and failing miserably. “According to our list, I still have to meet with Prince Jean-Jaques’s half-brothers, my last candidates. Not that I should bother. With all being widowers, some more than once, if I somehow settled on one of them, I would be sealing my fate, rather than preventing it.”
“That’s exactly why I proposed the plan Mother is taking such an exception to.” Leander dragged a chair, sat down, and leaned close, his whole body tense. “I proposed a way to find new candidates for our cause. I even corresponded with some, and a handful are willing to visit. Though I haven’t expressed the concept of courting you yet.”
Hope I’d thought extinguished soared, only for confusion to swoop down on it like a vulture. “You mean there are more royal heirs? Why didn’t you say so before?”
Mother cut Leander’s attempted answer off with her shrillest screech yet, “Because they’re not human!”
I blinked between them, stunned.
Leander gritted his teeth. “What I was about to say is that I didn’t suggest these men to start with, because I believed you wouldn’t consider them viable prospects. I decided to leave them as a last recourse, if we exhausted all other options. Now, we have.” His eyes sought out mine, intense and earnest. “We must seek out nobles from other races, be it shapeshifters, sorcerers, or even fairies.”
That statement made me almost swallow my tongue.
The Leander I knew was not the joking type. But we’d spent years apart, changing drastically in that time, so I had to entertain the possibility that he now was.
But as he stared at me expectantly, with nothing but the sound of my escalating breaths and my cup rattling on its saucer filling the silence, I became certain. He would never joke about something like this.
Setting down the cup before I spilled the tea over myself this time, I stammered, “Leo, you can’t be serious. The curse said I can only be saved by the noblest of men.”
“We have to be flexible with our definition of men, just like we’ve already been with that of noblest.”
I almost jumped at Father’s ragged voice as he appeared beside Leander’s chair. I vaguely noticed his semi-formal attire—a sky-blue vest the same color of his eyes, a white shirt, and deep-blue trousers. His greying pale-blond hair looked messy, like he had been running his hand through it.
Escaping his weary gaze, my eyes dropped to his hand and the papers he was gripping. They bore Leander’s handwriting, made familiar through our correspondence during the early days of his imprisonment in Rosemead.
That had stopped when his transformation had rendered him unable to write. His last letter had been dictated to his friend Lord Clancy Gestum, the Duke of Briarfell, wishing me luck in my voyage to Cahraman.
The trip I’d been confident would end with my curse broken.
I’d had no reason to think otherwise, when I’d prepared all my life to become Cyaxares’s perfect bride. I’d thought that, and our arranged betrothal, would suffice for him to declare his love and commit to take me as his bride.
Instead, Ada had come out of nowhere, and beaten me in the competition for his heart and hand.
I’d thought it was over for me, that I would never find a replacement in time. And this was why Leander, along with Lord Gestum, had drawn up the plan they’d called “speed-courting.”
It had been essentially holding my own version of Cyaxares’s Bride Search. But unlike Cyaxares—or Cyrus as he preferred to be called—who’d invited fifty girls from all levels in the hierarchy, I’d had a limited pool of options. What the curse described as the “noblest of men.”
Noblest, by definition, meant a king or at least an heir to a throne. But I’d wasted my first seventeen years banking on my betrothal to Cyrus. By the time he’d rejected me, there was a severe shortage of bachelors in that echelon of nobility. What remained were either too young to understand what courting even was, or were, like Prince Jean-Jacques and his brothers, old enough to be my father, and barely noble. Leander had included such men in our list of suitors as an act of pure desperation.
I’d come to this chamber knowing I was already out of options and didn’t have much time left. Three weeks to be exact.
But other races? Could I wed someone inhuman, even to save my life?
As if hearing my thoughts, Father touched my shoulder soothingly. “Fairuza, darling, your brother and I would do anything to save you.