Page 11 of Knightfall
“Don’t worry. She won’t.”
* * *
Quinn kept a death grip on my wrist as he led me to the right, not to the main throne room, but to a minor receiving room used for groups of foreign dignitaries. Still pretentious. It still held five thrones on a raised platform. But it was a smaller, more intimate level of pretension.
The room was empty.
Quinn halted in the middle of the room and stood silently under the main chandelier. He didn’t go to the bell-pull to ring for servants. He didn’t call for anyone to come. He must have assumed that the gossip from the courtyard would ensure my mother and sister found us. Not to mention, my three other husbands.
I sighed. Husbands. That was the lie my mother had put out when I’d run. That we’d all secretly married, and they’d secured their positions as my knights. It had been whispered about that we’d been too eager to wait for the formal ceremony. What with the threat of dragons looming and my intention to seek out and kill the last of the monsters … that last bit had dulled any gossip about my impropriety.
Why my queen mother had invented the lie instead of simply handing my husband group off to my sister and declaring her the crown princess immediately, I didn’t know.
“So, what are you gonna do about all those rumors that I was off hunting some made up foreign dragons?” I tried the conversational approach with Quinn.
It didn’t work. He didn’t even look at me.
Unlike before, when at least I felt tension rolling off him, felt him give in to the thrill of the chase, there was nothing. It was like I was talking to a big, grey stone wall.
Fine. Sard you, too, I thought. Until I realized that he might have been waiting for me to apologize.
It might end up the only moment I ever had with him alone. The palace was always full of eyes and ears and I’d rarely gotten a moment’s privacy growing up.
Was that why he didn’t call anyone?
Shite.
I at least owed him an apology. I was sure he hadn’t wanted the match either. To be told two days before a wedding? Even if the bride came with a crown, that was a lot to take in.
I sighed. “You know when I left, it had nothing to do with—”
“You’re back!” Avia strode into the room, her skirts sweeping over the mosaic floor, her face as hard and brittle as iron. Four years had changed her. My sister wasn’t the gawky little twelve-year-old I remembered. She was sixteen. She looked taller. Leaner. And she had bags under her eyes so deep they could have been craters.
“I—”
She pulled the crown off her head. My crown. The crown she’d been forced to wear after I’d run. She studied the rainbow array of gems. Then she flicked her wrist. The crown flew at me, smacking me in the chest.
I took a step back as it rolled on the floor and Quinn stopped it with his foot.
“Take it. And them,” she snarled gesturing behind me. She grabbed her red skirts and swept out of the room before I could respond.
She was a little bit angry with me.
Understandable. I can handle that, I told myself.
I turned. Behind me were the three other men I’d been promised to. The men I’d abandoned.
Their gazes were cold, hard, and unforgiving.
Even Connor’s.
My childhood best friend, my first kiss, my first love, Connor stared at me the way I’d seen him stare at my mother.
It almost looked like anger and disgust warred beneath his blue-green eyes.
That stung. And not a little. It stung like I’d walked into a hornet’s nest. Which, perhaps I had.
I shrunk back. I knew I’d missed sending that last dove to him, but I’d sent so many before. I’d written him nearly every month of my absence. Sometimes more. He’d never written back, but obviously, I hadn’t expected him to. The palace was full of eyes and I didn’t exactly ever provide a location. But I didn’t expect the vitriol from him. Not from my sweetling.
