The Glass Queen (The Forest of Good and Evil #2) - Gena Showalter Page 0,30

I won’t make again.

“Why did you have to approach me at the funeral? If you’d just stayed away—” I pressed my lips together, going quiet. Yelling my grievances wasn’t the way to get him to hear me. He’d only go on the defensive. Moderating my tone, I told him. “I bore you no ill feelings. Yet, even as my mother’s body burned, you glared at me, as if you were enraged. What possible reason could you have to attack a fourteen-year-old girl who’d just lost the only parent who loved her?”

“I never attacked you.” He moved to inspect one of the potted plants and crossed his arms over his chest, a pillar of resentment. “As for my rage...you know why.”

“I don’t!”

He flicked his tongue over an incisor before looking at the plant as if it were one of his guards and demanding, “Are you hearing this?”

Um...

Scowling, he abandoned his plant companion, dragged the trunk directly in front of me, and sat down, careful of his wings. “We have a past, you and I.”

He said no more, yet flutters erupted in my belly. I drew in a deep breath. I meant to clear my head, but I drew in his scent. He still smelled like a summer rain, and I wanted to close my eyes and savor. “A past? What kind of past?”

Ignoring my question, he stretched his legs in my direction. “Remove my boots.”

I gaped at him. Had he really...? “Is this my second task?”

“This is you fulfilling your duties as my servant.”

“Don’t you mean palace liaison?” I folded my arms, not removing his boots. “This supposed past of ours. Are you referring to a time before our encounter in the royal garden?”

“Why? Have you recalled a time before our encounter in the royal garden?” He cocked a brow, so arrogant he offended me on every level. Almost every level. Some levels. One or two, surely. “The boots.”

Fine. For reparation, for my father, for answers, I would do what Saxon asked. Forcing a smile, I moved closer to work on the strings. “How long before our encounter in the garden?”

A pause. Then, “Hundreds of years.”

What? He couldn’t be serious. “I’m seventeen years old.” In a month, I would be eighteen. “I haven’t lived for hundreds of years.” I finished one set of ties and slipped the boot from his foot. He wore black linen socks. Why did I find that adorable?

“Do you know what a reincarnate is, Princess?”

The way he spoke my title...as if it were a curse and a prayer all rolled into one. I shiver-shuddered again, suspicions poking and prodding at my fragile calm. “You mean someone who is reborn again and again, until they accomplish a certain goal?”

“Exactly right.”

I worked on his second boot with more gusto. “And you think...what? That I’m a reincarnate?”

“I know we are both reincarnates.”

Saxon, a reincarnate...me... The idea dropped into my mind with all the grace of a cannonball, and I shook my head. “No. Impossible. We can’t be.”

“I was known as Craven. The first avian king.”

“The Destroyer.” Dread settled deep in my bones.

He nodded, a single jerk of his chin. “You were known as Leonora, a fire-wielding witch who communed with dragons. Later, I became Tyron, but you remained Leonora, only you had a different face. Now I am Saxon, with the same face as before, and you are Ashleigh, different again, yet we are still Craven and Leonora.”

The moisture in my mouth dried. If he’d mentioned any other names, I could have refuted his claim straightaway. But Leonora and Craven...everything I’d read about the couple, everything my mother and Milo had inadvertently revealed about the witch...

The coincidences were only stacking up.

Should I mention what Milo had said, just before Saxon found me in the garden?

No need to ponder the answer. Why give Saxon more ammunition to use against me? “What makes you think—sorry, know—I’m a reincarnate of this Leonora?” The few times Momma had deliriously referred to me by the name, she’d called me possessed, not reincarnated.

You possessed my baby. You took her from me.

“You told me,” Saxon snapped, “just before you launched the first ball of fire at me.”

No way, no how. Utterly impossible. Right?

One heart, two heads.

Possessed.

What if I had an evil, more powerful Ashleigh buried inside me, and it was her magic power I sometimes felt? What if she only made an appearance when I slept? How many times had I gone to sleep and awoken covered in dirt?

Reeling at the implications, I fell back on my