Really, it was my responsibility as Ellie’s friend to put a stop to it. If memory served me correctly, Kiran, the King of Naenden, had crushed the windpipe of Fin’s late wife before reducing her to a pile of ash.
The story that had made its way north to Dwellen was that Prince Fin’s bride, Ophelia, had plotted against him, attempting to seduce Kiran into both her bed and her schemes to assassinate the prince.
That was why he’d killed her. Or so he said.
But who was I to assume he’d told the truth, when he very well could possess an innate jealousy over his brother’s lovers?
I chose to forget my species’ inherent inability to lie. It was more convenient that way.
Just by allowing this to continue, by allowing Prince Fin to spin Ellie around like she was a marionette, I was practically complicit in Ellie’s untimely demise. Her fiery murder.
What kind of friend would I be if I stood aside and did nothing?
“Your betrothed looks like she’s having all the fun, doesn’t she?” an amused voice asked.
I turned, then practically jumped, gobbling up my shock too late.
My surprise quickly warped into mortification.
The Queen of Naenden stood before me, her frame tiny and delicate and not at all matching her face. The scars that cut across her cheeks. The patches of mismatched skin. And most shocking of all, the pinkish empty eye socket that should have mirrored a pretty hazel eye.
“Your Majesty,” I said, clearing my throat. “I apologize. I didn’t see you standing there.”
“You don’t allow others to sneak up on you often,” she said, and I wondered whether that was a question.
I shook my head. “No. No, not usually. But it’s been a long night, and I’ve been…distracted.”
“By your betrothed dancing the night away with my brother-in-law.”
My smile flattened, as hard as I tried to tug it upward on the edges. I had to remind myself that Queen Asha of Naenden didn’t grow up in a royal court. If a member of the nobility used that sort of direct language, it was almost always with the intention of being disarming. Coming from a human raised in an impoverished neighborhood in Meranthi?
The queen was probably just blunt.
“Our marriage is arranged,” I said. “There is little room for jealousy. That would require a sense of possession, and as I don’t claim to own her heart, and I don’t believe in owning her person, I have little claim to the emotion.”
My jaw almost dropped, and I tried to remember the words just as they’d come out of my mouth, because it was probably the most eloquent thing I’d ever said.
“Mmmm...” she said, her crooked smile wry. “A pretty male with pretty words.”
I wasn’t sure that was a compliment.
I was also fairly certain this was the point at which it became rude if I didn’t ask the Queen of Naenden out onto the dance floor. Which I would have been inclined to do, had her husband not been lurking in the corner.
Everyone in this room was well aware of his reaction to his first wife cheating on him.
It would make history books. It had made history books.
And so had the tiny human standing before me, waiting to be asked to dance.
One waltz was far from cheating, sure, but the King of Naenden seemed like the type to murder anyone who laid a hand on his wife—innocent or not.
I wondered if she was into that.
Even now the King of Naenden sulked in the corner, quieter and less gregarious than his twin by manifold. Well, sulking probably wasn’t the right word. It was more like he was reserving himself, his shoulders tight, his spine rigid, his fire-wick eyes scanning the room as he brought his chalice to his mouth more times than I imagined he actually sipped it. That was something I’d noticed about people who kept to themselves. They were always sipping something, holding something in their hands.
It was almost as if the King of Naenden—
“Kiran doesn’t enjoy crowds. I made him promise me the last dance, though he’d rather be in the gardens,” said the Queen of Naenden, breaking me from my thoughts. When I turned my attention back to her, a girlish smile curved at her lips, as if she had referenced an inside joke I wasn’t a part of.
The smile softened her harsh features, and a barb of guilt panged at my stomach for not noticing it before—the person behind the scars.
This woman, with all her rough edges, her mismatched features, had calmed the fiery torrent and saved a nation’s worth of women with her words alone, and probably a little help from the Old Magic that was rumored to possess her.
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected from the human Queen of Naenden. It wasn’t this.
“If you don’t ask me to dance soon, others will think you find me ugly.”
I blinked.
She blinked back.
“You’re not exactly the source of my hesitation,” I said, shifting my gaze to the hulking monstrosity of a male in the corner. “I’d rather not end up burned to cinders.”
She shrugged. “Yet you risk inciting his wrath should you insult my appearance. You truly are between a boulder and a vat of quicksand, aren’t you?”
I eyed her with suspicion. “Are you sure my dearly betrothed didn’t put you up to this?”
She scanned the room. “Is she the type? If so, perhaps I should leave you be and go dance with her. It seems as if she’s the more fun of the two of you.”
