Angus gestured to one of the chairs. “Food? Water?”
“Both.” She sank onto the fur-covered rocker and stared into the fire. What was she doing here? There was always the option of going home. She could walk right back to the Seelie court and into her old life. But she didn’t want that. She didn’t even know where home was anymore.
Although, Donnacha had been teaching her what that meant.
Angus returned, handed her a goblet full of water and a loaf of bread, then sat down beside her. “What do you want with Donnacha?”
She raised a brow. “Try again with another question.”
“No, I want to know. You were at that castle for an awfully long time, and you’ll have to excuse me when I say I don’t trust you. I don’t think you were there because you saw some poor cursed sap and thought you might help him. So out with it.”
“How do you even know all that?”
Angus chuckled. “Dwarves have their ways. He’s my cousin, Seelie. I never lost track of him, even in the darkest of times.”
Elva busied herself with drinking the water. Then, when he kept staring at her, she shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“You could start with the truth.”
“There’s no truth. I was there because Scáthach asked me to be.”
“And?”
She shoved the bread in her mouth, purposefully chewing with it open when he got too close with the staring. “What’s it to you?”
“He’s my cousin.”
“So? I’ve seen faeries kill family every day. What does it matter that the Troll Queen has him?” It mattered more than the breath in her lungs. Feeling her expression shift, she looked back at the fire instead of meeting the pain in his gaze.
“You feel something for him,” Angus said, leaning back in his chair. “That’s what it is.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. You feel something for him, and you don’t want to let him go.”
“I don’t feel anything for him. I don’t even know the man. He couldn’t talk about himself at all, and he was cursed as a bear. Do you really think much talking happened?”
Angus leaned forward. “Then why are you still here, Elva? Why are you here when you could have walked away? Why is there interest in your eyes every time I start talking about saving him?”
He was asking too many questions. He was too close. Had it gotten hot in this small room all of a sudden? She needed to go outside and catch her breath. She needed…
Him.
Donnacha had been the first person who had helped her breathe around another living person. She’d just been getting to the point where she could touch him without feeling like she was going to fly apart.
Why couldn’t she feel the same with this dwarf? It didn’t make any sense!
She leaned forward and mirrored Angus’s position. “Because I’m not done with him yet.”
“Sexually?”
“No.”
“Emotionally?”
“Hardly.”
Angus shook his head. “You’ve got to give me more than that. Otherwise, I’ll save him myself.”
“You’ll never get close enough to the Troll Queen to touch him.”
“Dwarves are much smaller and easier to ignore than a faerie.” He laced his fingers together over a knee and tilted his head to the side.
A challenge? Elva leaned back in her chair and rested her hands in her lap. “They already have one dwarf, Angus. Do you think they really won’t notice two? They’re looking for a dwarf constantly.”
“At least I know I can trust one of my own.”
“You can’t trust anyone,” she murmured, feeling the shadows of her past darken her gaze. “As a king, I thought you’d know that.”
He let out a long, frustrated sigh. “Fine. Fine, this is probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but I believe you. You want to find him.”
“I do.”
“You somehow have made a connection with him that is neither emotional or physical, although I doubt this completely.”
She did as well, but he didn’t need to know that. As long as Elva kept telling herself there was no connection between them, then there was no connection. She could survive this as she had survived so much more.
Nodding, she stuck out her hand. “Deal. Now, I have to go, so if you can provide me with armor and a sword.”
He tilted his head to the side with an unimpressed expression. “Elva. I have been planning this rescue since the first moment Donnacha was cursed. Do you think I don’t have a plan?”
“I think if you had a plan, you wouldn’t need me.”
Angus tilted his head to the other side and nodded. “Well, you aren’t wrong there. But I did make a pack for you. Did he tell you where the Troll Kingdom is? It always seems to move.”
“East of the sun, west of the moon.”
“Right. So an impossible place.” Angus scrubbed a hand through his beard, a move Donnacha made right before he was about to suggest something ridiculous. “Well, there are a few people I know who might help.”
She knew what he was going to say. She’d had the same thought herself, but she didn’t want to owe any other faeries debts, and she most certainly would.
“Do not say—”
“I was going to suggest—”
“Bugganes.”
“Bugganes.”
Elva threw her hands up in the air. “Absolutely not.”
“They are basically trolls,” Angus cajoled. “It makes sense they would know where the Troll Kingdom is.”
“They aren’t trolls. They are stupid, ridiculous creatures who have rocks for brains. I am not going to beg them for a favor. Do you know what they’d do to me?”
Angus gave her a once-over and grinned. “For a lock of your hair, I think they’d do anything.”
“How dare you?”
“It’s just hair.”
She didn’t want faeries having a bit of who she was. That was more dangerous than giving them a spell to curse her with. Huffing out a breath, she crossed her arms over her chest. “It’s not happening.”
He reached under his chair and tossed the pack at
