Movement from my periphery made me suck in a breath. I turned, found my reflection staring back at me from a floor-to-ceiling mirror on the wall. I hardly recognized that creature in her green finery, hair done up high, but those eyes were mine.
I approached, dress rustling, staring at a Eurydice I had never once met. Bramble crown, blond plaits, a corset tight enough to compress ribs, a skirt bountiful enough to drown in.
The mirror’s edges were perfectly straight, bone-white wood. The glass was strange—darker than it should have been, like looking into deep water rather than at a reflection.
And there, tucked between the glass and wood at head-height, a folded piece of paper with my name on it.
Queen Eurydice.
I pulled the piece of paper free.
Footsteps sounded behind me as I opened the tri-leaf fold. “What is that?” Faun snapped.
Foreign, looping lettering. I glanced up at her. “It’s in Faerish.”
She plucked the paper from me, gaze moving over it in two seconds. “An invitation.”
“From who?”
“Liora. She’s invited you to break your fast with her in the morning.” She let out a breath through her nose. “Alone.”
Faun stalked out of the room with the paper fluttering. She spoke in sharp Faerish notes with Dorian, the two of them back and forth, the paper crinkling as Faun stabbed at it with her finger.
I couldn’t read the invitation. I couldn’t understand their conversation now.
But…
I turned back toward the mirror.
Most of all, I couldn’t understand how Liora had known.
That I’d pick this room—that I’d go straight to the mirror… that some lowborn part of me still couldn’t resist my own reflection.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dorian
Come morning,Eurydice would meet Liora alone. I could have accompanied her—a queen didn’t have power to command herveyre—but if Liora was going to kill Eury, it wouldn’t be over bonbons.
It would be in the night, when all the song and revelry had quieted and she was nowhere nearby.
That first night, Faun bedded down in the smaller bedchamber adjacent to Eury’s. And Eurydice agreed, after Faun’s encouragement, to leave her bedchamber door open to the central atrium of the guest quarters.
Just before she went to sleep, I dragged one of the velvet armchairs away from the corner library, close to the door to Eurydice’s room. Not facing inward, staring over her, but toward the fountain. She deserved privacy, as much as I could give it.
I sat down, laid my sword over my lap, and prepared to watch the koi swim in the basin until dawn.
Only minutes after I’d sat, Eurydice’s bare feet padded over the rug through the doorway. Her shadowed form appeared, blond braid soft and loose for sleeping. She wore a white slip and a barely tied robe over it.
I turned my face up to her. Even in the darkness, her eyes on me made my throat constrict.
Her hand clutched the doorframe. “You’ll be up all night again.” Not a question.
“I don’t sleep much, anyway.”
“You haven’t slept at all since we left Sylvanwild.”
“I have, here and there.”