I held out my left hand. Eava thrust it into something cool and soft.
“Know what this is?” she asked.
I let the dust settle between my fingers. Smooth. Soft. Almost odorless. “Flour?”
“Very good.” She moved my hand to the next mystery ingredient. “And this?”
Gritty and fine. Easy. “Sugar.”
“And this one?”
My fingers sank into something warm and sticky. I immediately pulled back. “That feels disgusting.”
“But what is it?”
“Rían Joseph O’Cleriegh!” Eava snapped. Not close by. From far away. “What’d I tell ye about messin’ in my feckin’ kitchens?”
I ripped off the blindfold with my clean hand to find two Eavas—one with laughing blue eyes and the other with stern black ones. Then I looked down to see my hand covered in lard.
With a flick of a wrist, the laughing Eava vanished.
“Forget everything that nutter said,” Eava grumbled with a shake of her head, hefting a thick book down from a shelf in the corner. The pages were brown and worn and scribbled all over. “I always follow the feckin’ recipe.”
* * *
That afternoon, I met Ruairi outside the castle’s main doors, bringing the mini vanilla cakes, one for each of us, that Eava and I had baked.
“Hostage,” he said with a nod.
I smiled. “Guard.”
Instead of taking me to the garden, he said he had a surprise and started for the gates.
The courtyard was quiet today, with only Oscar and Fillion changing the hay in the empty stables. The moment we crossed beneath the barbican, I felt the wards prickling my skin. Only this time, instead of blocking me, I stepped right through and out into the bright sunlight of Tearmann.
The sweetest breeze, smelling of salt and sand, lifted my hair from around my face. “He let me out . . .”
“Good hostages are rewarded,” Ruairi said with a fanged smile, starting up an emerald hill toward the sound of crashing waves. Within minutes, I found myself on the crest of a cliff, staring out at the tumultuous sea.
The east coast where I’d lived eased into the water. But this . . . This wild land didn’t ease. It came to a violent end.
It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Ruairi’s hands slipped around my waist. I squealed. Whirled. And found a smirking prince where my guard had been only a moment ago.
“Disappointed?” he laughed.
“So disappointed,” I countered, catching his collar and giving him a quick peck on the lips. “Why are you here?” He hadn’t joined me since that day in the garden.
“To torture you. Why else?” With a flick of his wrist, he was no longer Rían but Ruairi, from the broad shoulders and raven hair to the sharp incisors, all mimicked to perfection. Everything but his blue eyes.
“Why can’t you be you?” Besides the circling black and white birds, the waves, and the hills, there was no one to see us together.
He gestured toward the sea far below, to flecks of vibrant color I hadn’t noticed flashing beneath the water. Merrow danced with the waves, beautiful and ethereal.
A small part of me wondered if all this secrecy had to do with his relationship with a different merrow. With Muireann.
A wool blanket appeared, stretched across the undulating grass at the cliff’s edge, pulling me back from my darkening thoughts.