and that you adopting my name for you has created its own connection between us.”

His lips curved. “All right, it is what you’re thinking, then.

” Again, there was an expression she couldn’t read in his eyes, and she could have sworn he was about to say something else before changing his mind.

“Your brothers will be wondering what has become of you,” he said instead. “Do you want me with you?”

She wanted to press him further, but he was right. Besides, she reflected ruefully, she was already facing down one complicated emotional conversation this morning; she could put off the one she and Mal needed to have for a little while longer.