Page 62 of A Curse of Hope and Shadows: Part I
“Usually am.” She sighed. “Youneedto get out more.”
Dimitri squirmed. She was probably correct, but he didn’t want to think about that right now, what he should do, what he owed to the people he was supposed to rule over. “What does Adeline like?” he asked instead.
He waited for Leonie to tease, or to pry, but she did neither. “Us,” she said resolutely. “She likes us. Her family.”
“Why do you think I’m letting you use my library?”
“Fair point.”
He smiled. “You don’t speak much like a child.”
She raised another eyebrow. “Neither do you.”
He supposed neither of them had much of a childhood, that perhaps suffering had stolen innocence away, hardening them both in different ways. He was sure, had it not been for his mother’s death and the curse, he’d been a very different person. He suspected Leonie might have been like this always.
“Please,” he carried on, “what else does she like? She indulges me with my wants. I should… I want to indulge hers.”
Leonie regarded him carefully for a moment. “You want her to like you.”
“I want her to be happy.”
Leonie sighed, old and defeated, as if she thought such a thing impossible. “Adeline’s good at reading, sewing, singing, healing… and anything that requires thought and logic. But she doesn’t like not beingexcellentat something. She’s good at healing, but not as good as me, good at chess, but not as good as you. Only thing that she beats everyone at is shooting.”
“Shooting?”
“You saw the pistol above our piano? It was our father’s. He taught us all to shoot but Adeline is the best.”
It seemed absolutely ludicrous to Dimitri that the soft-fingered, clumsy Adeline could enjoy something like shooting, and he half wondered if Leonie was having him on.
“What does she like to shoot?” he asked cautiously.
“Targets, mostly. She can shoot animals, too, but she doesn’t like that so much. She’ll do it when there’s need, though—she’s less likely to miss and cause the animal pain. She wept once when Elliott injured a deer when we were children.”
Now, thatdidsound like Adeline. “Thank you,” he said to Leonie. “The library is yours.”
“Excellent,” she said. “Will you join me in it? I daresay you haven’t got anything better to do today and you look like you can carry a lot of books.”
Chapter Sixteen: The Full Moon
It turned out that Adeline wasn’t the only Elsing woman Dimitri struggled to say no to, although he wasn’t sure if he acted the part of Leonie’s trolley because she was so direct, or if he was trying to impress her on behalf of her sister.
Her company wasn’t unpleasant, and it certainly beat staying up in his room all day. She was a lot quieter than Adeline, a lot more brash with her instructions. “Take this!” “Stay there.” “Hold this for me,” was snapped at him all day.
“Won’t your family be wondering where you are?” he asked at one point.
“Why? I haven’t been gone long.”
“It’s almost dinner time.”
Leonie’s eyes shot up from the book she was reading to the clock on the wall. “Is it? Oh, no wonder I’m hungry.”
“We had lunch.”
“Did we?”
Dimitri pointed to the empty tray of sandwiches he’d had brought up for the two of them several hours ago.
Leonie laughed. “Sorry. Engrossed.”
