My heart sank. Surely the king wouldn’t be so foolish as to force his heir to marry someone unfit for the Crown. Not that I thought I’d do a worse job at being a princess or a queen than whoever this woman was who couldn’t even handle holding onto the shoes she had stolen. But still. I hadn’t exactly been trained in royal affairs. “But you have to try. Surely there’s some way to convince him.”
“Why do you think I’m here? Because I felt like hearing your unfounded assumptions about what an undesirable bedmate I am? No, Miss Payne. You’ll be the one who convinces him.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Because he’ll like you.”
“More than his own son?”
The prince swallowed. “Shouldn’t be that difficult. The bar is set abysmally low.”
Something plucked at my heart at that statement. As much as I found the prince to be a vile pig and his suitors blinded to his stench by his good looks, something about the idea that a male, even a fae male, could feel so despised by his own father twisted at my insides. My father and I argued from time to time, sure. But not once in my life could I remember doubting his love for me. Deep down I knew that, were I to go sell myself to the local brothel, he’d liquidate his entire business just to get me back.
For the prince to think that his father would prefer me, a human stranger, to him, the only son he had left… I couldn’t fathom it.
“What would you have me do?” I asked.
“We’re to dine with my parents this evening. I’m to introduce you. I wish you to woo my father.” He must have seen the way my nose crinkled in disgust, because he laughed. “Oh, not like that. Don’t worry, my dearly betrothed. My father might despise his own son, but he adores my mother and has never been one to allow his eyes to wander. I simply ask that you charm him with your…erm…determined personality. Then, when dinner concludes, ask him to free you of your miserable fate.”
“And you think that will work?” I tried not to sound skeptical and failed miserably.
“Of course it will work. You’ll find conversation between the two of you easy. All you have to do is commiserate about how you’ve been unfairly matched with an idiot who is unfit to rule the kingdom, and you’ll be instant best friends, I assure you. By the time dinner is over, he’ll see that you’re much too clever of a woman to be stuck with someone as simple-minded as his son. He’ll feel pity for you, since he’s also stuck with me, in his own way. By dessert, you’ll be back with your parents doing…whatever it is that delights your mortal heart, I assure you.”
I chewed my lip. “You’re sure it will work?”
“I know my father. It’ll work. Just play up the glassblowing entrepreneur thing. He’ll like that. He thinks I’m entitled,” he said, rising from the bed and strolling to the door. When he turned around to face me, I tried to catch a glimmer of sadness in his eyes, but all I could find was that self-possessed mask of a smirk. “I’d tell you to wear something pretty tonight, but I figure that would just offend you.”
CHAPTER 9
ELLIE
“When Evander was sulking about his accidental betrothed, he forgot to mention you were a goddess.”
Blaise, my other lady’s maid, the one with whom Imogen had been agitated for skirting her duties, leaned against my bedpost.
She and Imogen had arrived at my quarters to help me ready myself for dinner, but the latter had left to retrieve my gown, which the tailor had only just finished due to the late notice.
Blaise lingered behind, claiming she would start on my paint, though she hadn’t yet made a move for the ornate wooden palette that rested top of the white oak vanity.
After a heavy internal debate regarding whether to inquire about Blaise’s religious beliefs—she’d mentioned a goddess rather than the Fates—or about her casual nature with Evander, I settled on the latter. “You call him by his given name?”
Blaise shrugged, a common mannerism though it came so naturally to her, she made it look as if she’d invented it. “Not usually. Most of the time I call him Andy, but I thought I’d be considerate and not leave you wondering who I was talking about.”
“Ah.” Andy. How endearing.
I fought the urge to roll my eyes and determined that I’d probably need to do my own paint if I didn’t want to end up looking like a circus clown tonight.
My guess was that Andy rarely befriended his female servants out of a good-natured desire to understand the viewpoints of the working class, and as the prince’s betrothed, I wasn’t keen on letting one of his bedmates near my eyes with something long and pokey.
I reached for the palette and brush, but Blaise abandoned her sedentary station beside my bedpost and waved me away from the paint.
“I can do it myself. I’ve been doing it myself my entire life,” I protested.
Blaise shrugged, taking the brush and opening the palette anyway. “Usually I’d take you up on the offer to do my work for me, but this is the only part of this promotion I’ve actually been looking forward to.”
When she lifted the lid, I couldn’t help but note that the palette differed from any I’d bought in town. Where most of the paints I’d purchased included a variety of shades that needed to be hand mixed to match one’s skin tone, this palette contained only one shade—a sickly gray that I’d only ever seen on faeries and light-skinned humans…who happened to be dead.
She really was intending to ruin my paint.
Blaise smirked, reading my expression. “Relax. I thought it looked disgusting the first time I saw it, too. But it’s some sort of special faerie paint.” I must have not looked like I believed her, because she dipped the brush in the paint and swiped it across her own cheek. The paint instantly melded with Blaise’s pale white skin, cloaking any blemishes and highlighting the cool undertones so that her face retained a delicate shimmer. “See?”
“You’d think that would have found its way into the human markets by now,” I said, nodding toward the paint.
Blaise made an exaggerated swoop of her neck. “Yes, but can you imagine the lines? Besides, I think they have to boil human kidneys to make it, so I can see how that might impact sales.”
I jerked back from the brush she was bringing to my forehead, but Blaise only laughed. “Kidding.”
She applied the paint all over, but before I could catch a glance of myself in the mirror to be certain it didn’t look as though I was wearing a nighttime clay mask, she swiveled my chair to face away from the mirror.
“It’s more fun if you wait until the end. More dramatic that way,” she explained with a flourish of her hands.
I wiggled uncomfortably in my chair, but she went back to work, applying paint from a different palette to my eyelids, biting her protruding tongue as she concentrated. “This part is more fun,” she explained, nodding toward the eyelid paint. “I guess even faerie magic hasn’t figured out how to experiment with this many hues yet. I hope they don’t figure it out.”
I couldn’t help the smile that tugged at my lips. While my first impression of Blaise was that she was a jealous lover of the prince’s, she seemed earnest, and while she certainly wasn’t demure and sweet like Imogen, I could appreciate her frankness. That, and the way she spoke about the paint like it was art. It reminded me of my glass, and it had my hands aching for something to do, something to create.
“How long have you been a lady’s maid?” I asked, not sure what topics to broach. My family had never employed any servants. That was more of an “old money” thing in Dwellen, but I was pretty sure decorum stated they weren’t supposed to talk much about themselves.
Something gave me the impression that Blaise didn’t give a frog’s butt about decorum.
