Nobody had touched me like that since my mother.
Her fingers fell away, and she accepted the jewelry box with both hands.
“May the light favor you, young queen.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Eurydice
Liora passedthe jewelry box to a handmaiden and accepted her scepter back without a glance. Six hundred years of rule in one efficient motion.
She extended her free hand, fingers flicking. “Come, my Sylvanwild beauty.” An almost-wink. “Let us show the people an alignment of queens.”
A command already. Yet I lit to it; every baby who’d ever laid eyes on her had probably smiled wider than at its own mother.
She wasn’t only Liora, the Dawnmaker. She made the dawn.
Faun had warned me to trust no one in Highmark. Haskel had said it was the court most likely to smother you with a velvet pillow. And they had both told me that I should follow all of Queen Liora’s cues in public. The first rule of Feyreign’s courts: grievances stayed hidden until you were ready to make them fatal.
I accepted her hand and turned for the first time toward the crowd of fae.
We stood in the massive sunlit courtyard of a castle, the outer walls rising high enough my gaze had to lift to find the battlements. The sun bore down, hot and unyielding. Did clouds ever pass over Highmark’s citadel, or was it immune to them like shadows?
Before us a trellis gate had been raised high, and past it the green plains of Highmark were split by the long Queen’s Road, disappearing into the distance toward Sylvanwild. Banners flapped at the top of the outer wall. Yellow, an open-winged hawk sewn into each of them. Guard stood up there at intervals, some of them with birds of prey on their shoulders—watching, even now, even in peacetime.
The courts hadn’t warred in four centuries. Then again, no one had attacked the Kingdom of Storms for generations—until they did.
So many colors in the crowd below, a sea of pastel brightness everywhere. Half the women waved lacy sashes and handkerchiefs. The men wore fine, bright suits. Blond and brunette heads abounded, some red-haired, most of them so pale-skinned they’d glow by night.
Yes, this was definitely where Sylvanwild obtained its cheeses, its grapes, its slender-legged horses, all the decadence that graced our tables and stables.
Two weeks of this, and I could only truly trust two people—Faun and Haskel. Maybe Mirek, maybe Eleyrie. Butmaybemeant nothing if you guessed wrong.
Liora raised my hand, squeezing my fingers. “The new queen of the Sylvanwild Court.” Her voice carried, the pitch hopeful, with a queen’s gravity. “Long may she reign.”
More cheers. And I finally understood, as adoration rained down, that every subject in this courtyard rose not to me, but to her. The sight of the Dawnmaker, as dear to them as their own mother.
From below, my court looked on—dark-haired, dark-eyed, only Haskel and Finch smiling. Faun’s attention was everywhere else, surveying the crowds. As was Dorian’s, and Eleyrie’s.
Keeping watch. Always watching, since the day we’d left.
Liora kept my hand upraised as the cheers continued. When they went on and on without subsiding, she leaned toward me. “Come, let us away before our ears start ringing and never stop.”
Tradition dictated the queen herself must give us a tour of the castle. The tour lasted hours and left me with aching feet and no better sense of where I was. Every surface gleamed: gold leaf on the bannisters, mosaics set into the floors, tapestries so fine the figures in them seemed to breathe. Liora moved through it all with the ease of someone who had forgotten what scarcity felt like.
Our guest quarters waited behind yet another gilded door. My handmaidens were led away to servants’ quarters, leaving only my inner court around me. When the door opened, Faun and Dorian were already scanning for threats before my eyes had even adjusted.
The space was lavish—a tiered fountain at the center, six doors leading off a common room, a spread of meats and cheeses and wine I couldn’t trust. Mirek found a basket of tailoring supplies and let out a delighted laugh. Haskel opened the nearest door, said, “My room,” and disappeared.
“Don’t touch that food until it’s been tasted,” Faun murmured beside me.
“Poisoning me seems in poor taste when I’ve just given her a hand-carved Sylvanwild jewel box while blessing her in perfect Faerish.”
“I assume nothing.” She selected a green olive, turned it under the light, and popped it into her mouth. “Except that every method will be tried at least once.”
Dorian and Faun fell into a whispered rapid-fire exchange—checking for hidden doors, false walls. Within minutes they’d found two. One behind the tapestry. One in Haskel’s bedchamber.
I left them to it and stepped into the room Faun had already cleared. A light-wood four-poster bed, golden silk bedspread, a carved hawk’s wings spread across the headboard. Through the archer’s slit window, faint music still echoed from the courtyard.