Dressed Like a Prince

Dressed Like a Prince
Ingrid

After my dinner with Kaloni, I can’t sleep. If she were just a grieving queen, she wouldn’t need to get rid of me. She wouldn’t be sniffing around my loved ones like she was looking for a bruise to punch. No, I’m on the right fucking track, and she’s not going to chase me off of it.

I pull my lute into my lap and strum absently. My thoughts unravel into music notes, neat and straight on staves. Mother used the rejuvenation of Escuro to humiliate Candace because everyone was there. She didn’t organize it. She just capitalized on the opportunity. Maybe these people aren’t all here because some massive evil is happening. Maybe Kaloni is one part of a much bigger plan, and they’re just using the excuse to—

Knock. Knock, knock. Knock.

My head shoots up. Everyone should be asleep by now… and that sounds like the call-and-response from that drinking song Amval and I played.

I creep to the door. My stomach churns. My mark aches.

When I open the door, my jaw almost hits the floor.

Amval stands there. Not Sash, Amval. In full princely regalia, like I haven’t seen him since that very first night. Coppery embroidery dances over his white doublet, and his white trousers hug the muscle of his legs down to boots so purely white that I can’t imagine how long the tanner slaved over the leather. An amber cape dangles from one shoulder, only barely not blowing in a heroic breeze. His dark hair gleams, pushed back off his forehead to reveal even more of his sharp face. Cheekbones slice, nose jabs, brows loom, and mouth—

His mouth is the only thing I don’t recognize from that first night, curved up in a faint, sheepish grin I want to kiss away.

My hand snaps out, and the crack of my knuckles against his face echoes down the hallway.

“What are you fucking thinking?” I grab his wrist, haul him into my room, and shut the door. “I told you, I hated you when we met.”

He rubs his jaw. “Mother had a rule—present yourself at your best when you need to apologize. Then, the person you’re apologizing to can see that you’re not hiding from what you did.”

“And sneaking up here in the dead of night…?” My blood boils. I can barely look at him. He can’t be here, not looking this handsome, not after what he said to me. Not after any of this.

“A necessity of the situation.” He straightens up, and Goddess, there he is. That fucking prince. The one I honestly couldn’t believe Candace was introducing me to. “I owe you an apology.”

“And then some.” I toss a log on the banked fire just for something to do with my hands. It bursts back to life, crackling and spitting.

It makes him an even bigger figure in my room, his shadow crawling all the way up onto the ceiling.

“I am sorry.” He bows deeply, and I seriously consider kneeing him in the face just to make him stand up again. “You’ve more than earned my trust. I should never have accused you of being impulsive or sabotaging me for selfish reasons. You’ve been tireless in pursuit of whoever is doing this to my family. I should have known you believed what you were saying.”

I wait a moment. Another. He has to say that I’m right now, right? That he’s sorry he threw away all the proof I had without looking twice at it?

But nothing comes. He just stands there, bowing.

“By all the stars.” I grab his lapels, silk crinkling under my hands, and haul him upright. “Is that it?”

“I…believe so?” He looks genuinely confused. The marks of my knuckles stand out, faintly red, on his cheek. I want to hit him again.

I want to breathe in deeply, charcoal and basil, and bury my face in his chest.

I want to fucking hit him again.

“What’s your goal here?” I hiss. “With your fancy little outfit, your hair styled, and your confession? What do you want from me?”

“I missed you,” he says frankly.

There it is again—something in the mouth and eyebrows that doesn’t match the prince I met that night. Something more like the man I keep dreaming about. He’s not lying.

I release his lapels and step back. This would be so much easier if he weren’t telling the truth. I just want to be angry, be right, and then leave. He’s not allowed to complicate that.

“You expect things to just go back to the way they were?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I know I have things to make up for—”

“But eventually.” The words burn. He expects me to crawl right back to him like a good mate. To cave to the bullshit my body is screaming at me and forget.

I’ve done that enough.

“No. I told you, I work best alone. Always have.” It’s how I learned to do damn near everything.

“I don’t,” he admits.

“Sounds like a problem for you to fix.” I march back over to the door and open it. “Take your empty apology and ridiculous clothes somewhere else to solve it.”

He crosses his arms but doesn’t move. “Find a single word of that apology I didn’t mean.”

I barely swallow a scream. “I bet you meant it. But you didn’t say anything about what we actually fought about. You don’t even know what you did wrong!”

He grits his teeth. “What exactly do you want me to say?”

“Do you think there’s any chance I could be right?” I surprise myself by saying. “Does any single crumb of you think I’m onto something?”

“I—” He swallows and looks at the fire.

I hold the door open wider.

“No,” he says. “I don’t.”

“Then we’re done.”

“You are closest with Candace, yes?” he asks. “Can you earnestly tell me that, if I came to you with the kind of evidence you had, you would believe Candace arranged your murder?”

