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Princess Emiana.
Hair so red it rejected the moonlight fell around her shoulders and brushed the bottom of her bodice. To say she was lovely was to insult her. So simple a word did not begin to describe the beauty of her emerald eyes, bee-stung lips, rosy cheeks, and jewel-cuffed pointed ears. Robes like angel wings floated around her form, revealing more than it concealed.
I instinctively averted my eyes. A finger under my chin drew them back up where she trapped them in her green pools. I would’ve cringed if my face would’ve allowed it. No one had ever looked at me with such contempt before, and I endured Kirwan’s hatred for years.
She halted in her tracks. “She’s moon-kissed. How—? She’s disgusting,” Princess Emiana spat. “If only Meya had seen fit to send us a comely girl. It sickens me to think I’ll be wearing this face for the foreseeable future.”
Confusion wafted through my mind and dissipated, not allowing the questions it brought to my lips to come out. What in the name of the All Mother was she talking about?
“Disgusting, my love? I wouldn’t say so,” Kaelan spoke up. “She has a certain fairness about her that I thought worthy—”
“Don’t you dare question me.”
The snap closed his mouth.
Irritated, Emiana threw my face away harder than she needed to. “She may be the right height and build, but she is wrong in every other way. I shall be as cursed as her for what we do here tonight. Punishment for dabbling in the unholy arts, but...” She blew out a long breath. “That is how it must be.
“Stand her up.”
Kaelan stood me on my feet, gentler in his touch than she was.
“Undo whatever magics you performed on her.”
“Your Majesty?”
Emiana spoke to him, but looked deep into my eyes. “Her magic is no less bound than mine. There is nothing she can do to fight back against us. No need to restrain her body and mind too, unless she gives us reason.”
Her compassion surprised me for the brief moment I felt surprise. Largely because she was still sneering at me.
Coolness spread down my head and flowed through my body. In the space of a breath, control was mine again.
I lurched back, tripping over my feet and nearly dropping on the carpet. “What is this? What am I doing here!”
“Hey! You address your princess.” Kaelan advanced on me. “You will hold your tongue, and speak only when spoken to.”
“Fuck you!”
Kaelan’s brows blew up his forehead. I suspect it wasn’t often a Gutter girl spoke to him like that.
“Kaelan,” Emiana said, raising a hand. “I will handle this.”
Falling silent, he snapped to the side—ever the obedient soldier. Emiana gave her first change of expression since I was brought into the room. She smiled.
“Fuck you indeed.” Her voice was a soft, light brush. “You’re angry. You’re scared and worried, but just because you stand in my presence, you’re ordered to hide what you feel. To lock it away and put on the face of a happy servant. Faemen...” She slid a look to Kaelan. “Cannot understand what it is to live bound by such chains. You may even believe that I don’t know either.
“I, Princess Emiana, live in a grand castle high above your problems. How could I ever relate to someone such as you?”
I lifted my chin. “Not to be rude to Your Eminence, but, you can’t.”
“That,” she said, turning her back on me, “is where you’re wrong. You see me and think I have wealth, but is that the case when every coin I spend is under the control and permission of others? You think I have power, but is it powerful to sit silently in a room of advisors and rulers, waiting for a single person to ask my opinion. You think I have freedom, and I ask you, what woman in Lyrica does?” she hissed.
“My magic was bound at ten, same as you. My choices were taken from me, same as you. My fathersoldme to warm the bedof a brutish man, just like you!” She whirled on me, stiffening my spine. “In the end, we are all the same to them... whores.”
I said nothing. What was there for me to say? To compare our lives was to live in a deluded fantasy. True, I knew nothing of the troubles of a princess, but I doubt she knew what it was to go days without food, weeks without a bath, or a lifetime with no dignity.
“I haven’t convinced you,” she said, reading my expression easily. “You don’t believe we’re all the same, no matter the station? Then, this is all I need to say to convince you.
“The royal line passed through my mother, not my father, King Salman. Try as they did, my grandparents were not able to have the son they wished for, leaving my mother to shoulder her birthright. But did they allow her to?
