It’s not that she was ashamed of it, or wasn’t interested in a repeat experience… but it had only left her head cloudier in the end.
It was inexcusable, she knew, to be so selfish. Courts were on the brink of war, and she was sitting in a foreign court fending off thoughts of velvet skin and bright eyes.
Eyes that were not hers to gaze into.
Velvet skin that could be hers if she simply said the word. She wouldn’t even need to say it out loud—she’d just need to glance at Arcas in front of her mother for the deal to be signed in blood. It was obvious, the way Oestera watched them at meals and as they stood in comfortable silence on the terrace after card games.
But there was so much Oestera didn’t see.
Lunelle shook her head, desperate to rid herself of these terrible thoughts.
So she took her tea in the atrium, the delicate glass architecture stretching into the sky and filtering gentle sunbeams across the circular room. She swirled her spoon against the sapphire teacup, letting the warmth of the Sun caress her as she enjoyed a quiet moment.
The boots of the Plutonians echoed off the halls midway through her tea.
They passed in one massive wave of blue, circling the atrium on their way to lunch. She attempted to keep her eyes on her tea, but Arcas caught hers from across the room. She forced a soft smile, but found she wished he hadn’t seen her at all when she saw the frown developing at the corner of his mouth at something one of his advisors whispered to him.
She returned to her tea as he moved into her peripheral vision, crossing the atrium and stopping beside her.
“Princess,” he said.
“Arcas,” she returned, setting her cup down on the table.
“I trust I’ll see you at dinner.”
Lunelle arched a brow. “Uh, well, yes.”
He nodded. “Excellent.”
“I suppose,” she mumbled, brows knitting together.
Arcas was gone before she could gather anything else into a coherent sentence.
“You know,”Mirquios said, sliding into the chair across from her as she flipped another trio of cards over for Yallara. “Your sister did a reading for me before we left. It was not all that encouraging.”
Yallara turned her eyes toward the king, her gaze fogged by wine and the late hour. Lunelle made a concerted effort to avoid looking at him, for fear he might look back.
She’d been unsuccessful at shaking her dream all week.
“What was so alarming about it?” Yallara asked.
Lunelle listened as she lined up the cards over the previous draw, finding the threads that wove them together.
“It was decidedly bleak,” Mirquios mumbled.
“Not everything has to mean something,” Lunelle said.
The king snorted. “That’s exactly what Astra told me.”
Lunelle pulled a final card, laying it in the middle of her spread. She leaned back, taking it all in and absorbing the artwork as she let their meanings mingle together, desperately trying to push anything Astra may or may not have said to him out of her head.
She twisted her lips into a smirk. “You got the Nether Queen card, didn’t you?”
Mirquios leaned away from her, startled. “How did you know?”
“No one likes to see her in a reading, but it’s because they look at her all wrong.” Lunelle took a sip of her wine, tilting her head as she read the cards one more time to herself. “She does not represent a finite end, but the beginning of the next.”
Mirquios touched his fingers to his chin, taking the message for a second time and deciding what to do about it. She blushed, thinking of just how strange the heat from those fingertips had been in her dream.
