“I do not think I’ll be partaking in any more of the princess’s tea parties.”
He smiled softly, a genuine thing, but his eyes remained elsewhere. “Certainly not.”
They continued slowly, meandering across the orchard. She preferred his company to that of the tent, where half the courtiers were rehashing everything they thought they saw, and the other half were too exhausted to engage beyond tacit smiles.
But the silence between them was surprisingly tolerable, Lunelle noted, irritated at her growing affinity for her sister’s fiancé. It was so much easier to dislike him for stealing Astra away, and yet, there was such an easy charm about him, she found it damn near impossible to hold him accountable for it.
And after watching him take control of the courtiers in the hall, she’d grown an ever more regrettable feeling toward the man—respect.
Lunelle picked up her skirt as she hopped over a twisted section of roots, the edges of the pale linen stained with Plutonian dust.
“She wanted to be seen,” Mirquios said, tucking his chin toward his chest as he stepped over the roots.
“Pardon?” Lunelle asked.
“Proserpina.”
Lunelle shook her head, finding it a tad bit easier to dislike him again. “Of course, because all women naturally desire to be the center of men’s attention.”
A slow grin cracked over his face as those bright eyes stared back toward the massive tree they’d left behind, rising above the rest of the grove.
“She wanted to beseen.Pluto only everlookedat her. He never saw her for who she truly was.”
Lunelle mulled over his point as they began walking again, the quick anger that rose in her chest dissipating with each step. He plucked a pomegranate from the last tree at the far edge, her mother’s stare once again finding her from the tent now that she’d emerged once again.
“You cannot court him,” Mirquios said as plainly as one might state the direction of the wind. He pulled at the end of the fruit, struggling to get hold of it.
Lunelle cleared her throat, still stuck on what he’d risen within her mind about Proserpina.
“I’m sorry?”
“Arcas. He’s a disaster, Lunelle, you saw so last night. He cannot lead his own modest court, let alone a court as powerful as yours.”
She looked away from him, searching the tent, spotting her mother as she laughed with Kahlia. The pomegranate slipped from Mirquios’s hands, landing in the grass below with a thud. Lunelle quickly bent at her knees and scooped it up.
She tilted her head, watching the prince as he slinked between tables, a dark cloud rolling between the courtiers. Searching for his sister, she assumed.
“Arcas is green, I’ll give you that. But I’m not sure he’s adisaster.”
“There’s something dark within him, Lunelle. Something I don’t trust.”
“I feel it,” Lunelle admitted, cracking the pomegranate in half in one quick twist. She handed half to the king, his eyes darting from her hands to her face.
“I loosened it,” he said, eyebrows arched as he pointed to her pale hands now stained in blood reds.
“Perhaps Proserpina did not want to be looked atorseen,” Lunelle mused, flinging the ruby splatter from her fingertips. Mirquios’s eyes narrowed, watching as she popped a handful of weeping seeds into her mouth.
“Oh?”
She nodded, shoving the second half into his hands.
“Perhaps she wanted to be feared.”
Lunelle rarely letherself slip into such an unbecoming posture, but given the seclusion of the tiny courtyard garden between her chambers and the dining hall, she let herself relax.
She pulled one knee up onto the stone edge above a rippling fountain, adjusting her skirts so they covered anything necessary as she swung the other leg back and forth across the pavers. A wall of lush sapphire roses climbed over her, dripping deep blue petals into the fountain’s water.
She counted them as they fell, allowing her mind to focus on nothing but their spiraling paths lest she devolve into panic.
