If she killed him, it only hurts once.
“Bane’s are unpredictable and Lysander is… was one of my best.” There’s a roughness to his voice that tells me he feels his friend’s loss too.
I catch his fingers and squeeze them. “We’ll get him back.”
“Vi.” Dark lashes flutter over his eyes, but he squeezes my hand. “You saw what he was like today. Lysander loved you. I would never have thought anyone could turn him against you, and yet he was going to kill you.”
I press a finger to his lips. “We’ll get him back. We are not going to let her win this game.”
A sense of implacability sweeps over his face. “I won’t put you at risk. He could kill you.”
“Then he can stay locked away until we work out how we’re going to break his curse.” Rolling toward him, I press a gentle kiss to his lips. “If I can break one curse—”
Thiago captures my face between his hands, holding me there. “You are not going to ask the Mother of Night to return him to his fae form.”
The thought hadn’t occurred to me.
I nip at his thumb. “I was desperate to save your life. This is different. We have time. We have opportunities. Surely someone knows how to break a bane’s curse. Unless you just happen to have his true love locked away in a tower somewhere, ready to bestow her kiss upon his lips? That might work.”
Thiago breathes out a laugh. “I forget how much you’ve forgotten.”
“Why?”
“Lysander has no true love. And certainly not one wearing skirts.”
“Ah.” Something tickles my memories just then. It’s just a flash of a sinfully devastating face swimming into view, a wicked smile sent from a man who looks disarmingly like Baylor—if Baylor ever met a smile he didn’t drag into a back alley and stab.
Singing in the background. Something ribald about a sailor named Thom, who had the prettiest lips a sailor ever did have.
And then it’s gone.
“Memory?” Thiago murmurs.
It vanishes like the ghostly flutter of butterfly wings against my skin.
“I think so.” I can never predict them. But I do know one thing. “Lysander gets along well with Finn, doesn’t he?”
There’d been too much mischief in his smile.
“Terribly well. I try to keep them apart as much as possible.”
I sigh as I push away from him. “We’ll get him back.”
“And then we’ll discover what your mother is hiding at Clydain.”
I find Baylor sitting outside Lysander’s cell, his knuckles clasped together and his head bowed. My feet are silent on the stairs—an old habit—but he looks up as I approach, his golden eyes flaring amber for a second before they return to normal.
“Princess.” He shifts to stand, but I wave at him to stay where he is.
“Are you all right?” I murmur, slipping onto the stone bench beside him.
Baylor leans back against the bars. Inside the cell, his brother’s body lies still beneath a white sheet. “He will rise with the moon.”
That’s not what I asked.
A shrug slips through him but I insist upon squeezing his shoulder. Baylor’s the quietest member of my husband’s loyal court—still waters running over stone—but that doesn’t mean he can’t be hurt.
And it hurt him today to drive a sword through his brother’s chest.
“Thank you,” I whisper. “For saving me.”
Despite everything that has come between Andraste and me, I know exactly how that would feel. She’s my sister and we loved each other once, before my mother turned us against each other. There’s a part of me that will always love her, and I have to hope that her warning today meant something.
“He would never have forgiven himself if he hurt you,” Baylor finally says. “I know you barely remember him, but the two of you…. You were close friends.” A muscle tightens in his jaw. “To see him like this, so twisted by hate and rage…. It’s the worst thing the queen could have done to him, for my brother is love and laughter. We were born from the same womb, but he was always the one that others loved more.”
It’s an arrow straight through the heart, because I feel that too.
My mother’s people adore Andraste. She inspires confidence wherever she rides, because she’s the perfect princess. She’s better than I am with a sword. She’s dared to argue against my mother in court for the rights of some minor lord, whereas I never had that lenience. She proffers wise counsel, and she makes the court laugh.
She is the sun and I am the moon, and somehow, I never truly fit into the Asturian court.
“Some are easy to love,” I tell him quietly, “because they shine so brightly it’s difficult to look away. But others…. We don’t love them any less, Baylor. Because they are steadfast and true. They are solid rock beside quicksilver, but they will not break when quicksilver is too soft. It is a different kind of love. Steadier, perhaps.”
Thiago taught me the truth of that. And I’m learning to love myself—or trying to love myself as much as he does.
“Do you think he’ll remember himself when he rises?”
I won’t pretend I’m not a little nervous about meeting Lysander again.
“Dying hurts,” Baylor replies. “Sometimes it takes time to remember who you are and where you are.” He looks toward his brother. “I don’t know what he’s been through this past year.”
“Thiago told me about Clydain.”
What sort of weapon would my mother be keeping in the far north of Asturia?
Could it turn the tide of war?
“Do you think he found something?” I whisper.
Baylor stares blankly at the wall in front of him, running his knuckles back and forth over his knee. “I think he found something,” he finally rumbles, “though whether he’ll remember it is another matter.”
Chapter Six
“I need to go into the city,” Thiago murmurs the next morning. “Do you want to come?”
“I thought you’d be holed up with Eris and Baylor, plotting a counterattack against my mother?”
There’s a touch of leashed violence about my husband
