Page 184 of Dare
No. If she were hurt, I would feel it.
Briar released me and inched backward, tucking herself into Poet’s chest.
The perceptive jester spoke next, his voice low. “And how are you, sweeting?”
Only this once would I condone the endearment. Since returning, no one had asked me that question. Not in that way. More than my kin, these two had witnessed how Flare and I had lived in that rainforest.
The jester waited alongside Briar. Concern. Empathy. They watched me as though consoling a friend.
Is that what we were? Friends?
The notion chipped another fragment of ice from my chest. Briar had once been banished from Autumn; she and Poet had been forced apart. As a Royal, Her Highness had also been bred to keep certain public emotions in check. As a darling to the same Crown that would have sooner clamped his son in irons, Poet had worn a mask in the Spring Court for years.
Indeed. They knew how the fuck I was really doing.
My suite. My bed.
The throne room. The banquet hall.
Escorts. Advisors. Chancellors. Nobles.
I’d never felt less alone. Nor lonelier.
I diced my gaze toward the alpine mountain vista, where the peaks bit into the hemisphere like fangs. “That is irrelevant.”
“You miss her,” Briar interpreted gently, the truth suffocating. But when I kept my gaze averted, she set her palm on my fur-clad arm. “You will find each other again.”
“And if it is not safe?”
A humorless chuckle escaped the princess. “I ask myself that every day, with my husband and our son.”
“My wife isn’t the only one.” Poet leaned one hip against the rim and regarded me with a slanted gaze, his features brought into stark relief against the chilled panorama. “Alas, sweeting. You’ll never stop asking that question, no matter if you’re standing a thousand miles apart or in the same room.”
I cast them a furtive glance. Amid the gray sky, Poet’s green, kohl-lined eyes stood out like a sinful defiance. And how the fuck he’d managed to stride across an ice-laced terrace in those heeled boots without slipping on his ass, I had no clue. The motherfucker made it seem effortless. On that score, no one in Winter could get away with wearing such an ensemble.
Poet would turn every head tonight at the welcome feast. I’d seen him eviscerate Autumn’s chaste sense of propriety merely by stalking into a room. With that face and voice, he was a walking aphrodisiac, smirking and flaunting his tongue as if he’d invented sex. Case in point, that mussed, fuck-me hair routinely looked as if his wife spent the majority of her nights yanking on the roots.
On that score, the jester would disappoint each noble and dignitary in attendance. As much as people lusted for him, the man had eyes only for one woman.
The freckles dotting Briar’s countenance were more pronounced in this climate. Her plaited tresses burned through the frigid setting, and her poise balanced out Poet’s fiendish appearance.
They made a striking pair. Never once did this power couple take for granted the luxury of being together. Nor did they remain ignorant of the constant threats they continued to face.
With renewed ambition, I revisited the other reason we’d convened here. The plans we had made in the rainforest. Our intentions for Autumn and Winter, the merging of our courts for the same crusade.
In The Phantom Wild, we had plotted. Now we would act. To get my little beast back someday, this must be the path.
Poet wrapped his arms around Briar from behind. We stood at the terrace edge, assessing the vista. A blustering wind slapped the fur coat against my limbs and shook the chains of my boots.
Nestled into the alpines, candlelight flickered from countless windows throughout Winter’s universities and museums. It wasn’t a lower town so much as a small city.
I regarded the view while addressing my allies. “For all Winter’s knowledge, we have been educated singularly. Flare’s false imprisonment and the incarceration of any born soul, among countless other errors in judgment, prove as much. It will take time and science but also testimony. To start, tell me what’s happened since the Reaper’s Fest riot. Tell me how you convinced your people in the long-term. Tell me what I don’t know, then share these facts with my queens and our court. Help me to convince them.”
Medical remedies only did so much, providing advantages and disadvantages. Ultimately, they couldn’t be solely relied upon.
Unlike Winter, the Kingdom of Autumn had been learning differently. Avalea, Briar, and Poet’s court taught born souls practical skills, valued and enhanced their inherent abilities, and treated them by mindful means as well as medical.
Poet and Briar’s son, for instance. Nicu’s affliction had to do with an impaired sense of direction, lacking comprehension of space, distance, and location. He could not tell the difference between north and south, the distinction between a kitchen and a bedchamber.