On the way out, we meet the vizier by the door.
“Wait,” I tell Kiran, then crane my neck toward the vizier. “If the courier fell sick, how did the ordinance finally get to us?”
The vizier’s eyes sparkle. “Ah. I believe you have a servant girl to thank for that.”
Kiran and I exchange a confused glance.
“Yes, apparently the girl had been waiting on return correspondence from Prince Phineas for weeks. When she realized the courier with which she had entrusted her letters had never left Othian, she alerted Queen Elynore immediately.” The vizier chuckles. “Should you wish to send her a gift of gratitude, I believe her name is Imogen.”
I gasp, flinging my palm to my mouth as I search for Fin who…isn’t here.
“Ah, if you’re looking for Prince Phineas,” says the vizier, “I’ll have you know that when I came to retrieve him and the princess—ahem, Her Majesty—from your friend Bezzie’s, the prince immediately sprinted off to find your sister. Who is perfectly unharmed, by the way.”
Kiran grunts something about “needing to have a talk with that boy.”
I simply grin.
As it turns out, there were more consequences to using Kiran’s immortality to bring me back than just stripping him of his.
“I want to say something, but I’m afraid it’s probably the most selfish thing anyone has ever said,” Kiran says. He strokes my face as I sit in his lap on the balcony in our room. Our new room.
Kiran’s having the old one demolished.
I like that plan.
Not that I’ll be venturing over to that side of the palace for a good long while.
I chuckle. “You’ve already given up your immortality for me. I think you get a temporary pass on saying selfish things.”
Kiran’s brow knits as he stares at my face, tracing my cheek with his thumb. “I’m glad these are back.”
My heart stills as he traces the familiar pattern of scars that line the left side of my face.
As it turns out, Az’s healer had been a fraud, and my scars weren’t healed so much as glamoured, though the healer had explained it away by claiming he could bring back my eye, just not my vision.
The glamour had clung to my body in death but had dissipated once the Old Magic helped Kiran leech his immortality into me.
I haven’t spoken to the Old Magic, of course. He disappeared after helping Kiran heal me. And apparently left an extensive list of verbal instructions about the care I would need during my recovery.
I let out a laugh.
“What?” my husband asks.
I hit him playfully on the shoulder. “You’re right. That is selfish.”
A smile breaks across my husband’s face, and it’s warm and encompassing and steals the breath from my lungs.
“Thank you,” I whisper, more seriously this time.
“For what?”
Can I even count? Bringing me back? Giving years of his life away for me?
“Loving me. Me, in all my,” I gesture to myself, “socially unacceptableness.”
Kiran presses a kiss to my mouth, and I feel his lips pull into a grin as his familiar stubble scratches at my cheek. “I wouldn’t want you any other way.”
I yank back from him. “You mean you didn’t want me when my face was all fae-like?”
Kiran sighs in exasperation.
Oh, how I’ve missed my grumpy husband.
“You’re fun to tease, did you know that? Really, you make it much too easy.”
“Tease me all you want, Asha,” he says. “I’ll keep a mental record of each and every time you do.”
CHAPTER 117
PIPER
It’s morning before I wake, my eyes heavy with exertion, and when the sun beats against my face, I find my limbs aching.
I rub the sleep from my eyes, stretching my limbs until the motion reminds me of a cat. At the thought of feline creatures I shoot straight up, scanning my surroundings.
There’s no sign of the Others on the plain. Just the gentle cadence of the nearby creek singing as it dances over smooth pebbles, and the sound of…
The sound of a child shouting.
