Page 67 of The Crown of a Fallen Queen
Every movement is calculated, because if I shift even a little, my knee will brush his. And I don’t trust myself not to lean into it. I glance at Seth from the corner of my eye and catch him staring at my bare legs. My breath hitches, and I rest my head on my thighs, erasing him from view.
He rummages through his bag and retrieves a metal flask, unscrewing the top before taking a sip and passing it on. Nether cider. Nice.
“Truth or dare,” he says as I take a swig.
I rub off the taste of oblivion that comes with strong Nether cider, grateful for the familiar sting of the icy drink. “Are we teenagers again?”
Seth pouts in a pleading grimace. “Humor me. I’m not remotely calm enough to go to sleep, and you wouldn’t approve of the other way I’d like us to spend our time.”
Incorrigible bastard.
“Alright, but I go first. Truth or dare?” I say quickly.
“Truth.”
I resent him for how easily he chooses it, when I’m simply bursting with lethal secrets.
“Okay.” I untie my bun and let my red braids fall around my face, shaking my fingers through them to dry them off. “Why did your father refuse to acknowledge paternity, even after your Storm magic became common knowledge? The fallout between our courts wouldn’t have been so damaging if he’d just admitted to it outright. Disinformation and conspiracy theories just polarized the debate further.”
Seth scratches the back of his neck. “Weeds are many in Spring, but infidelity is not viewed in the same light in Storm’s End. Before marriage, men can do whatever they want, but after, they’re expected to honor their wives. Cheaters get judged pretty harshly. To betray one’s mate is viewed as petty and weak.”
“Helgar and his all-important cock, right?” I snicker. “How did the legend go again?”
A touch of humor warms his whole face, and my pulse spikes. In this bleak, gray hole, there’s nothing to distract me from his beauty. Nothing else to do but admire how the firelight kisses his skin, highlighting the lines of his athletic build. Legs and thighsbare, abs rolling on an easy laugh, the man would have made a killing as an underwear model.
“Helgar, a Storm god reputed for breaking hearts and promises alike, cheated on his wife, Nyssa,” he says, his conspiratorial drawl shivering through me. “When she caught wind of his infidelity, she buried him alive, deep beneath the earth, in a cavern as cold and dark as his conscience.”
“My kind of gal,” I say joyfully, gathering my braids to one side to disperse the heat at the nape of my neck and using them to cover my chest.
Seth drags a piece of wood among the embers. “Before sealing him in, she handed him three gifts: a cracked mirror, a black rose, and a pair of scissors. To break free, he had to sever the root of his sin—his Faehood. But Helgar would rather scream beneath the earth for eternity than give that up. It’s a cautionary tale against infidelity, but the hidden moral is that sometimes, the hardest prisons are the ones we build ourselves. And gods are no better than us at cutting their losses.”
I blink. “That’s not the moral.”
Seth lifts a brow. “How so?”
“Nyssa buried her husband alive. She entombed him, plain and simple,” I grumble. “It’s a story of revenge.”
His eyes dance with mischief. “Yes, but he made her do it, so it’s his fault. There’s no revenge in justice.”
Vigilante justice. The fuck-someone-else-and-I’ll-make-you-cut-your-own-cock-off moral is terrible. Such a sentence would be unimaginable in Spring, where people step out of marriages every day in the name of passion. But, it’s also kind of awesome. Deliciously unhinged.
“Damn. I really like that crazy bitch.” I chuckle.
“I thought you might.”
I gulp down a few mouthfuls of cider, mulling over the underlying message of Seth’s story. By that logic, I could justifyanything, but I can’t help but be charmed by a Storm legend that puts the woman at an advantage.
“Truth or dare?” he asks.
“Dare.” There’s no way I’m giving him a chance to pry into what he thinks he heard back in Inverness. If he caught even a glimpse of my cupids, he already knows too much about my curse.
He draws absentminded patterns in the debris beneath his feet before saying, “I want you to…read my future.”
“What?”
I expected him to ask for a kiss or something scandalous, so his demand throws me for a loop.
“In your shop, there were plenty of crystal balls and tea leaves. You must be good at palm-reading, too.”
