Shock pinned me in place. I barely recognized you with your teeth bared like that. This new you, who wouldn’t surrender in the river, a Jude I am not sure I know. A Jude I was not sure would like me. Right then you looked as though you wanted to bite out the prince’s throat and he looked thrilled to have an excuse to do whatever awful thing he was planning.
I was terrified for you and scared for myself, too. Everything was just getting worse and worse and I didn’t know how to stop any of it. It felt like being trapped in one of those circle dances. Mortal feet won’t stop moving, no matter how tired you get. We’ll dance until our feet bleed. Until we collapse. We can’t do anything else until the music ends.
But that night, at last, Locke came to my window.
A stone struck the glass pane and I was out of bed in an instant, fumbling for a robe. I came out onto the balcony and looked down at him, my heart racing. His hair was bright in the moonlight, his face as handsome as heartbreak.
I took a breath and steeled myself. It was so tempting to push away all my doubts and fears and to rush into his arms.
But I couldn’t let myself forget how hurt I had been, night after night, not knowing whether he’d ever come again, not knowing what I’d meant to him, if I’d meant anything at all.
And something else bothered me. Something about the freshness of Nicasia’s anger and her possessiveness made me wonder if Locke and she were together still. If, when he wasn’t visiting me at night, he was visiting her.
Locke and I stared at each other as the cool night air blew my robe, ruffled his hair.
“Come down, my beauty, my darling, my dove,” he urged, but not loudly. He must have been a little worried, with the general sleeping so near. If Locke woke Madoc up, who knew how he’d have reacted? For a moment, I pictured Locke’s heart shot through with an arrow and then shook my head to get rid of the image. It wasn’t like me to think things like that.
It especially wasn’t like me to have a brief jolt of satisfaction from it.
Guilt over my thoughts, more than anything else, made me lasso a thin rope from my balcony and slither down it. My bare feet landed on the grass.
Locke took both my hands and looked me over with a smile that managed to be complimentary and slightly, amusingly lewd. I giggled, despite myself.
“It was hard to stay away from you,” he said.
“You shouldn’t have.” It was part of his charm, somehow, to get me to say the things I meant.
“We—the Folk—don’t love like you do,” Locke said. “Perhaps you shouldn’t trust me with your heart. I might break it.”
I didn’t like that. “Cardan knows it was me you were meeting. He told me as much.”
“Ah,” he said. Just that.
I took a few steps from him and crossed my arms over my chest. “Leave Jude out of this.”
He gave me a fox’s grin. “Cardan certainly does seem to enjoy hurting her, doesn’t he?”
It was true, and awful. Even if I could persuade you to stop reacting—impossible enough—the prince had to be angry about being slammed into a tree. “She can’t win.”