Page 129 of Dare
He arched an eyebrow. “Are you asking when I fell in love with Briar?”
An aggravated noise skidded from my chest. “Give me concrete facts. Not a maudlin verse.”
Instead of relishing this moment, Poet stared. There had been a time when he would have skewered me for getting near Flare. To say nothing of what his dagger would have done if I’d stood within a ten-mile radius of Briar.
This bastard excelled in peeling back one’s secrets, having mastered the intricacies of deception. He grasped when someone was in earnest and when they wore a disguise.
If I wasn’t being genuine, this jester would know. Somehow, the soldier to my right would as well.
Poet made his choice. Facing the vista, his eyes flashed with memories. “She enticed me the moment I spied on her during a welcome feast in Spring, as she stood amid public displays of fuckery with her head aloft, despite the fear she tried to conceal. She ruined me in a hall of mirrors when we sparred, her tongue as sharp as my own. She claimed me when she met my son. She seduced me in a garden maze where she danced, then in her Royal suite when I sank to my knees for her, and then in a library where we fantasized together. She broke me in a bell tower, after a shitstorm roundtable. She owned me when we committed treason, rescued my son, and got thrown in jail. She destroyed me on Lark’s Night, when we fucked until dawn, and she got me to shout until my lungs gave out.”
His words turned to silk. “I didn’t fall in love with Briar in a single moment. I fell hard over a thousand moments.”
He had one job. Facts without prose.
Then again, Flare was a romantic. She would admire his speech.
I wavered, feeling incompetent and hating to show it. “I was looking for a definitive moment of epiphany.”
Poet’s lips twitched. “I know.”
Aire scrubbed the back of his mottled neck. Noble. Straitlaced. I could guess which explicit part of Poet’s recitation had affected the knight’s complexion.
The amused jester knew this too. “Never fear. Your turn will come.”
Aire grunted. “If it does, I shall not be vocal about the effects.”
Poet swung his gaze toward me and mouthed, Liar.
Despite myself, my lips ticked sideways. Like Poet, this much I had learned. No one knew a damn thing until it happened to them.
Avians cawed, and mammals roared. Even at this late hour, a sauna would have been more comfortable.
The mood blackened as my thoughts returned to Poet’s earlier point. I spoke through my teeth. “I will not leave her.”
Not yet. I just … would not.
Conflicted, Aire observed me with a mixture of reproach and respect. “Few rulers choose devotion over duty. You are among them.”
I sliced my head toward him. “I gather you have some practice with that.”
“It is a simple truth, not based on firsthand experience. I’m not a monarch. And I have no devotions that surpass duty.”
“None despite your unearthly intuitions?” the jester countered.
The knight’s attention flickered toward the door where the women had exited, then he directed his gaze back to the forest. “My senses provide a service to others. Not to myself.”
My frown deepened. Regardless of what I believed about premonitions, he looked as if a bad omen weighed down his thoughts. But although the man had more to say, he remained quiet.
Poet contemplated his friend with a perceptive expression, then let the matter drop. Instead, he leaned deeper into the casing. “Heed this, Winter. Don’t think any of us will stop watching you. If you fuck up with Flare, I’ll shear the flesh from your bones. That is, after she and Briar are done with you.”
“Warning noted,” I stated. “And accepted.”
His probing features slanted my way. “You’ve changed, sweeting.”
“Is that a compliment?” I wondered.
“Nay.” His mouth quirked. “’Tis an alliance.”