Page 10 of A Kiss of Flame

He couldn’t help himself. ‘But not me.’

Roland looked up at him sharply. ‘You think I doubt you?’

‘What am I supposed to think?’ He didn’t mean to sound so petulant, but it was hard. He could feel something else brewing, like an oncoming storm. Roland was holding off telling him what that might be and Finn didn’t like that.

‘Keeping the two of you as far apart as possible until we can sort out whatever has happened between you and untangle whatever enchantments she wove would be better.’ Finn made to protest but Roland raised his hand to silence him. ‘Inadvertently wove.’

For a moment Finn didn’t know what to say.

‘You’re separating us? Like children?’

‘Some would say you are children.’ Roland sat down behind his desk now and Finn sank into the chair opposite him. This couldn’t be happening.

‘Because of the queen? Has she demanded this?’ He knew Elodie didn’t approve of his relationship with Wren. She had made that perfectly clear. The worst part was, Finn feared she might be right. And that made him feel like the worst kind of traitor.

A queen in prison, on trial for treason, shouldn’t be in a position to make demands of anyone. Perhaps it was Ylena. The regent had lost more than anyone in the war against the Ilanthians so it was no wonder she distrusted him. Perhaps she was only trying to protect Wren. The Aurum knew that was all Finn himself wanted to do.

That brief thought of the Aurum, and the darkness that had flared in its depths when he had stood there before it with Wren, made the icy cold hand of reality crush his spiralling worries.

Roland and Ylena didn’t know the worst of Wren’s magic, what it had done to the Aurum’s flame. Finn didn’t know how or why the flames had turned black for those long, terrible moments, but he knew what it could mean. The Nox had touched Wren in that stone circle. It had made itself part of them somehow. He’d felt it flow through them both. And maybe more of it remained than they realised.

It was the reason he had been keeping his distance, staying away from her, or at least trying to, even though it felt like physical pain to do so. He burned for her in a way he couldn’t explain, like those holy flames, eternal and all-encompassing. It had to be an enchantment, his rational mind told him. Wren hadn’t meant to do it, he was sure of that, but something had happened to bind him to her. He could claim it was when she saved his life with her magic in the stone circle, but he knew it had happened long before that. He’d been bitten by shadow kin. That ought to have been the end of him and if anyone found out even that much, he’d be locked up, examined and tested to madness. But Wren had cured him, riddled him with divine light and made him… made him into something else. Her creature. When she was threatened, he lost his mind with the raging need to protect her.

Perhaps it had happened even before that. In the forest of Cellandre, where he first met her. When he had lost all sense of who and what he was and she had saved him. He had kissed her. Her lips on his, her body in his arms… even that first kiss still haunted him.

Roland spoke again, more softly but still firm, the voice of command.

‘I have another mission in mind for you. One for which you are uniquely suited.’

That did not sound good at all. And clearly it was something designed to keep him as far away from Wren as possible. Which… yes, he knew it had to be this way. Inevitable.

‘Which is?’

‘The king of Ilanthus, your father, has petitioned us to reopen the embassy as a gesture of goodwill and an overture of peace talks.’

For a moment Finn thought he might be hearing things. ‘Peace talks.’ The two words came out flat with disbelief. His father didn’t want peace. None of his family did.

‘He is sending a special emissary here and they have asked specifically for you to act as a liaison. He sent a letter.’

‘What letter?’

Roland produced it, unrolled it and let Finn read. It really didn’t help. Not at all.

‘You can’t believe any of this?’

Roland shrugged. Whether they believed it was clearly beside the point. Finn was a prince of Sidon, Ilanthian royalty, whether he liked it or not. He might have started off as a hostage here but the connections he could forge between the two courts were, as the letter pointed out, unique. It would serve them both.

His father’s signature adorned the bottom of the page, a beautiful and elaborate scrawl. There was an official seal. This was not a lie.

But it could be a trap.

Finn sighed to himself.

Of course it would be a trap. For him. Or for Roland. For someone.

And it would surely mean he would be kept as far away from Wren as possible. Because an Ilanthian could never be trusted. But of course, he knew that better than anyone.

CHAPTER 5