Page 42 of Water Dragon
“What are you going to say to her?” Iona asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Malcolm admitted.
They entered the great hall, spotting the lady across the room.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t show her that you’re not inclined to make her queen,” Iona remarked.
“I’m not going to lie to her,” Malcolm said. “The truth will be more effective. Whatever she’s been told to believe about me, about the elemental magic, that’s the lie. I can’t counterweigh it with more lies.”
“Are you sure?”
“No,” he admitted, producing a smile on Iona’s mouth that made him want to press his lips to hers and claim her in front of every last pair of gawking eyes. “But,” he finished, “it’s our best bet.”
“I shouldn’t come with you,” Iona protested as he headed for the lady, his hand still holding hers, pulling her along.
“You should,” he disagreed. “We must make her see reason and you’re the most reasonable person I know.”
They reached the lady, who had noticed them the moment they entered the great hall. She raised her glass in a salute, having a sip as they stopped before her.
“Highness,” she greeted, gaze glancing at their entwined hands, drifting to Iona. “My lady,” she added with a slight bow. “Or should that be my queen?”
The irony in her tone wasn’t lost on him, but Malcolm didn’t have time for a verbal sparring match. They needed to know what the next move was going to be and how to ensure their attackers were stopped dead in their tracks. She could provide that information. If she was involved, of course.
“That waterlily,” he said, holding eye contact. She kept her composure without so much as her pupils dilating. “Why did you bring it?”
“Why?” she asked. “That’s a rather odd question.”
“So that everyone at the tournament might know that I had your favor,” he said.
“That’s right,” she agreed. “Why else would I have brought it? What’s going on, Malcolm?”
“Dark and dangerous things,” he replied without hesitation. “And the waterlily seems to be at the very center of it.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sure I don’t understand what you mean,” she said, putting her glass down on the table and moving as though she was going to excuse herself.
He stopped her by placing his hand on her arm.
“Please, don’t make me take this into a private room,” he said. “I believe it would cause a bigger scene than you humoring me here.”
“Humoring you how?” she asked, moving her arm away from his touch.
He looked into her face, well-known and once thought of as a face he would want beside him for the rest of his life. How hard she seemed, how different. There was a lack of depth to her gaze, as though all feeling had drained from them. Her once so enticingly black irises seemed like bottomless wells, but where he had thought himself falling, now he felt as though balancing on the edge was the most dangerous thing he had ever engaged with.
“What do you want from me?” he asked. “What is this about? Really?”
She smiled then. It was the most frightening thing he had ever seen. To have trusted someone so implicitly and have it stated, beyond doubt, that he had been wrong to do so was like a blow to the head. Unthinkable a day before and now so very real.
She had betrayed him.
This entire time, she had been scheming behind his back against him.
But then it was as though the detachment in her gaze faltered and, for a brief second, there was regret there. She looked away then, down at the floor, at anything but him. Was this the act? Or had the detachment been a necessity in order to cope with what this was doing to him? Did she care beneath it all? Had he not been entirely mistaken about her?
“Shannon,” he said gently, reaching for her wrist, this time lightly. “If you’re in trouble, you can tell me.”
Simply because Sir Patrick had done it for the gold didn’t mean the lady had as well. She might have been coerced. Tricked into whatever her role was in the plot against the crowns. The fanaticism surrounding the attack seemed rife for brainwashing its followers into worshipping an outright lie. Had she bought into it? And if so, why?
There was surely more to discover here.
