Next to the hearth, Aimee’s face was the picture of horror. She clutched her round belly. “You told her I’d been laboring overnight, didn’t you? I’ve said to you no such thing. I walked into the room today with a tub and laboring tools ready. He can’t come early. It’d be weeks early—and—” She shook, eyes brimmed with angry, knowing tears.
“Shame,” he said dryly. “I promised to pay her handsomely to take him out of you. Told her it was urgent.”
“What is wrong with you?” she breathed. “That is myfriend. She would never—never do that to me.” Tears streamed down Aimee’s face. “Tell me this isn’t about those faeries, Pascal?—”
He lunged, knocking a vase over and pinning her wrists to her side as she cried against the wall. “You’re fucking selfish,” he spat. “Do you know what this could do for us? We haven’t been able to grow anything for months now.”
“Because all you do is obsess, and obsess over those plants.” She shoved him off, strode to the pots, picked one up and flung it across the room?—
Before it shattered against the wall, seafoam mist filled the air once more. The memory was gone.
Garin was silent,but Lilac could feel the rage emanating from him.
The Bugul Noz hummed loudly in awkward disapproval. “That wasn’t the one I wanted. Let’s try this again.”
The mist thinnedto reveal a desk covered in organized stacks of parchment, quill boxes, and a stack of dried pastries on a plate pushed to the side.
Henri’s desk.Except his was usually askew and littered with tankards.
An arm rummaged through the drawer before them before sliding it carefully shut.
“Shit.” Garin’s voice, low and barely audible.
There were footsteps and voices outside the study. The scene shifted up to the rest of her father’s study. Again, much too neat.
“She’s with child,” chimed one—male. There was the sound of metal, something like clinking armor. “Surely he will let them off easy.”
“I don’t know.” A second voice, female. “Francis is a kind king, but François’s men are here.”
“This is true. His kindness tonight would look too easily like pandering weakness.”
The footsteps passed the study; Garin moved out from behind the desk, slipped out the door, and into the dark western tower. Distant, echoing voices floated throughout the keep. The clanking of dishes and hushed whispers of gossip.
He passed the rooms on the left Lilac recognized as spare rooms for herparents’ court, leaving the king and queen’s chamber behind as he rapidly descended the steps, barely a sound to his footfall.
Garin broke into the empty second-floor keep and peered down into the foyer. No one was there save the guards flanking the front doors; one was dawdling, loosening the straps at his shoulders. The other had his head back against the wall.
The scene shifted, as if he’d descend the foyer steps—when there was another sound. One beyond the castle chatter.
The sound of a strange wheezing. Then, a cough, high-pitched and wet.
It was an infant.
The scene blurred, jostling and churning her stomach. Garin was suddenly in her tower, his vision bright despite the dying embers in the fireplace. Her four-poster bed was not there; near the hearth, in the center of the room, was a lone crib—and a figure standing above it, a bundle in its arms.
“No.”
The man’s head snapped up, face twisting in shock beneath his dark blonde brows and slicked mop of hair. His familiar icy eyes narrowed. “Erm, yes? Can I help you?”
The infant’s wheezing continued, but he seemed in no rush to help it.
Garin strode toward him, causing the man to retreat. “What are you doing? Who are you?” The man stumbled back, tripping over a wooden toy.
“Give the child to me,” Garin demanded, his voice laced with panic.
The man shrank away. “N-no, I was?—”
A fist shot out. Bones crunched, and the man screamed. “Guards!” he roared.