I stare out at the empty hallway, at Kaloni’s door. And I picture Candace behind it. Someone telling me that Candace had met with Corwyn, or Nessa, or any of the other snakes my family has caught in the grass.

With gritted teeth, I shut the door. “No.”

He nods. “My whole family is like that to me. I trust them with everything I am.”

“Do you have any idea how much you don’t notice about each other, though?” I ask. “Joli goes missing for days at a time, and no one bats an eye.”

He scoffs. “No, she doesn’t.”

“She’s a smuggler. A damn good one. She supplied Moonlight Hollow and brought me in on one of her trips.” I cross my fingers that she won’t be mad I told him, but I need him to listen to me.

Amval blinks slowly. “I would have noticed.”

“Are you seriously telling me you don’t believe there’s any way your siblings have secrets from you?” I can prove him wrong if need be, but I don’t want to reveal any more of Joli’s than I have to.

“Cirocco drinks with the grooms,” he says abruptly. “Or near them, I suppose.”

I nod, step closer. “Maybe I wouldn’t believe Candace arranged my murder. But if you told me Candace was keeping a secret from me, I’d laugh and ask what was new. Everyone has their secrets.”

He shakes his head. “Even you admit there’s a world of difference between secrets and what you claimed.”

Not after the dinner I just had with her. But conversation isn’t going to convince him.

“I have more evidence.” I lead him to my wardrobe, throw open the doors, and push aside my dresses.

In the low light of the fire, my web of names and kingdoms Corwyn met with doesn’t look like a growing map of a conspiracy. It looks like a craft project. The thread I requested for my “embroidery” certainly doesn’t help.

He grabs a sheet of notes from the floor of the wardrobe and reads it silently. This is the part where he tells me I’m just being impulsive again. Or seeing problems where there aren’t any. He’ll congratulate me on the work I put in, just like everyone does when they hate what you did but don’t want to hurt your feelings, and I’ll throw him out on his ass like he deserves. I don’t need him to understand. I can save him on my own.

“Lord Corwyn was behind the civil war in Tansy Beach—Moonlight Beach?” Amval asks.

“Him and Lord Denidor,” I say, feeling stupid. “Finn gave him that new scar when they found out.”

“You’re sure it’s him?”

I cross my arms. “My brother let me stay in a war zone. He wasn’t stupid enough to do that without making sure I could recognize the person who started the war.”

Amval traces one of the threads with his finger. “He’s met with all these people?”

“I followed him to every single one.” I point out a few repeats—Birchmint Valley, Whaleberry Harbor, Seedmoss Rapids. “And once he talks to them, they go and meet with someone else on this map. It’s that organization, Astralis.” My heart pounds, and my words start to run into each other on the way out of my mouth. He’s listening. “Who else would have the resources to do all this? Burning clove isn’t easy to find; Mother made sure of that. And getting the horses to rear in the exact right spot must have required training or planning. All these people are in on it, but why? To make Kaloni Luna without anyone questioning how she got there.”

Amval flinches back, and I realize he was leaning in, even nodding. He was actually listening. I was getting through to him—except for the final part.

“Half of these names are nearly strangers to Lightning Cape,” he says. “Why under the Goddess’s sky would they conspire to put my sister on the throne?”

“To… steal the world?”

Amval’s eyebrows shoot up in disbelief. Fair. That, and something vague about Father, was all Finn and Xandra figured out. I told them immediately that it sounded like Corwyn puffing himself up.

“Right.” He looks back at the board, taps the torn paper bearing Corwyn’s name in the middle. “I’m certainly convinced Lord Corwyn is a danger and potentially our most promising suspect yet.”

I study his face. No laughter hiding behind his eyes—but I guess that’s not a shock. He’s not turning away from the board, either. He’s actually still studying it, like there’s some clue he missed.

“Thank the Goddess,” I say breathlessly. “If all this couldn’t get you there, you’d really be a lost cause.”

He almost smiles. “Thank you for your patience.”

“Always.” My mark hums, like all is right with the world again. I grit my teeth. “But can you see any other motivation in all of this than putting Kaloni on the throne?”

He scans my string-map, the notes I’ve taken, my rough sketches of the two “accidents.” His shoulders slump. “No.”

I grin—and stop the second I realize how I would feel if someone proved Candace planned my assassination.

“Blackmail,” he says abruptly.

“What?”

“My assassin, he was blackmailed.” Amval nods like he’s convincing himself. “And we suspected Iltas was. Perhaps Kaloni is being blackmailed, too.”

“Maybe.” I’ve only got gut feelings—and her policy changes—to prove him wrong. “Okay. I can… live with that.”

Amval throws his arms around me, and if I melt into the embrace, that’s only instinct. “Thank you.”

He can’t hear me through his shoulder anyway. I’m not hiding any thickness in my voice.

“Oh!” He releases me. “There is one more thing, if we’ve come to a truce.”