A few hours later, Daylily’s dream came true.
She had retired to the privacy of her chambers when the commotion became too tiresome. The means for celebration were pathetically reduced, and Daylily disliked watching the household desperately trying to behave as though there were some real reason for all this joy. So the prince had returned. Very well. Where was he during those five years when he’d been needed? But they wouldn’t think about that now, would they. No, they’d save that for later, Daylily knew. And later would bring its price.
So she retired to her rooms and told her servant not to light a fire. She avoided fires, no matter how chilly her room might become at night, nor how dark. The smell made her sick. She wrapped a shawl about her shoulders and sat at the window instead.
Lionheart knocked at her door. She knew it must be he, though how she knew she could not say. Out of habit, she checked to make certain her hair was arranged and let the shawl drop from her shoulders down to her elbows. Then she said, “Come.”
He was still shaggy with that wretched beard, though he’d changed into finer clothing. Ill-fitting clothing, to be sure. He’d outgrown all his own and there had been no time yet to fit him for others. But at least he was no longer dressed in the colorless sacking in which he’d arrived.
“Hullo, Daylily,” he said. He carried a candle, for dusk was settling in. The light cast strange shadows on his face.
“Good evening, Lionheart,” she said. She wondered briefly how she looked to him. The dragon poison had taken its toll upon her, leaving her thin and hollow cheeked. Her former beauty might never be reclaimed. She hoped the candlelight was gracious to her.
Not that it mattered. She knew that her dream was about to come true, and she dreaded the moment. After watching it burn and die so many times, the prospect of fulfillment was almost unbearable.
“Daylily, I was wondering,” Lionheart said, shuffling his feet. For just that instant, her heart went out to him again. He looked so like the awkward Leo she once had known. Leo, who couldn’t play a game of chess to save his life.
“Yes,” she said quietly.
“I was wondering if . . . well, after all this . . . and I understand if you’d rather not.” It was strange to hear that boyish stammering when his voice had grown so deep.
“What is it, Leo?” she asked.
The use of his childhood name brought his head up, and he smiled. The smile vanished quickly, but it had been there, a ghost of his former self. Daylily wondered at the amount of dragon poison she saw in his face. After all, Lionheart had been away; he had not suffered enslavement during those five years. Why should he bear the marks?
“Tell me what you want,” she said.
He closed his eyes and drew a breath as though stung. When he looked at her again, there was a sharpness like thorns in his expression. But he said, “Daylily, will you marry me?”
So she would be the Eldest’s wife after all. She would fulfill her father’s expectations and Plan. She would prove herself in the eyes of Middlecrescent, in the eyes of the entire nation. Daylily had succeeded, as she set out to, in winning the heart and devotion of the crown prince.
“Yes,” she said.
Lionheart stepped forward, leaned over, and kissed her, just once, before he backed away. She looked up at him, her eyes like a ghost's in the candlelight.
“Thank you,” he said, turning to go. But he paused in her doorway and looked back.
“Daylily?”
“Yes?”
“I was wondering . . . do you know what became of Rose Red? The goat girl, remember?”
Daylily did not break his gaze. The candlelight reflected like opal fire in the depths of her eyes.
At last she said, “She disappeared.”
“She promised that she’d come back and watch over my parents and those imprisoned here,” Lionheart said. “Do you know if she did?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“Do you know . . . did she survive?”
Daylily got to her feet and paced across the room. Fury suddenly thickened her voice to a menacing whisper. “She’s not dead, Lionheart. She fled after the Dragon left. She lost that veil of hers, and we all saw her true face, and she fled. I don’t know where she went. Followed the Dragon, perhaps? They were quite friendly, I’m given to understand. Last I saw her, she was very much alive and very much running for her life because she is no longer welcome in this land.”
Lionheart’s face hardened into stone. Daylily stood there, hissing up at him like an angry cat, her loveliness twisted so that he almost could not recognize her. His betrothed. Of all the damages he’d yet seen wreaked upon his homeland, somehow this was the worst.
“I think I know where she’d go,” he said. He put a hand on Daylily’s shoulder, gently but firmly. “And I’m going to fetch her back.”