out Hann’s thinking of himself as a spy pretending to be a monarch.
“Marry me,” he says. “Become the Queen of Elfhame.”
I feel a kind of cold shock come over me, as though someone has told a particularly cruel joke, with me its target. As though someone looked into my heart and saw the most ridiculous, most childish desire there and used it against me. “But you can’t.”
“I can,” he says. “Kings and queens don’t often marry for something other than a political alliance, true, but consider this a version of that. And were you queen, you wouldn’t need my obedience. You could issue all your own orders. And I would be free.”
I can’t help thinking of how mere months ago I fought for a place in the Court, hoping desperately for knighthood and didn’t even get that.
The irony that it’s Hann, wh
