Page 43 of Where Shadows Bloom

Her new room was even more ostentatious than the last. A beautiful washroom with a marble tub, a large bed with a dozen down pillows, a daybed hidden behind curtains stitched with golden lilies, and a view directly into the marvelous gardens.

King Léo’s eyes snapped to mine, as sudden and arresting as a clap of thunder. I’d never looked into the face of a king before. The illustrations I’d seen in books and the etching of his profile on our coins—they were nothing like this. He did not look like any human man I knew. The angles of his face were too sharp. His eyes were too piercing. His hair was the color of spider silk, silvery and strange, nothing like the white hair of the aged governess who’d raised me at the orphanage. Even his smile was wrong, like he knew some joke, some secret, that I did not.

This was the man the gods had chosen?

“Mademoiselle,” he said, slick as oil, “you’ve brought me my daughter as requested. You are dismissed.”

I stood, rooted to the spot, and Ofelia stepped between us, reaching back to cling to my hand. “No! No, this is Lope. My closest friend, my confidante, my guard—she is to remain at my side.”

The king brought a blue porcelain teacup to his lips, his expression almost bored. “From which family do you hail, Mademoiselle Lope?”

He asked that question, but I knew he meant another:You aren’t nobility, are you?

“I am one of the children who was trained to hunt Shadows—”

The king hushed me. I’d forgotten. He preferred to pretend the Shadows didn’t exist. Even though I still bore a barely healed gash down the side of my face. Even though I had livedmy entire life with the sole purpose of fighting them.

“I was trained to huntbeastssince I was small,” I amended slowly. “A necessity, as our soldiers were—and remain—in other lands.”

His Majesty set aside his tea, meeting me with a gaze that, I supposed, was meant to be warm. Something about him, about all of this, taking tea in this beautiful garden while monsters roamed just outside, made the hairs on the back of my neck rise.

“So you’re an orphan,” he said. “You’ve no peerage.”

I stood steady against the blow I knew he had meant to inflict. I had heard it before: my accomplishments meant nothing. I was not born into one of the families that a king favored a thousand years ago. One of those great, gods-blessed families, like Ofelia’s.

“No, sire,” I replied, smiling as the courtiers did here, false as fool’s gold. “I’m just a girl.”

“Then why do you keep company with my daughter?”

This blow rang true, cutting me to the quick. This man was decidedly my enemy. But he spoke the truth. Who was I, a servant, to be clinging so to her mistress? To be so besotted?

“Father,” interrupted Ofelia, her voice firm but upset, “Lope brought me safely to Le Château, despite the danger. Where I go, she will also go. You cannot deprive me of my mother and then deprive me of my companion!” She stopped her tirade just as her voice was growing more and more tearful.

The king waved at me. “Stand guard, then.” He reached out a hand, and Ofelia carefully took it, sitting down beside him at the breakfast table. At his glare, I reluctantly stepped back a few paces, but kept Ofelia steadily in my view.

From his breast pocket, he procured an envelope for Ofelia. “You see?” he asked. “I do not wish to deprive you of your mother.”

She gasped and tore it open. A tiny, pink seashell dropped onto her lap. She examined it, smiling, and then eagerly read the note. After a few seconds, a soft little sob burst forth. I ached, my fingers instinctually reaching for the handkerchief tucked in my pocket—but the king had already given her one.

“I told you she was at Lantanas,” he said. “Why do you not believe me?”

Ofelia hunched over in her seat, her head bowed. “I—I just want to see hernow.I want to embrace her again.”

He held her hand in his. “You will, very soon. I know it is difficult being apart, but you must wait for her, as she says.” Even from afar, his smile looked false to me. “I waited seventeen years to meet you.”

She laughed, small and half-hearted.

“There’s something else I’d like to show you,” he said.

He lifted something over his head, something that glinted when the light hit it at just the right angle. Ofelia gasped, reaching out for it.

“Mother’s locket!” she exclaimed, clicking it open.

My heart skipped. The ledger and now the locket. Had Her Ladyship really been here?

“She let me keep it while she is away,” said the king. “This painting—this was the first time I ever saw your face. I know you’ve changed a lot, but... for a moment I could imagine it, if you had been raised at the palace. Your little footsteps scurrying through the hallways.”

“Mother didn’t let me run indoors at home,” she said with a smile, and I remembered the last incident well—when she’d asked me to chase her around the manor, and she’d then run face-first into a wall. Apart from some blood and some bruising, she was all right, but Her Ladyship and I were mortified. It was only due to Ofelia’s begging that I was allowed to enter the house again.

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