The next morning, a footman escorted Niamh to her new studio and handed her a letter composed in the prince regent’s immaculate handwriting.
Dear Miss O’Connor,
Please accept my sincerest apologies on my brother’s behalf, and for my sudden departure yesterday. I hope you are settling in well, and do not hesitate to let my staff know if there is anything at all you might need …
The note went on to describe, in excruciating detail, Kit’s social calendar for the Season. In addition to an outfit for the presentation of the debutantes next week—and the arrival of his fiancée, the first time in one hundred years that the Castilian royal family would stand on Avlish soil without a war banner and a navy behind them—he would need suits for two balls a week, a hunting jacket, and, of course, the traditional wedding cloak.
Before she left Machland, Niamh had cobbled together as much information as she could on Avlish wedding traditions. As part of the ceremony, the groom’s best man placed a cloak around his shoulders to symbolize his new role as husband and protector. It recalled, apparently, a chivalric era, where a knight’s squire would help him dress for battle. How unromantic, Niamh thought, to see marriage as a battle to be won. In Machland, they exchanged golden coins and danced until dawn. Here, a wedding ended no later than noon.
Niamh scanned the rest of Jack’s note—and nearly gasped with excitement. Infanta Rosa had requested that Niamh design her wedding dress.
Details, Jack wrote, to be finalized upon her arrival.
It was an enormous honor, one she hadn’t dared to hope for. But after a moment, it sank in exactly what had been asked of her. She would need to make ten pieces in six weeks. Even though he’d promised her a team of assistants to help assemble the garments she designed, the prospect of all that work daunted her more than she cared to admit. It took the better part of ten minutes for complete and utter overwhelm to harden into stubborn determination. Neither absurd deadlines nor difficult princes could frighten her. Not when Gran and Ma were counting on her.
Especially not when she’d been given such a beautiful workspace.
The staff had stocked the workshop with everything she could possibly need and more. There was a spinning wheel tucked into the corner—even a loom—and a gorgeous worktable situated just beneath the bay windows. The bookcases had been emptied and refilled with sumptuous bolts of fabric, everything far finer than she could’ve ever dreamed of purchasing herself.
She stood in the middle of the room with her hands clasped at her chest. She never wanted to leave this place. She couldn’t believe that, even if only for a month, all of this was hers. If only for a month, she could imagine that she truly belonged in a place as beautiful as this. That maybe she even deserved it.
Niamh gathered her skirts in her hands and twirled through the open space. She’d never learned to dance, but she almost heard the swell of the string quartet now. The weightless one-two-three of the steps, the steady touch of her partner’s hand at her waist, and—
“What are you doing?”
She shrieked in surprise. When she whirled toward the voice, she saw Kit standing in the doorway. She dropped her skirts and steadied herself before she trod on the hem. “Did you knock?”
For a moment, he only stared at her. He wore a peculiar expression, caught somewhere between bemusement and irritation. “Yes. I knocked.”
“Well, please knock louder next time!” Blood rushed through her ears, and her face burned with embarrassment. This was precisely why she couldn’t indulge her flights of fancy, as Gran liked to call them. Anytime she paused to enjoy something, anytime she indulged herself, something terrible happened. She’d wasted too many afternoons sketching out impractical, unsellable gowns, or daydreaming away the hours while a loaf of bread burned in the oven. And now, she’d been caught dancing alone by the most judgmental man in Avaland. “You scared me.”
“You were lost in your own world. I hardly see how that’s my fault.”
Niamh resisted the urge to groan aloud. Surely, he had more important things to do than mock her. He was lucky his voice was as nice as his eyes, or no one would be able to stand him at all. It had a pleasing rasp to it, like the tide over a rocky shore.
She forced a polite smile. “What can I do for you, Your Highness?”
“Don’t call me that. Your Highness is my brother.”
So he and Sinclair did have something in common. Neither of them had much regard for things like titles or formality. Still, Kit couldn’t hide his true nature. All the pride radiating off him—the upturned nose, the disdainful curl of his lip—was testament enough to his princeliness.
“My lord, then?” she tried.
He sighed exasperatedly. “Just Kit.”
“Very well, my…” She caught herself before the very regrettable words my Kit left her mouth. No, it was far too intimate. She couldn’t call him by his given name, so she would not call him anything at all. “Ehm … I’m sorry. What is it you wanted again?”
