No one, not even her kingdom, wanted a repeat of the Hundred Years’War, or one to that scale, that much was true. She was in the middle of arguing that she would perhaps explain the nuances of her situation and he’d merely send her several brigades, when the sun on her back felt suddenly unbearable. She sidestepped into the shadows, but this didn’t seem to help much.
The heat was getting to her. Lilac barely ground out that she would revisit the option of outsourcing troops without marriage at a later date, before she found herself being lifted off the library floor by two sets of hands, one at her head and one at her feet. Her shoulders and back of her skull throbbed, the sharp voices of Yanna and Isabel ringing out above her as the councilmen carried her up her tower stairs.
She spent the rest of the day—what she remembered of it at least—dizzily being tended to by her handmaidens, Madame Kemble, and Hedwig, who spent several hours pressing cloths to her head and staving off any pending fever. She did recall her parents coming to the door, only for Kemble to usher them away. Her caretakers found it most concerning that the usually breakfast-ravenous queen had not thought to request food be brought to their early morning meeting, but she hadn’t realized she was starving until it was too late.
Even with a full platter beside her bed, Lilac’s first inclination was not to dig in under Kemble’s watchful gaze, but insist on her privacy. She had the girls draw her curtains against the sunlight before they left, and as soon as the door shut, she shakily bit into a sausage, devouring the entire thing along with an apple and half piece of bread, washing it down with a glass of water.
As she’d feared, this did nothing to quell the ache in her chest and churning in her gut, the general feeling thatsomethingwas wrong—and, for once in her life, that something wasn’t nerves or fear. Or hunger.
At least for food.
She’d laid down and, again, forced herself to shut her eyes. She lay there in the silence, hating being inside her own mind and once again willing rest to come easy, but all she could think of was Garin. How cross she was with him, what she would say to him if he were there. What she might do to him.
There would not be much speaking or fighting, she knew. Her handsslipped beneath her nightgown and she cursed him. Cursed herself and her humanity.
When the sun dipped beyond the trees, casting her room in fire and gold, Lilac finally slept, the last of her energy reserves spent by making herself come to the mere thought of him next to her. It was a poor semblance of sleep, riddled with broken dreams of Garin’s hands and teeth. In her dreams, he was pacing the length of his room at the inn.
He was a monster who needed comforting. Shaking, shivering into his quilt, the bottom half of his face and teeth smeared in burgundy, eyes shut tight against the world, the embers dying before him.
Lilac woke the following morning with a start, rays of sun peeking through her curtains, her nightgown drenched in sweat and her hair a bird’s nest atop her head.
She’d prolonged it as much as possible. If Garin’s sanguine magic, his entrancement—whatever it was—continued to torture her this way, who knew what might happen? It might drive her mad. She had set her defenses in place as much as was reasonable without any true provocation from France.
She had a choice… or wanted to believe she did. Lilac could continue as she had and not do anything. Continue to suffer and allow Garin’s magic to work around her—against her. Or, she could do as he demanded and make him regret every moment of it.
She could watch him beg for her blood and body, and revel in it.
Lilac had then leapt from her bed before her dutiful handmaidens could stop her and marched downstairs, nightgown drenched in sweat, to the Grand Hall. She’d swung the doors open and doubly shocked her parents by demanding all propositions received by the courier in the days she was gone. Marguerite had then slowly glanced up from her breakfast to exchange a glance with John, as if it hadn’t been a topic of conversation as of late.
The scribe then cleared his throat to announce in front of her parents, near dozen staff and scullery either taking their meals or helping organize it, and the six guards lining the room that there had been none thus far.
No proposals.
For the first time, Garin was wrong.
Lilac had her mother repeat the news, just to confirm. Begrudgingly, Marguerite did as she requested, along with a strongly-worded suggestion for a bath. By the time her mother began nagging on about the next thing, Lilac had turned heel, her ears ringing. She could not marry if there werenooffers for her hand. Impossibly, she felt something shift, an immense pressure off her shoulders and chest. The sensation of restless dread in her chest had begun to dissipate. Lilac grabbed a tart from the incoming breakfast cart she met at the door and marched back up to her tower, followed by the baffled gazes of her parents.
Lilac had simmered in giddy rage as Yanna and Isabel arrived had drawn the bath she sat in now.
Garin was a monster with a sweet tongue, wielding a terrible kind of magic. He would never hold this kind of power over her again. This had made the first and only other time he’d entranced her feel likenothing; the way he’d had her hold her vibrating dagger to herself, bringing her to a swift and shattering orgasm—though, that had not been a request she’d intended on fighting.
But being humiliated, made to crawl across the floor…
Heat blossomed upon her cheeks, moisture stinging her eyes.
Howdarehe entrance her, strip her of what little freedoms he’d spoken of.
A spark of defiance brought on an abrupt wave of vigor, her strength returning with her anger as her mind finally started to clear enough to consider the repercussions of Garin’s betrayal.
It was time. She had played his game, a little too roughly for her liking. Now, she would play her way. She would make him pay, risk of a blood bond or no.
She rose from the bath without warning; there was no sense in staying any longer if Yanna and Isabel were going to prod her like some experiment. Isabel toweled her hair while Yanna slid her into a pretty kirtle of muted pink over a cream shift, and a fine eggshell corset patterned in roses and leaves from the back of her armoire, duly ignoring the folded stack of clothing Garin had gifted her at the bottom of it. This was one of the pieces of clothing her mother had acquired in the past year, should she one day return to society—as if fashion would suffice as any kind of bandage over her Daemon tongue.
Perhaps in the past few days, in Lilac’s hysteria her handmaidens hadn’thad the chance to examine her properly. They stared at her in the mirror as she combed her hair, which brushed the bottom of her collarbone and had mysteriously deepened in color, dancing in several shades of oak and auburn and framing her full, flushed cheeks. Lilac rifled in her vanity drawer for her powder and rogue to try to cover some of it up while they styled her in a pair of half-up braids that softly crowned her head and balanced the intensity of her gaze.
“Are you… expecting someone, Your Majesty?” Isabel asked, stepping back after her hair was fashioned.
“No.” Lilac untucked a couple chunks of hair around her crown, just like she liked it.
