“Weren’t you the one who said dreams might be enough?—”
Lunelle’s brows tucked together, her head tilting.
“When did I?—”
A half-smile tugged at his lips. “In the library,” he whispered.
Pink pooled on her cheeks, warming her face as she leaned into him, hiding her eyes.
“Do not do that,” he chuckled, pulling her chin back toward him. “You can never hide from me, Lunelle. I will always find you.”
When she’d finally priedherself from the eyes of the Inner Courts and stumbled back to her bed chambers, she was surprised to find a certain Plutonian princess perched at the edge of her bed.
“Yallara!”
Her onyx waves bounced as she rose at Lunelle’s voice, crossing the room and grabbing at her hands.
“Lunelle, my gods, I am so sorry!”
“For what?” Lunelle could think of dozens of things one might pity her for, but not one of them was Yallara’s doing.
“I know that this isn’t what you intended, that last night things got heated, and he, he, godsdammmit,” she cried, falling onto Lunelle’s sofa and pulling her into the seat beside her. “I’d always hoped that there was more to my brother than our father’s brutal misgivings, but the destruction he caused last night… the pain. It will take Kwan months to rebuild?—”
“Yallara,” Lunelle whispered, smoothing a tangled curl from her pale face, wet with tears. “I understand your fears. And I will not lie to you and say I do not share them. But perhaps there is a way—with time—that I can influence your brother. I don’t believe that he’s half the monster he thinks he is.”
“Do you really think so?” The sullen blues of her face seemed to deepen with her sorrow, the candlelight clung to her tear-stained cheeks as she drew a slow breath.
Lunelle wasn’t sure what she thought. She only knew what she hoped for desperately, and those were rarely the same things.
“I will do my best,” she whispered.
“Princesses?” Lura set a tray of tea down on the table before them, her own eyes welled with the frustration and anger of the room.
“If anyone can cause a boy to want to become a man, it’s a woman far too wise for him,” Lura said with a quiet confidence Lunelle wished she could bottle. She leaned back into the sofa, maintaining a soft hand on Yallara’s forearm, who seemed as if she was finally able to take a full breath.
“Goddess speed to you,” Yallara sighed, reaching for a cup. “When you return to the Lunar Court tomorrow, I am calling a meeting with the rebels. I believe there are enough of us within the halls of the palace that, in my brother’s absence, we may be able to make strides toward dismantling his advisory.”
Lunelle’s lips twitched into a half smile, the most she could gather.
“Your brother was right to fear you,” she giggled. “You move things along here, and I will move them along with Arcas. If one wise woman can turn a boy into a man, imagine what two can do.”
Lura cleared her throat.
“Three,” Lunelle corrected, feeling the slightest slip of lightness she’d hold close over the coming months.
“You shouldn’t be here,”Mirquios groaned when a halo of silver curls appeared in his doorway in the middle of the night.
Not that he’d been anywhere close to sleeping.
She wore less fabric than he was capable of taking in responsibly—just a slip of white silk and a robe left open. Every detail of her sparkled in the flickering lantern light, something they seemed to realize at the same moment. She pulled her robe tightly over her body and tied the waistband, though it wasn’t much better.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she sighed. She’d tried. She’d gone back into that ballroom so bravely, with a smile on her face even though she felt as if she were spiraling back into Pluto’s underworld. Yallara and Lura had stayed long enough to convince her not to fling herself from the Plutonian cliffs.
But the moment she was alone again, the pain struck up, flaring across her chest.
“You could at least have worn a very thick cloak,” he muttered, rubbing at the ache in his chest. He moved from the doorway and let her in, the war within him seeping into the Tether. She slipped in like smoke, settling quietly into the corner of one of the armchairs near the window. He watched as she peeled back the curtain, spotting the Moon and her contemporaries in the sky and doing some sort of silent calculation.
“What is it?” he asked, sitting gently on the floor beside her. She tucked her knees to her chest and pushed the curtain back further.