“I’m supposed to get fitted for a new coat.” He said fitted as though it were a method of torture and coat as though it were an instrument of one.
All at once, the memory of his insult came flooding back. I would sooner wear nothing to my wedding than anything she has so much as looked at. Hurt knotted itself tight within her, but she drew in a deep breath to steady herself. Everyone deserved a second chance. Sinclair had suggested as much, in his way.
“Have you changed your mind, then?” Immediately, she wished she could wrangle he words back into her mouth. She’d meant to sound playful, but all her hurt feelings tumbled out like thread from an unraveling spool.
Kit straightened up, and his eyes narrowed distrustfully. “About what?”
You know very well what. She shoved her wounded pride down. If he wanted to believe she was nothing but an airheaded, peacocking fool, so be it. With as sweet a smile as she could manage, she said, “You aren’t planning to go naked to your wedding anymore?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” he asked, entirely and disappointingly unfazed. “Let’s get this over with.”
“As you wish, sir.”
She hadn’t yet mapped out the new studio, but it couldn’t be that hard to find what she needed. She flung open the drawers of her worktable and was disturbed to see everything organized by color, every tool exactly aligned in perfect little rows. Whoever did this was very fastidious indeed. Her own method of organization was … Well, she supposed calling it a method would be a stretch of the imagination.
After a few moments of rummaging, she grabbed a notebook, tucked a pencil behind her ear, and draped a strip of tailor’s tape around her neck. Kit stood exactly where she’d left him: arms crossed, lurking halfway out the door, ready to bolt at the slightest provocation.
She gestured to the mirror. “Stand here, please.”
To her surprise, he obeyed without complaint. He skulked into the room as if one of the dress forms might suddenly leap at him, or a swath of colorful silk might fly from its bolt and garrote him. It admittedly unnerved her to have him so close, with him glaring down the bridge of his nose at her. He was as lean and coiled as a wolf in midwinter and shorter than most men she’d met. But as slight as he was, she was smaller. There were a few inches of height between them. That would make things difficult.
“One moment.”
Niamh retreated to the corner of the room and dragged over a footrest. She unwound the tailor’s tape from around her neck, then climbed onto the ottoman. The legs wobbled beneath her weight, and Niamh swore she saw Kit flinch, as though he meant to steady her but stopped himself at the last moment. It surprised her enough that she almost knocked herself off-balance again. Perhaps he still possessed some gentlemanly instinct. Or perhaps she’d imagined it entirely. He stared resolutely at the wall, a muscle in his jaw feathering.
Her hair still hung loose around her shoulders, so she swept it back into a chignon. One glance in the mirror revealed that she looked a complete and utter mess, but she couldn’t be bothered with it at the moment. It wasn’t as though she could impress him if she tried.
She began taking his measurements: his height, the breadth of his shoulders, the length of his arm … By some miracle, he allowed her to manipulate him like a doll and wore only a slightly martyred expression. But now, she had exhausted everything safe. Safe. How ridiculous. She was a consummate professional. He was the one who would undoubtedly be fussy and awkward about what came next, so she would warn him and be done with it.
“So…” An unpromising start. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I will need to be a little close for the next few measurements. If that bothers you—”
“Just do it.”
“Right,” she replied with false cheer. “Lift your arms for me, please.”
The silence ground miserably on. Her arms were too short to spare either of them the discomfort of proximity. Niamh sidled closer to him, until she pressed herself nearly flush against his back. Heat radiated off him, along with the scent of growing things—and tobacco. If only she could stop noticing him. Never in her life had she felt so self-sabotaging. As she looped the tailor’s tape around his chest, she felt as much as saw his muscles wind tighter. As her elbow grazed his ribs, his breath hitched. The fabric of his shirt whispered against her skin, and—
“Do you have something you want to say to me?” Kit asked.
His bluntness all but crushed her every untoward thought. “Huh?”
“You’ve been acting skittish and strange from the moment I walked through the door. If there’s something on your mind, out with it.”
Skittish and strange. Oh, the nerve of him! The last of her patience snapped. “Well,” she drawled, “since you asked so nicely, I thought you might want to apologize.”
Kit’s face slackened with surprise. She watched as he pulled himself back together piece by piece, his expression darkening with understanding. “Sorry.”
Sorry, spat out like a broken tooth. As though she’d extracted a confession from him under torture. If she wasn’t so furious with him, she might have laughed. “Is that all?”
