Shining Talon hadn’t asked outright, and that her answer had been the right one.
She didn’t close her eyes. Even if Shining Talon could keep watch better than anyone, Inis planned to keep her own.
Sometime in the night, with Two at her back, she curled into him and slipped into his thoughts, his senses, behind two of his four eyes. The wholeness he brought her, after leaving the rest of her family behind. She cried.
Tell me a story, Inis, Two said, licking the tears off her cheeks. The first one you think of.
Inis wasn’t sure if she was still awake or dreaming. Night bugs glowed over her head, winking on and off. Sometimes they weren’t night bugs but stars. She heard every sleepy cricket, the twisting of an owl’s head from back to front, and the splash of a far-distant frog as it dove underwater, the bog fly it had swallowed still writhing.
Inis’s thoughts drifted back to her childhood. To an old, long-gone friend, the youngest prince—one of the Queen’s many sons who had no chance at the crown, his chances even less than the others’.
His name was Somhairle Ever-Bright, a prince with a beautiful face and withered side. He’d told her most of the stories she still shared with Ivy on nights when memory haunted them like vengeful ghosts, chasing them from sleep.
Once upon a time, Inis started. But instead of focusing on the story—about a girl who runs across a midnight procession of the fae and must outwit them to earn back her freedom—she found herself thinking of the boy who’d told it to her.
As if the storyteller was the story.
Sitting beneath a pear tree with Prince Somhairle, neither of them important enough to be wanted anywhere else.
She felt Two radiate warm approval.
Inis knew where they had to go next.
48
Somhairle
Somhairle woke to banging, to his bedroom door being nearly pounded off its hinges. He fell on his way to open it, good knee and both palms stinging. Not yet awake.
He’d been dreaming of silver. Again. Still tangled in the dream’s webbing, fingertips catching beams of oddly bright moonlight like they too were wrought of metal.
Somhairle unlatched and opened the door.
On the other side, Lord Faolan. His black hair tousled, loose, falling over his face in chaos. His eyes like glass—mirrorglass.
“You need to go somewhere, anywhere else,” Lord Faolan suggested, brittlely calm. Outside, lightning split the sky, buried its forked tongue in the earth directly in front of Somhairle’s window. Its heat charged his lips, his skin a single, continuous prickle. “On second thought, stay here and don’t come out until I’ve given you the signal. Or don’t do what I say and regret it the rest of your life.” Faolan’s voice cracked. “Your choice!”
“What about you—?” Somhairle began.
Faolan didn’t let him finish. “Ah, Morien the Last is here.” He shuddered, straightened, and dragged the door shut, Somhairle still gripping the knob on the other side.
Something screeched along the floor, probably one of the heavy hall tables being dragged into place, heaved as barricade between Somhairle and the rest of the house. The wall trembled on impact, stilled. Silence descended.
Outside, the rain had ceased to fall, the moons hidden, the night pure black.
Somhairle rubbed silver out of his eyes. Whatever job Morien had been sent to complete for Queen Catriona, whatever royal approval he bore—surely this didn’t give him the right to terrorize the countryside.
The door rattled when Somhairle pushed it, pounded on it. It refused to budge.
He fought with the doorknob even though it was a futile effort, because it was a futile effort. One he had to make, in order to live with himself. It had happened so quickly, he hadn’t realized he’d let himself be made prisoner. In his own room, in his own life.
He placed his shoulder to the door and pushed and pushed, and cried out and slipped. He tried to lever the door open with his leg brace, all the while grateful he couldn’t dislodge the table.
What did he plan to do if he could escape? What power did he imagine he held over Morien the Last?
What use was a prince who didn’t understand anything happening in his own kingdom?
Unable to answer these questions, Somhairle turned to the window. He imagined that, if he opened it, tried to escape his prison that way, the unrelenting night would suck him in, preserve him like a specimen in amber.
He returned to rattling the door but at last surrendered. A foregone conclusion. His arms sore, his hip