He was right about her being late to dinner; she’d spent the last few evenings mapping the tunnels, preparing for her and Angelyne’s escape. Had she actually fooled herself into thinking she could evade her fate?
She looked at Quin with new and heavy understanding: this would be her husband. Her lifelong mate. Mia had logged very little time with him—too little to know what kind of boy he was—but she knew exactly what kind of man King Ronan was. Clan Killian had ruled Glas Ddir for centuries, glutted on power and the abuses of it. It seemed only natural the prince would take after his father.
Fear sank its teeth into her stomach and she swayed on her feet.
“Are you—” Quin reached out to steady her, then quickly withdrew his hand from her gloved arm. “You’re not going to faint, are you?”
She exhaled. “I’ve never fainted in my life. I’m not that kind of girl.”
What she didn’t say was that his touch had pierced the slinkskin like a dagger. Was it always this unpleasant to be touched by a boy? She didn’t have much personal experience. While other girls were sneaking into empty market stalls to shyly touch their lips to someone else’s, Mia was throwing blades into tree stumps and studying the number of bones it was possible to break in a Gwyrach’s neck.
Quin gestured toward the bed, where Angelyne’s tiny feet peeked out from under the canopy. “Is that your sister?”
“She’s resting.”
“Make sure you wake her within the hour, or she’ll be late, too.”
“Why the sudden interest in punctuality, Your Grace?”
He shifted his weight. “My father demands it.”
A chill snowflaked under Mia’s skin, as if someone were sliding an ice cube along the nape of her neck. The inside of her neck. She did not care for King Ronan. Didn’t care for the way he spoke to his servant girls or looked at her sister. Nor did she care for the pleasure he took in torturing the Gwyrach who’d been captured and brought back to Glas Ddir. She had seen his Hall of Hands.
Mia straightened. “We’ll be in the Gallery in one hour. Worry not.”
Was it her imagination, or did an inch of tension melt from his shoulders?
“Good. My father will be pleased. My mother is already furious at the cooks for ruining the duck—I’d rather not give her one more reason to whine.”
Mia felt the gut punch she always felt when people spoke of their mothers, especially with such obvious disdain. She wanted to grab Quin by the shoulders and shake some sense into his cerebral cortex. Remind him how lucky he was.
“The Hunters are here as well,” he said. “They will join us at the final feast, to ensure we are protected. But you are not to speak to them.”
Anger flared in her chest. She had every right to speak to the Hunters if it pleased her. She had, after all, been training with the Circle for the past three years, poised to take the sacred oath on her eighteenth birthday and pledge her life to tracking and eliminating Gwyrach. The clean logic of the Hunters’ Creed appealed to her: Heart for a heart, life for a life. Though she had never killed a Gwyrach—her father had strictly forbidden it—Mia knew she would not hesitate when it was time.
And then her father had summarily dismissed her from the Circle and announced her wedding plans.
“I will take it under advisement, Your Grace.”
She studied him. When Mia first arrived at the castle, she’d nursed a wild hypothesis that, underneath his ice-cold exterior, Quin might actually have a red beating heart. She searched his green eyes for it—a spark of joy, a terrible secret, a tiny fissure in his veneer. Something. Anything. But if this were a mask, it was permanently frozen to his face, the secrets frozen with it.
The prince lingered in the doorway. What was he still doing there?
“Your buckles,” Quin said.
“My buckles?”
He nodded toward the decorative buckles on her boots.
“They’re very shiny.”
“Thank you?”
The silence was excruciating. They each cast about for something to say.
“Your buckles are shiny, too,” she blurted.
“Thanks much.”
If this were the sort of conversation that would fuel the next fifty years of marriage, she was tempted to take the buckles and stab herself.
“I’ve got to—”
“I should be—”
“Yes,” they said in unison. Without another word, Quin strode down the corridor on his long legs, his reflection flashing off the black onyx walls. He really did look like Wound Man, the lanky male figure on her favorite anatomical plate, minus the various weapons sticking out of his body.
Mia’s fingers thickened, blood crawling through her veins. It was not the first time Quin had left a trail of frostbite in his wake. She couldn’t account for the sluggishness of her hands or the kiss of cold against her cheek. Was this how it felt to be hated? Like sinking into a snowdrift, naked and exposed?
She banished the notion. Hatred wasn’t cold, any more than love was hot. To start assigning meaning to bodily sensations was a dangerous game. The Gwyrach trafficked in sensations, and as long as they roamed free, touch was a battlefield, bodies the instruments of war. For Mia, the casualties had been devastating.
She brushed past her sister, sound asleep. Angelyne could fall asleep faster than anyone she knew. She’d always been that way.
Mia rubbed her hands until the blood was pumping through them once more. She plucked a bundle of sulfyr sticks from her dresser and retrieved the satchel from its hiding place under the bed. Then she stooped over the stone fireplace and brushed aside the mound of ashes. Under the ashes was an iron grate, and beneath it, a trapdoor.
She lifted the grate quietly so as not to wake her sister, then lowered herself into the darkness.
She would pay her mother a visit.
Chapter 3
Bones and Dust
MIA SCRAPED A PINEWOOD sulfyr stick against the coarse rock of the tunnel wall. The sticks, thick as thumbs, were a gift from her father, his latest spoils from Pembuk, the glass kingdom to the west. They were clearly his attempt to worm his way back into her good graces. It hadn’t worked, but she’d taken them anyway.
Griffin Rose traversed the four kingdoms hunting Gwyrach, and his pockets were always full of exotic gifts. Mia still remembered how, when she was a little girl hungry for adventure, he would unroll crinkling scrolls of parchment paper on the kitchen table, letting her trace her tiny finger over his travels.
“This is the known world,” he’d told her, “carved into four kingdoms.”
“River, Glass, Snow, and Fire!” she’d cried, eager to please.
“Very good, little rose.” Her father had pulled a peppery-spiced chocolate from his pocket, though for Mia the greater reward was always the way he nodded with pleasure when she answered a question correctly. “Now name them in their native tongues.”
Languages came easily to Mia, in the same way mathematics and sciences came easily to her. A language was simply a system of grammar and rules. It was, at least in its early stages, about sticking variables into equations. Mia liked equations. She loved having the right answer.
“Glas Ddir, Pembuk, Luumia, and Fojo Kara??o,” she’d said proudly.
“Your pronunciation could be better,” her father had said.
The green flame flickered out as dark shapes swam before Mia’s eyes. She struck the stick against the tunnel wall and the fire winked back to life, flooding the corridor with the sour pinch of eggs. Like magic, sulfyr sticks manifested flame.