His eyes flashed with bitter frustration. “What else do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know.” Her heart beat so wildly, she could barely hear herself over its thunderous roar. Some distant part of her knew she should demur or simper or stand down, that she should not talk to a prince this way. Perhaps it was her finite days that gave her courage, or perhaps it was the seamstress in her. She’d never been able to resist tugging at loose threads. “That you regret calling my craft a trick?”
He fixed his gaze on the wall past her shoulder. “I was angry when I said that.”
“I’m angry now. My work is…” Me, she almost caught herself confessing. “It is personal!”
“I’m not going to apologize for not falling at your feet with awe. I’m not the one who asked you to come here.”
“That is not what I meant.” Her voice trembled. If she cried now, she would never forgive herself. “It was cruel, and you know it.”
“I do know it.” He bristled. “I said I was sorry.”
And that, she supposed, was the extent of the apology she could expect from him. How little he must’ve thought of her to believe that was all she deserved. A Machlish girl, after all, was worth less than nothing. In the silence, the gulf widened and widened between them.
“I need to finish my measurements” was all she could think to say.
As she continued her work, her mood darkened. Sinclair had told her that she would be caught in the cross fire of whatever war Kit had chosen to wage. Now, Niamh saw the battlefield plainly, with two Carmine-red flags planted in the earth. His marriage to Infanta Rosa would be a union of duty, not of love.
I didn’t ask you to come here.
I am yours to command.
Jack had arranged this marriage. And although Kit had agreed to it, he clearly intended to spite everyone to the bitter end.
Suddenly, Niamh felt terribly sad. She had always loved love. As much as she yearned for it, she couldn’t fathom something so bright and wild. It would burn her up like kindling. Life was too painfully short. She couldn’t burden someone else with the intimacy of that knowledge, which she’d carried with her since she first noticed her fingers turn deathly white in the cold. But while love was not for girls like her, the hopeless romantic within her couldn’t be denied. She couldn’t be entirely certain where it had come from. Machlish myth, after all, was not so whimsical and kind as to promise everlasting love. In fact, her namesake might have the most tragic romance of all.
Long ago, Queen Niamh took a mortal lover and brought him to her castle in the Land of Eternal Youth, where spring reigned forever. Nothing ever died, and nothing ever changed. But after many years together, her lover grew homesick and longed to see all the people he had left behind. Niamh warned him that his family and friends were gone, but she knew she could not keep him like a prisoner. She knew that his loneliness was more powerful than their love.
Reluctantly, she agreed to let him go—but only if he promised never to let his feet touch the earth. As he rode across the countryside, searching for familiar faces, he realized that what Niamh had said was true. Everyone he ever knew and everyone he ever loved was long dead. As he drew away from the village he once called home, his horse spooked at a rustle in the grass and threw him from his seat. The moment he struck the ground, his hundreds of years seized upon him at once, and he transformed into a feeble old man.
No good ever came from loving fragile things.
Niamh had never cared for Machlish tales. They made her terribly depressed, all of them filled with tragedy and war and the impossible weight of honor. But she’d spent many nights as a girl paging through a book of fairy tales imported from Jaille: stories about peasant girls who snuck off to balls in glass slippers, who married princes because of their goodness and beauty, who loved fiercely enough to break terrible curses. They were impossible, wondrous, romantic stories, and they’d filled her up with hopeless yearning. She very much doubted someone like Kit cared a whit for romance, but it seemed a shame he might never get a chance to experience it himself.
When the prickly silence threatened to drive her mad, she sighed. “Is there anything about the wedding you are looking forward to?”
Kit glared at her disbelievingly. “Are you trying to provoke me?”
“What? No! I…” She resisted the urge to strangle him with the tailor’s tape looped around his neck. “I am just making conversation.”
“Most people might try commenting on the weather,” he said, with a begrudging sort of admiration. “You’re impertinent.”
“And you are combative.”
He squinted at her, but he did not look angry. In fact, he seemed almost incredulous. “What, are you going to scold me now?”
Feeling ridiculous and exposed looming above him on the ottoman, she stepped down and found herself at eye level with his chin. “Well … maybe.”
His eyes glittered with cold amusement. “Go on, then.”
“I understand that you have complicated feelings and that you are under a lot of pressure, but—” He scoffed. Ignoring his flagrant contempt, she barreled onward. “But this process will go much smoother if you cooperate. Your brother—”
“You don’t know the first thing about my brother.”
