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Opal
“What is it exactly you wish to see?”
The king seemed reluctant, a
It would forever be stained with his acts of brutality.
Inside a carriage as dark blue as the night sky, I twisted to face Dade. He was staring out the circular window, but I knew he wasn’t seeing the hedges we ambled past, the fountain, nor the willow-lined road we’d begun to roll down.
It might have been new to me, but he’d seen it all before. I missed taking such things for granted in my own home. The walls, the treasures kept within, all just things until they’d been stripped away from you.
“The clothing boutiques,” I finally admitted. “I find myself rather fond of your fashions, the comfort of the gowns and nightwear, the materials. I wish to meet the people who craft them.” In part because I wanted to see if they were slave workers, golden Fae stolen from my kingdom.
“So you can remake clothing of a similar fashion?” Before I could say yes, he added with a slight sneer, “For when you return home?” He looked at me then, and in those blue eyes was not the same creature who’d cornered me in the halls outside our rooms the day before, the creature who touched me with a violently gentle reverence that melted and seared.
In those eyes loomed the predator he’d always be.
The monster who’d damned and killed hundreds of souls, who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of others, including my father.
I’d taken him from his next kill—had thought to distract him because even though I couldn’t stand Bron, I couldn’t have him die in that nightmare of a dungeon. Not when the repercussions would be vast, and he could be of use in sending an important message.
And so I’d lured the wolf from his captured prey by offering myself as his next meal, yet I was evidently foolish and flailing.
And failing.
I swallowed over the swelling in my throat, wishing he would blink already. Wishing things were different. That he wasn’t who he was, that he wasn’t all the horrors he’d committed, and that I could climb into his lap and erase the winter from his eyes.
“I think we both know that I’ll never return home.” That seemed to do it. The king blinked, his eyes narrowing with the lowering of his thick brows. “So I would like to spend my time doing things that I enjoy.” The lie flowed smoothly, softly, from between my lips. So much so, that I wondered if it were because there was more truth to the words than I’d known until I’d set them free.
If this were any other male, any other time, any other life, I’d love nothing more than to see to the things I loved the most. Mending, perfuming, exploring, and gardening.
But those things were a waste of time and selfish. I’d discovered so the hard way. My people were dying and would continue to.
Dade released a breath through his nose, his nostrils flaring slightly. “You would like to spend your days with your passions? Mending and gardening?” A little lift to his lips, then he said, “But I hear you already spend a lot of your time in the gardens.”
I tilted my head, then looked out the window. “Define a lot, my king.”
“I think my cock just ripped the seam of my pants.” I coughed, dragging my eyes from the lights that had begun to twinkle through the window and back to the smirking king. “Say that again.”
I scowled. “No.”
“Yes,” he purred.
“Do you grow…” I scrunched my nose, irritated that I didn’t have the right words and deciding on, “erect whenever someone calls you their king?”
“Erect?” he said, delight lighting his eyes, raising his brows. He laughed, then reached out a finger to trace down the bridge of my nose. “Only when my mate does.”
I snapped my teeth at his finger, gri
“Ah, she admits it. Then why did you say it?” he asked, all velvet curiosity.
“It was a barb,” I stated coldly. “Sarcasm. Do you know what that is?”
“Do you know how erect I am?”
I smacked him in the chest on reflex, playfully and without thought.
He caught my hand before I could retract it and brought it to his mouth for his lips to glide over the skin of my knuckles, eyes never leaving mine while he listened to my heart whoosh and thud. “Look,” he murmured to my skin, eyes darting behind me.
He scooted over the leather seat to my side as I looked out the window. Breath tumbled from me and through the open glass into the night beyond. Up ahead loomed a bridge large enough for two carriages to cross at once, the river reflecting the vegetation and large rocks that nestled along it, as well as the night sky.
“Here they come,” the king said, his voice at my neck, stirring tendrils of hair and warming my skin. We left the bridge with a gentle thump, then meandered through a cropping of giant oaks and the gaps between. Starlight sprinkled over the leaping squirrels and packed dirt roads and pathways.
Not just starlight, I soon discovered as we exited the foliage and entered a clear grass valley, but lights. Dazzling and blurring, they lit up the heart of Vordane in neat lines that stretched farther than I could see seated inside the carriage. Though I suspected that unless I was in the air, I still would not be able to capture all that awaited us.
Streets, cobblestone and narrow, were filled with two-story cottages made of brick and wood and stone. Shops intermingled amongst them as well as smaller homes. A cluster of manufacturing halls, thatched and worn but well-loved, was the first to appear through the window, their chimneys expelling puffs of smoke that dissipated inside the night sky.
A distillery. A metal shop. A carriage repair shop. A cookware supply shop… the signs were all the same and hanging above the wide metal doors, a few locked and sealed tight for the night.
At home, we had some similar sheds crafted for such things and more, for there was surely more upon the other side of the carriage that I hadn’t seen, but nothing as tidy, as large and as obviously needed, as any of what gathered before and after my eyes.
The city was a coiled, jeweled serpent, homes and shops glued to one another in a loving, untidy yet organized fashion, light swaying from windows and doorways, from fires and sconces and torches. I’d entered another maze, this one crafted in straight, square lines that stretched farther than I could walk in a day.
Peering closer, the king’s heat at my side, I waited. I waited, and I watched the groups of citizens we passed by. Some were huddled on doorsteps, gossiping and laughing. Others were serving patrons outside of squashed and spacious restaurants.
Many were looking straight at us and bending at the knees.
I sat back, forgetting not for the first time just who I’d journeyed here with and wondering why in the stars I hadn’t seen it. The hatred, the fighting, the thievery, and the unrest.
With a ruler such as the one seated right next to me, the stories were endless. Tales told of the vicious Vordane and its smiteful king who governed his people with a talon-sharp fist.
I was grateful when the king tapped the ceiling, and the driver pulled the horses to a stop. Dade climbed out before me, and before I could deny him, he grabbed me by the waist and set me upon the uneven cobblestone.