We listened to the few disconnected words that punctured the stone tunnel, and I found myself wishing that Evander and I could have been presented together. It wasn’t that together was my preferred state of being when it came to the prince; I didn’t exactly enjoy the prince’s company, or even tolerate it.
He might have saved me from suffocation, but he’d gone back right to being insufferable immediately afterward. The prince had made a point of getting under my skin. Knocking on my door in the middle of the night belting sardonic poetry would have done the job just fine, but the imbecile went as far as stealing food off my plate, and that I could not forgive.
But if he were here, at least I wouldn’t be able to hear shallow gasps that marked the panic in my breath. At least I’d have some rude comment to offend me, to take my mind off what lay ahead, rather than having to sit alone with my morbid thoughts.
I was going to die today; there seemed to be no question about that. At least not in the prince’s mind, or his mother’s. Whether the king expected me to live or not, I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t gotten the impression that he’d been lying that night, when he had sealed my Fate because he believed I might make a decent queen one day.
Unfortunately, becoming queen one day necessitated I outlive the king himself.
Which seemed improbable now that I had a moment of silence to really consider it.
Of course, he had never intended me to be queen. Why would that situation ever come up? If he hadn’t been brutally murdered in the last millennia, or however long the king had lived, why would he expect it to happen during the next sixty or so years of my mortal lifespan?
So why was he doing this? Surely he had nothing against me personally. All of his anger seemed to be directed at Evander.
I didn’t have time to answer those questions.
It occurred to me that I didn’t have time left for much of anything at all.
The king concluded his speech, and the chains on the stone door scraped and reeled, allowing the sun to slip onto the tunnel floors through the widening crack at the bottom of the door.
Once the door had lifted high enough, the sun singed my eyes, but it turned out I didn’t need them at the moment. The guards simply shoved at my back and pushed me into the arena.
How considerate of them.
The crowd went wild in a buzzing amalgamation of cheers and jeers. I couldn’t quite tell the ratio of those in favor of my survival compared to those who would rather get their money’s worth for the price of admittance by witnessing me torn to pieces by some rabid animal.
“Introducing the betrothed of the Prince of Dwellen,” the king announced amid the crowd’s screams.
“And now, my son, Evander Thornwall, the Prince of Dwellen himself.”
The crowd lost it, though again, I couldn’t tell whether the cheers outnumbered the booing. It wouldn’t exactly have surprised me if the crowd was eager for the possibility of the prince’s downfall. It wasn’t as if he was popular amongst the fae or the humans.
But he was devastatingly handsome, so there was that.
I searched for him through the blinding light and found a shadow across the arena, appearing from a doorway. It took a moment for my eyes to focus, but I knew it was him before I had the chance to make out his features.
No one else swaggered quite like that.
The prince strode across the arena and presented himself before his father.
He didn’t bother to bow.
His copper hair whipped into his face in the windy arena, his white tunic billowing, especially since the prince had not bothered to tuck it into his dark leather pants.
My heart skipped, and I told myself it was only because I had just laid eyes on the man by whose side I was surely about to die. The humor of the situation did not escape me. Me. The woman who’d never done anything with a male, was now going to die with one.
Great.
His green eyes found mine from across the arena, and he smirked.
And to think I had once entertained pity for him. Apparently, he couldn’t even take our impending deaths seriously.
As I scanned the arena, I noticed what looked to be an obstacle course that ran through the middle of the colosseum. It had only taken a matter of days for the king’s servants to assemble the monstrosity, though they must have worked on it all hours of the night. The first section looked to be a huge triangular prism made of wood. Something glinted at the top edge of the prism, but I couldn’t make it out from such a distance.
Next to the long prism was a collection of vertical logs that looked like a forest of recently guillotined trees. Then, at the opposite end, was a huge metal box that looked like a receptacle, and though I couldn’t see inside it, I was fairly certain the crowd could see into it from its open top.
I searched the crowd for my parents, though I had no idea why I thought I’d be able to find them in this colossal stadium.
And the stadium was packed.
From what I could tell, most in the audience were fae, though I could only differentiate the details of their faces within the first section of seats, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the humans had been placed in the topmost sections.
My chest ached for my parents. They’d written me every day since they received my first letter reporting that I wouldn’t be back home anytime soon. Though I hadn’t specified that the fae bargain I’d gotten myself into was the betrothal sort, the morning paper had spilled the news for me.
Father had been livid, of course. At least, that was the impression I’d gotten from the way he’d stopped referring to Evander as the prince, and had renamed him The Cad.
But I’d take my father’s anger over my mother’s sorrow any day. If it hadn’t been clear by her letters that she missed me terribly, the tear stains that smeared her perfect script would have given it away.
I could only imagine how they’d felt when they’d read I was to participate in the Trials.
Part of me hoped my parents hadn’t come. If I was doomed to die, as Evander had so kindly informed me at breakfast yesterday, I didn’t want my parents to witness it. But it was a vain hope. There was no way my parents weren’t somewhere in that stadium, hands clasped tightly together, praying to the Fates to spare my life.
If I had lost the will to live, the will to try, the knowledge that they were watching would have been enough to stoke a fire in me.
But I hadn’t lost the will to live, and their presence would simply fan an already-roaring flame.
The king’s voice boomed from his box that loomed over the section of the course with the lengthy prism. “Now, for the prince to escort his betrothed to their first trial.”
