“Let’s get you back to your rooms,” I murmur.
“No, please, my lady. I don’t….”
I understand. She thinks I intend to overwhelm her. “You’re safe,” I whisper. “You need to sleep it off. I’ll get you out of here.”
I hate the fright in her eyes, but this one time, I have been able to use my power for good.
Even if it makes me a powerful enemy.
By the time I’ve set the little maid in her bed and returned to the gathering on the lawn, the bows and arrows have vanished and the men have returned. There’s no sign of Keir. Perhaps he’s cleaning up after the hunt.
A blur of darkness captures my attention.
The Lord of Mistmark slips away from the party as if he’s heading toward the castle to refresh himself—but halfway there, he takes a sidestep and vanishes into the maze.
“Excuse me,” I say to a princess who’s trying to insult me. I think she’s one of Rhea’s friends. “I have to… fix my hair.”
And then I walk away from her, ignoring her shocked gasp and her pointed “how rude.”
I slip into the shadows as I enter the maze. The world is abruptly muted. It’s like looking at everything through a diaphanous gray veil. Fine details are lost, and everything becomes soft and blurred. It strips the hard edges from a fae prince’s face and eases the harsh lines and avarice in a princess’s expression.
I steal from shadow to shadow, tiptoeing along in the wake of the Lord of Mistmark.
He’s the one mystery I haven’t been able to solve.
He reaches one of the final turns of the maze and glances over his shoulder. A lock of raven-dark hair tumbles over his brow, and I catch my first glimpse of alpine-blue eyes. They’re amazing eyes. Even with a veil of shadow between us, they make my breath catch.
Okay, maybe it was the eyes that caught Soraya’s attention.
She’s always had a thing for pretty fae lords with sulky mouths and dangerous intensity. Or lords who are clearly up to no good, because Mistmark is obviously meeting someone here. Someone he shouldn’t be.
Maybe someone female?
I wonder what your dearest Belladonna will think of this….
We slip through the maze, and Mistmark clearly knows where he’s going, because within minutes he paces into a clearing where a hundred oak trees stand apace, clipped into uniform precision. It’s not the heart of the maze, but one of the “rooms” inside. We passed dozens of them: a fountain carved of alabaster—shockingly white against the reddened leaves of the maze—stood alone on a field of lawn carefully mown into checkered squares akin to a chessboard; a water garden edged by hedging caught my eye; a dozen cascading pools babbled like a brook in another; a folly; a grotto; even a spun-glass butterfly house, with dozens of tiny winged fey trapped inside.
“Where are you?” he calls softly.
A figure appears from around the trunk of one of the mighty oaks. I start, because although I’d scanned the garden the second I approached, I didn’t see him there.
It’s a fae male I don’t know.
Someone fairly prominent, judging by the dark green velvet coat and the diamond earring stabbed through his ear. It glitters like a star. Despite the clean lines and cut of his clothes, the way he wears them tells me he likes to look good. His cheeks are so smooth I want to run my hands over them just to check if he even grows stubble, and the way his hair is raked back looks like he’s spent a decent allotment of time soothing it into place.
Mistmark, on the other hand, is simple good taste.
Black velvet. Black leather gloves. Slightly scuffed boots. Careless hair.
It’s all expensive—and I’m fairly certain I recognize a glint of demorari silk embroidered into elegant roses in the weft of his coat, which is the latest of fashions in the southern courts—but Mistmark looks as though he paid good money to a tailor or three, and simply let them loose on his wardrobe.
Something simple. Something fashionable. Make me look like a groom who’s comfortable in his own power, and not someone forced to bend knee before another court…. Nothing too fussy….
Whereas the blond looks as though he made half a dozen tailors and their assistants sweat as he pored over every scrap of fabric, and then fingered the seams before sniffing and insisting they did them again.
My eye lingers on the newcomer. Even from the shadows, his hair gleams like spun moonbeams. There’s an uneasy sensation within my breast—a feeling I know this stranger, when I could swear we’ve never met in our lives.
I study his face, but no recognition dawns.
I’ve never seen him before. I’m sure of it.
“Well?” Mistmark tugs his leather gloves from his hands, finger by finger.
“It is done,” the stranger says. He tosses Mistmark a scroll of paper. “You’re playing dangerous games. Malechus won’t appreciate it.”
“Malechus started the game,” Mistmark says coldly. “If he doesn’t like my rules, then he shouldn’t have challenged me.”
Ooh, interesting.
The stranger laughs under his breath. “I admire your brashness, Alaric. Very few seek to take on the Prince of Knives, and few do it out in the open like this.”
Mistmark unfurls the scroll, a faint smile edging his lips as he examines it. “You found the questing beast.”
“It found me.” The stranger flicks a speck of dust from his sleeve. “It could scent me, even if it couldn’t see me.”
“You look none the worse for wear, Falion.”
“Tell that to my hunting leathers,” Falion drawls. “The bitch can breathe fire. It took me all morning to lure it into the maze and then I had to make a hasty retreat into one of the ponds, where I managed to finally lose her.”
A questing beast? In the maze? A little shiver runs through me. They’re usually monsters formed of several different animals and viciously dangerous. Some say they were fae who were cursed or betrayed by former lovers, and now they seek to take their vengeance
