Page 111 of A War of Crowns

Save for Master Kyn, who glanced away when her eyes met his, his cheeks ablaze. No doubt from the prince’s accusations that they had been engaging in a flirtation of all things from a mere conversation alone.

When the Crow finally recovered and turned back to her with a fresh snarl on his lips, Seraphina held up her hand to him again, this time to demand silence rather than to threaten another blow.

“That is thelasttime you will suggest the Baron of Crestley and I are lovers,” she vehemently informed the Crow, her voice a good deal louder and shriller than she had originally intended.

She would have been utterly mortified by how captivated her current audience was by this whole interlude were she not otherwise struggling to keep herself from trembling her way straight off of her horse in the sudden absence of her initial adrenaline rush.

Seraphina added, while she was at it, “That is the last time you will speak a vile word against me—in my hearing or otherwise—as a matter of fact.”

“And that will be the last time you ever lay a hand on me,Your Majesty,” the Crow tacked on for his own benefit, though there was a certain threat held in his words that had not been in her own.

Seraphina thinned her lips at the sound of it and withdrew her hand into her own personal space, more than happy to thread her fingers back through her mare’s reins. “At leastthatwe can agree on,” she muttered under her breath, not caring if the little monster heard her or not.

When she next turned her attention to the Sons, who were all still watching them both—save for Master Kyn—she lifted herchin in clear challenge, daring any of them to utter a word about what they had just witnessed.

Only the eldest among them took her up on that challenge.

“Well, that was a good deal more entertaining than watching Tayn and Eisway beat each other to bits,” the elderly man drawled.

Some of the other Sons chuckled now with the tension finally broken.

After a few more moments passed, though, the youngest-looking fellow there dredged up the courage to ask her, “Your Majesty…is it true that there’s going to be a ball soon?”

Seraphina pursed her lips at the realization that bit of news had traveled so swiftly. “Yes, that’s true,” she confirmed simply enough.

But she blinked in surprise when the young man asked her next, “Do we have to go?”

Before she could answer him, the Crow himself rumbled a flat, “No.”

Curiosity piqued again, Seraphina slipped a sidelong glance toward the prince. “You will not be in attendance?”

The look he delivered to her was just as flat as his tone had been a moment ago when he uttered another simple, “No.”

Before she could press the matter further, the man abruptly wheeled his horse around and nudged the stallion into a trot. He rode away from her and his men without so much as a backward glance.

She sat there, watching him go as a pang of guilt suddenly pricked her. He might have deserved the strike, but she was better than all that. She wasn’t her father.

After a single moment more, she too nudged her mare into a trot and took off after him. Though his horse had the longer legs and the faster gait, the Crow did not know his way through the King’s Forest as she did. It did not take her too long to overtake him, her Queensguard riding just behind.

“Your Highness,” Seraphina attempted to politely hail him. When he continued to ignore her in favor of staring stoically ahead, though, she tossed all manners to the wayside. “Crow.”

Beyond a brief twist of his lips, still the man refused to acknowledge her.

“Aldric,” Seraphina sighed, finally going so far as snaking out her left hand and grasping his horse’s reins. Like that, she prepared to bodily yank both man and beast to a stop if she had to.

The look he shot her was perfectly acidic when he reined his stallion to a halt and snarled, “What do you want from me, woman?”

“I am trying to apologize to you,” she expressed, with no small amount of exasperation. A headache pounded at her right temple from the effort of simply trying to exist in the same space with this man for more than a few minutes.

His expression shifted only slightly at her confession, morphing from pure acid to bald suspicion. He wrenched his stallion’s reins from her hand and asked, “For what?”

Seraphina swallowed hard and flicked a look back toward where they had left his Twelve Sons. Though she was certain they would have preferred watching the pair of them having words deeper in the forest, it looked as if Master Fitzjesmaine had them beating each other once more instead.

“For striking you,” Seraphina explained, sparing him a brief sidelong glance with the words. “You deserved it,” she added, her tone sharpening when she rounded the full weight of her gaze upon him. He met that gaze look for look. “And I do not regret it. But…” She shifted her weight in her saddle and glanced upward, feigning interest in the overcast sky barely visible through the trees. “…But I still should not have.”

Rather than accept her apology with all the grace and dignity of a gentleman, the Crow was swift to further prove to her that he was anything but when he rumbled to her, “If this is your poor attempt to lure me to your littlebirthday party, Your Majesty, you are doing a horrendous job of it.”

Her gaze snapped back to him as a fresh bout of anger sparked to life within her soul. She nudged her mare even closer to the Crow’s own mount, riding up alongside him until her leg had the great misfortune to bump against his. “Please,” she hissed in turn. “Do not flatter yourself.”

---