Claimed by the Summer King

CHAPTER 4

Liora POV

The petal burned.

Not truly Liora knew that, logically, the way she knew fire was hot and ice was cold and yet every time her fingers brushed the small folded square of parchment tucked into the lining of her travel trunk, the blackened moonflower petal pressed flat inside it seemed to pulse warm against her skin, like something with a heartbeat of its own. She'd told herself for six months it was nothing. A trick of nerves. A guilty conscience giving her fingers ideas that weren't real.

She hadn't thrown it away, though. That was the part she refused to examine too closely.

"Can you believe today is finally the day?" Seraphine's voice cut through the quiet like a blade through silk, and Liora nearly dropped the gown she'd been folding, her hand jerking guiltily away from the trunk's lining as though she'd been caught somewhere she shouldn't be.

"How could I not?" Liora forced her voice into something light, something bored. "You've spoken of nothing else for half a year."

Six months, three days, she corrected silently, the number arriving with the same precision it always did, unbidden and exact, the way it had every single morning since the ships had pulled away from the mainland docks. Since Prince Kael King Kael, now crowned the moment his foot touched Summer Isle soil had sailed out of her life with hundreds of cheering subjects lining the harbor to see him go.

Liora had not been among them. She'd claimed a headache, blamed too much honeysuckle wine, and hidden in her chambers while Seraphine wept prettily into a lace handkerchief on the dock, playing the devoted bride-to-be for an audience of thousands. Liora told herself it was cowardice. She told herself a great many things these days that she didn't quite believe.

"I still don't understand why you insist on bringing every gown you own," Liora said, nodding at the mountain of silk currently threatening to swallow the room whole. "You'll only replace half of it once we land. The Summer Isle has its own fashions."

Seraphine, seated at her vanity dragging a golden-bristled brush through hair like spun moonlight, caught Liora's eye in the looking glass with an expression that could have curdled milk. "I need you sharp when we arrive, Liora, not worrying about my wardrobe. You've heard the same rumors I have. They say he takes a different girl to bed every night. Sometimes more than one at once."

The brush came down against the vanity table hard enough to send a tremor through the glass.

"They're only rumors," Liora said, and hated the way her voice wavered on the last word, hated more that half of her hoped it wasn't true and the other half the part of her she kept locked away even from herself hoped it wasn't true for entirely selfish reasons.

"And where, precisely, do rumors come from?" Seraphine's eyes flashed in the mirror, sharp as knives.

"Every young lord runs wild before his wedding," Liora pressed on. "He'll settle the moment you're there to remind him what he stands to lose."

She did not mention that half the married lords in the palace kept mistresses well past their vows, that the whole court reeked of quiet, well-dressed infidelity dressed up as tradition. Fae ran hot hot tempers, hotter blood and no amount of ceremony had ever fully tamed that particular flaw in their nature. We are a beautifully broken people, Liora thought, and immediately hated herself for the small, treacherous part of her that understood exactly why those unfaithful lords strayed. She understood it because she carried the same ache, quietly, for a man she could never have.

He tricked you. There was no real spark. It was pixie dust, or some cheap parlor charm meant to loosen her knees for one last conquest before he sailed away forever. She had told herself this so many times it should have started sounding true by now. It never did. Her lips still remRivened the shape of his mouth on the bridge of her nose. Her palm still remRivened the static-shock heat of his hand closing around hers.

"Liora!" Seraphine's voice sliced through the memory like a blade through gauze. "Are you even listening to a word I say?"

The gown slipped from Liora's fingers, forgotten, pooling silk at her feet. She manufactured a yawn, wide and unconvincing. "Forgive me. I was up half the night making sure everything was packed."

Not entirely a lie. Half the night had been spent staring at the ceiling, imagining every possible version of their arrival on the Summer Isle, and none of them had let her sleep.

Seraphine's expression softened, just slightly, into something almost pleading. She turned on her stool, smoothing the lilac silk over her knees. "Then promise me something. Promise you'll watch him for me. I won't survive it if the rumors turn out to be true and I have no proof, no way to confront him properly."

