“I’m so disoriented after being in Pluto all this time. Just finding my bearings before we return home tomorrow.” Lunelle leaned her chin onto her wrist, releasing a slow breath as the tugging in her ribs eased. Mirquios leaned his shoulder against her chair.
Not touching, though the weight of the air between them felt like a tight grasp around their throats.
“What Moon is it?”
She searched the sky, Pluto’s many Moons obscuring hers. “Hmm, the Harvest Moon,” she replied. “But the next is the Mourning Moon, my favorite.” The heft of the words settled on her shoulders. She sank further into herself. “She knows it’s coming, the longest night of the year, and she weeps in the cold, but she shows her face regardless.”
“Is it the longest night of the year if day never comes?”
Lunelle giggled, a gentle release she so desperately needed.He had a point.
“I suppose that mythology works better in courts like this one.”
He was silent for a long moment.
“When we return home, we will figure this out, Lunelle,” Mirquios declared.
Lunelle straightened in the chair. “What is there to figure out? My mother has made her decision and she won’t change her mind. Arcas has threatened to expose every last one of us if I do not marry him. I do not want to get rid of this between us, and I suspect you don’t either…”
He sighed. “Of course not.”
They were truly trapped, but there was something gnawing in the back of her mind—a constant whisper between heartbeats.
What if. What if. What if.
She could not let herself follow that trail. It would only lead to worse pain.
“Tell me more about the Moon.” Mirquios leaned his head against the leather of the chair as she inhaled, trying to pin a place to start.
“When I was a little girl, my father used to tell me that the Moon was my real mother. That I was a drop of liquid moonlight escaped to the courts, and that he and my mother loved me too much to let me return. I used to cry in my bed, thinking I didn’t belong there.”
“Lu,” he breathed, reaching a hand upward, toward the soft silk falling over her arm, but he thought better of it.
Lunelle had never said her next words out loud, never dared let them pass her lips.
“I think I’ve always felt like my court wasn’t my home, somewhere deep down.”
They sat in the silence of what she didn’t say—what shecouldn’tsay. That she’d never felt settled because, all this time, she’d never had him. That home would always be wherever he was—Moon, Mercury, or anywhere in between.
“Take the bed,” he said, pointing to his unmade mattress. “I’ll stay in the chair.”
“You don’t have?—”
The fire in his eyes stopped her protest. He was not interested in her independence. She resigned herself to his request and climbed over him, slipping beneath his soft sheets and letting the scent of him drown her as she fell into another world—the dream world they’d created together—her library, where he was already waiting with a fresh cup of tea and a new book.
She pulled her shoulders back, shaking off the misery from the evening.
“We need a plan for tomorrow,” she said.
Mirquios waited for her to elaborate.
“My sister will sense what’s happened immediately. If we’re going to suffer apart, I do not wish to bring her into it.”
“Of course,” he said, a smirk unfolding.
“What?”
“I like Princess Lunelle, but my gods, Queen Lunelle does something frightening to me,” he murmured, his bright eyes dancing as he watched her regal posture return, the desire to protect her sister reminding her just who she was.
