“Least exciting?” I exclaimed. “You could have died!”
He tried sitting up, hissing with pain until he settled back, head propped up by the pillows. “I always thought it would be along the lines of being captured while performing a legendary heist, and taken to the throne room, where I’d have the pleasure of spitting in Prince Jon’s eye.”
“And get your head chopped off?”
“Better than getting it bitten off.” He felt his head with a grimace. “The teeth on those things, never saw anything like them.”
I shuddered. “I’ve now seen enough of them to last me three lifetimes.”
His dark-pink lips spread in a dazzling grin before the cut on his bottom one reopened. He caught it in his teeth with a wince, licking it soothingly, before smirking. “So—what do you think? Am I what you expected?”
“I’m not sure what I was expecting. But it definitely wasn’t you being a fairy.”
He touched the tip of his ear, huffing in tired amusement. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m half-human.”
That explained my earlier observation, of him looking the best of both worlds. Also why he had freckles, like my Arborean blood making me susceptible to sunburns. “Which half is fairy?”
“My mother.”
Like Bonnie, then. How common was it for human men to marry fairy women? And was it of their own free will, or were they influenced by their magic?
“What’s with the face?”
“What face?”
He wrinkled his nose and curled down his mouth. “You look like you just smelled rotten food, a foreign experience to someone like you. Then again, where did a castle-bred courtier see flesh-eating demons?”
“I…um.” I grappled for a good lie, but found none.
Ghouls were native to hot, sandy lands only, dwelling underground away from the scorching sun, digging tunnels to reach burial grounds, and feasting on the rotting flesh of the dead. But, as I knew all too well, they wouldn’t turn down fresh meat.
I’d already told him my mother was a foreigner, but if I mentioned I’d seen them in Cahraman that would be another dot for him to connect…
“Running out of lies, huh?”
If I could sweat, my scalp would be drenched now. “Lies? What did I lie about?”
“Do you prefer omitting the truth? About what you were doing in that tower, about why a fairy queen of all people cursed you, and what you need with King Theseus now?” He counted on his fingers, their tips white with callouses. Bowstring scars. “Not to mention, about your identity?”
“Like you’re not?”
“Who I was doesn’t matter anymore, so, no, I’m not. As of five years ago, I am no one else but Robin Hood.”
“So who do you think I really am—a peasant playing at being highborn?”
“Actually, I think it’s the other way around.”
“I never said I was a commoner.”
“But you’re not the Minister of Agriculture’s daughter either, because I’ve met Lord Weatherly, and he’s a pasty redhead.”
“And his red hair discredits me as his daughter, how?”
“It does, because I also know his wife, whose father was a landed knight, and definitely not foreign. Your foreign blood is as plain as the ears on my head.”
Offense sprayed in my chest like the corrosive venom of a desert lizard. “That is in no way comparable!”
“How so? We’re both the products of mixed-marriages.”
I couldn’t hold back the infuriated squawk. “My parents may be from different lands, but they’re both human. That is not the same as you being a…”
I trailed off, holding my tongue in time.
One brow rose challengingly. “Finish that sentence.”
I shook my head.
“Finish it. Tell me—what am I?”
Affront dissipated under a flood of mortification, as I remembered Leander’s arguments with our mother about Bonnie. She’d called her a half-breed, and willfully equated her to the genies and fairies she hated, not to mention the witches that murdered her own mother. She completely disregarded that Bonnie had saved her firstborn, and the dozens who were subjected to his curse.
This kind of indiscriminating prejudice was what had made the Spring Queen curse us in the first place. Whatever terrible experience Mother had had with magical beings, and whether they’d been totally in the wrong as she’d always claimed, she’d ignored her job as queen, of being political and pragmatic. She’d burned any goodwill the queen had had left for Father, the man who’d jilted her, calling Queen Etheline a monster, and threatening her with iron in front of hundreds of guests. It had made Etheline do monstrous things in retaliation.
And I was here to fulfill the deal my mother had rejected, to free