Her crystalline eyes held such raw, unguarded hope that Liora's next breath caught somewhere behind her ribs.

"I promise," she said, and meant it, even as a small, treacherous voice in the back of her skull whispered, "Who's going to watch you, Liora?

"Good." Seraphine's smile returned, brittle around the edges, and she swiveled back toward her reflection. "Then finish packing. We sail at dawn whether your trunk is ready or not."

Liora said nothing to the sourness that had crept into her mistress's voice, a coldness that had settled over Seraphine gradually across the last six months, growing sharper by the week, though Liora could never quite name what had caused it. Does she know, that same treacherous voice pressed. Is it one of the rumors about me?

She shoved the thought down hard enough to bruise. They had grown up together, she and Seraphine, sharing chambers and secrets and stolen sweets since they were children barely old enough to walk. If Seraphine suspected anything real, surely she would simply ask. Surely there would be some conversation, some confrontation, rather than this slow, silent frost creeping in between them.

If she asked, I could tell her everything, Liora thought, and then immediately flinched from the idea, because telling the truth would mean explaining exactly how far things had gone that night in the cove further, in the whispering rumor-version she suspected Seraphine had already heard, than they actually had. Would Seraphine believe the truth, or the story? Liora wasn't certain there was a difference anymore.

Warmth crept up her throat despite the guilt, unbidden and humiliating, images rising unasked moonlight on water, his mouth against her nose, the blue flash behind her own closed eyes.

"I'll have everything ready shortly," Liora managed, voice thick, and covered the crack in it with a cough.

"Good." Seraphine rose from her stool in one fluid, practiced motion and swept toward the door, already composing whatever face she intended to wear for her goodbyes. She paused at the threshold, hands folded primly, one silver eyebrow arched in silent command until Liora scrambled to open the door for her.

I don't like this, Liora thought, watching her mistress glide out into the corridor without a backward glance. She held her breath without meaning to and only released it once the door clicked shut.

Whatever waited for them on the Summer Isle, she suspected it would not be kind to either of them. She had spent six months refusing to imagine it. Tomorrow at dawn, refusing would no longer be an option.

Her fingers found the trunk's lining again, almost without her permission, and pressed flat against the small hidden shape of the folded parchment beneath the silk.

It was warm. It was always warm now, whenever her mind wandered too far toward the cove, toward the water, toward him as if the scorched little petal inside it hadn't given up on her even when she'd sworn, over and over, that she'd given up on him.

She snatched her hand back and returned to folding gowns, and told herself, one more time, that it meant nothing at all.

Outside, the sky was already softening toward the grey that came before dawn, and somewhere below her window she could hear the first stirrings of the household trunks being dragged across stone, horses stamping in the courtyard, the low murmur of servants who had been given far too little sleep and far too much to carry. By the time the sun cleared the eastern towers, they would be gone from this palace, from these familiar corridors, from every small comfort Liora had spent six years quietly building for herself in a life that was never truly hers to keep.

She thought of the harbor she'd refused to stand on six months ago, of the ship that had carried him away with its sails full and proud, and wondered whether he'd looked back even once. Whether he'd searched the crowd for a face that wasn't there and felt anything at all when he didn't find it, or whether he'd simply turned his eyes forward, toward his new kingdom, and let the memory of one reckless kiss in a hidden cove dissolve as easily as sea foam.

She hoped, cruelly, that it hadn't. And hated herself a little more for hoping for it.

By the time she finished folding the last of Seraphine's gowns and latched the trunk shut, the parchment and its small blackened secret pressed safely out of sight beneath the silk, the window had gone the color of a bruise healing purple fading into grey fading, slowly, inevitably, into the pale gold of a morning she had no choice but to sail into.

Tomorrow, she had told herself for six months, as though the word itself might hold the tide back a little longer.

Tomorrow I finally ran out of road.