I leaned close. “I need your help, Faun.”
“This ball isn’t about your foaming desire for revenge,” she murmured. “Do you know the other queens will be announcing their intent? Hell, all the changelings will be there.”
I raised a brow at her, and she said, “Most ofthe changelings will be there. The living ones.”
“Gawain sent the mirror wraith after Eury. I’m certain of it.”
She kept her face forward. “You’re haunted by ghosts, Dor.”
We arrived at the ballroom after a long, winding walk, at the end of which we followed the sounds of violins and chatter. We came through filigreed double doors with servants standing at either side and into a room so large, so extravagant,obscenedidn’t suffice.
Highmark fae milled in a broad circle, and servants passed through with gleaming silver trays and tiny bites of food. Handmaidens stood along the walls at intervals in their soft yellow dresses, hands behind their backs. In the center, couples danced to a bright song. Above them, the glass ceiling reflected a starry night sky stretching from where Faun and I stood to the other end of the cavernous room.
At the far end, Liora sat at a gilded table wearing a sunlit-yellow dress with so many layers, she almost seemed more dress than fae. On her left and right sat Maeronyx and Iseris in their customary black and pink. The three of them surveyed the room through lace masks. Liora’s gaze seemed to find me, linger, then move on.
At the right moment in the song, the dancing fae in the room clapped and spun. So much cheer. So many pastels. A beautiful nightmare in yellow.
Faun gripped my arm tighter. “Let’s start with a drink.”
“How about two?”
“Even better.”
The three of us started toward the long, abundant table with a whole season’s harvest of food and drinks. Finch poured us two goblets of red wine, and he handed one to Faun and one to me without spilling. He only poured himself a goblet after I insisted. Together we three stood off to the side of the room, observing.
Mostly Highmark fae. But Maeronyx and Iseris had been sure to bring their victorious changelings; they stood out on the fringes in simple dresses. None danced, and all looked uncertain, out of place. Almost all were lowborn, and none had ever been to a ball—some hadn’t been in Feyreign for more than a handful of fortnights.
After fifteen minutes and two songs, Faun leaned toward me. “See any suspicious-looking Unseelie with jawline scars?”
Her voice barely penetrated. My attention was captured by the figure in the doorway.
The Sylvanwild queen.
Eurydice stepped into the ballroom, and the world stilled. Highmark’s pastel courtiers floated like moths around a flame, and she—she was the fire. Her gown clung dark to her body at the bodice, black-green silk cutting close, then spilling down in shifting layers of shadow and shimmer, like a forest floor glinting with starlight. Threads of silver and pale gold curled through the fabric in the shapes of vines and antlers; each breath of light caught on her and held.
Her mask was luminous, green-gold edged with mirrored shards that made her eyes seem brighter, more untouchable, while above it her circlet rose in branching silver, antlers tipped with pale stones that gleamed like dew.
She didn’t look like Highmark. She didn’t look like Sylvanwild, either. She looked like something in between—born of both, owned by neither.
Everything in me tightened. Desire for her, fear for her—the two were entwined in equal measure. I felt drunk on her. I wanted to rip out the eyes of every man in this room.
Eurydice Waters, who’d been mine for one night and never again. My heart wasn’t cut out for this.
“Wildmother,” Faun breathed. “That’s one way to make an entrance.”
Eurydice started forward, her mask glinting. Fae parted for her, became aware of her and in awe of her in the same breath.
This would be a long, agonizing night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Eurydice
As a girlI had imagined balls in the king’s castle. Elisabet and I sometimes lay together on her narrow bed and we closed our eyes and spooled out our fantasies. She was always resplendent in yellow, a noble from the inner district. And I… I always hovered at the edges of the imagined room. An onlooker, perhaps a guard. At best a servant offering food and drink.
Never begowned. Never a queen. And never with this many eyes on me.
I came through the double doors into a ballroom set beneath a night sky like an endless painting. I didn’t even know if it was real, only that it was the queerest, most beautiful thing I had ever seen.