Just like that, all of his walls slammed down, every weapon on his battlements trained on her. If she were less angry, if she had not read that Lovelace column, if two people had not already made her feel small for being Machlish, she might have cowered. But within her burned a resentment that refused to stay quiet a moment longer.
How could he possibly believe himself so persecuted? He was a prince, the son of the most powerful man in the world, a resident of the most glorious house she’d ever seen. He’d never known a moment of suffering in his life, and the one time he was asked to do something that did not please him, this was how he behaved. He could and would make her dreams into nothing but collateral damage. That bitter realization chased away all good sense.
“Maybe not,” she protested, “but I know you, sir. If you have no regard for anyone but yourself, then it is no wonder you’re so miserable—so much so that you are determined to make everyone else as miserable as you are!”
His lips parted in surprise, and he looked genuinely stung. That glimpse of terrible, hard-won vulnerability made her stomach twist sharply with regret. She felt no better for indulging her anger. She’d only succeeding in digging her fingers into a wound.
But after a moment, the hurt vanished from his expression, replaced with a now-familiar disdain. “That kind of naivete will bite you in the end. In the Avlish court, it’s far better to only care about yourself. You’d be wise to understand that now, before you’re thrown into that pit of vipers.”
You’re a smart girl, Niamh, but you have your head in the clouds, Gran had said on the night her invitation arrived. You don’t know yet that the world is cruel.
The reminder hit like a sucker punch.
Her family had given her a happy life. Niamh had never endured war or starvation. As a girl, she spent carefree days tearing through the village and rolling down the sidthe, tempting the Fair Ones to steal her away. But she’d seen darkness lurking like a wraith over every adult in Caterlow. She’d seen the churn of their tempers and the unpredictable waves of their grief. She’d seen the way the mood changed come harvest season—how it swelled, dark and oppressive as the sea in a storm—and broke only when the first potato was pulled clean from the earth. Perhaps she didn’t know the bite of cruelty herself, but she recognized the shape of the scars it left behind. She very well might be silly and absentminded, but she was not a fool.
“I am from Machland, in case you’ve forgotten. I know firsthand how terrible the nobility can be. The people you disdain so much—you are one of them. In fact, you are among the worst of them! Your family’s magic caused the Blight, and your father did nothing while my kinsmen starved to death.” She took a step toward him, until they stood nearly flush together. “And now your brother continues to do nothing for their suffering! All I have seen you do is brood and complain. If you truly think the nobility is so horrid, why haven’t you done something about it?”
The air between them felt primed to ignite. They both breathed heavily, and she swore her pulse was roaring loud enough for him to hear it. When she met his eyes again, they were blazing bright with anger. And far beneath it, hazy and faint, was something that stole away her breath.
Shame?
“We’re done here,” he said.
“Wait! I—”
The door slammed shut.
“I’m sorry.”
The tension holding her up evaporated, and she all but collapsed onto the ottoman. She buried her face in her hands and groaned aloud, just to release some of her pent-up energy. What was that? How could she have been so stupid as to pick a fight with the Prince of Avaland?
A fight, she realized, he’d fled from.
She’d chased off a prince. She felt oddly jittery, as though she’d discovered some strange new magic of her own. She’d hardly recognized herself just now: brash and confrontational. But the heat of their argument had transfigured her. She never picked fights, never chose her words to hurt. But something about Kit Carmine made her forget herself and every ounce of self-preservation she had.
If he told Jack how she’d behaved today, he could very well have her dismissed. The thought made her blood rush hot all over again. There was no choice, then. She would have to prove herself to him, once and for all.
She would make him a coat he could not help loving.
Which meant she must resist the temptation to make it magenta or marigold out of spite. She had already earned his hatred, anyway. There was no need to be excessive. Still, something bright would contrast fetchingly against his hair, and yellow might draw out the gold in his eyes …
Focus, Niamh. As she took in her surroundings, she blinked hard to help her vision adjust. It had gotten strangely dark in here.
She noticed at last that the window was half obscured by nettle. It clung stubbornly to the glass, its tendrils grasping like fingers trying to claw their way inside. Its flowers, however, bloomed golden instead of pink. Numbly, she crossed the room and worked open the casement. She pried some of the nettle loose, watching the leaves flutter to the ground far below her.
Kit’s handiwork, as lovely as it was thorny.