Page 50 of Golden Queen
He looked surprised. "Are you telling me the holy order names all the children in Windemere?"
"Notall. They don't name the common people," I said, and then with a bit of irritation, I added, "Apparently...the gods only deign to hand down names from the heavens for noble children."
"As if the gods would actually bother to speak with those pompous little turds," he replied.
My snort of laughter surprised even me. The fact that I didn't even glance at the other nobles in the crowd or the eldermen assembled along the dais to gauge their reaction, surprised me even more.
"You never answered my question," I pointed out, taking a drink of wine.
"Well," he said, with a sigh. "I knew you were not common-born. You knew far too much about the kingdom and the summit for me to believe you were anything but nobility. And then when Madia's father called you Aelia, it just all fell into place."
I felt slightly chagrined to realize how decidedly not clever I had been. Strangely though, even when he teased me about it, I didn’t feel like I was being mocked.
The prince stayed with me at the dais while food was served down the length of the table and throughout the hall.
He didn't seem to notice the faces of my uncle and the other nobles who were beside themselves with anger that this foreign prince dared to occupy the place where the king would have sat—the place where the regentshouldhave been sitting.
He made me laugh as he talked about Markus fleeing the godsgrass, comparing him to a spoiled child playing at being a king. He sympathized with me for living under the thumb of such an idiot.
“It is little more than a waiting game with my uncle,” I told him. I thought I saw respect for that reflected in his dark eyes—as though he might not have been capable of such patience and recognized it for the virtue it was.
He told me about his sisters, the fearlessly wild princess Eyildr and Fyr,the sweet one, as he called her.
I told him about Arkadian; what my cousin meant to me and how I wished he had been here to meet them, especially Britaxia. "Arkadian will fall at the woman's feet," I assured him.
"They all fall at Britaxia's feet," he admitted with a grin as his eyes found the table where she and Aben sat with the Radune emissaries. They were surrounded by courtiers trying to edge in on both the fae and human visitors from Nightfall.
It was surprisingly easy to talk to the prince, even with so many eyes of disdain and disapproval from the crowd in the great hall, even while he sat in the regent's place of honor and did not seem to give a damn.
"He should have been in the seat himself if he cared so much about it," he told me after finally catching my uncle's glare.
I smiled at that, fully believing he would not have risked giving offense to my uncle if he did not genuinely want to sit with me.
And then, as the feast drew to a close and people began peeling away from the tables in the great hall, he surprised me by looking slightly uncomfortable.
"I'm going to ask you something," he began, looking out over the crowd as though unwilling to meet my gaze.
"Alright," I said carefully. My heart raced at what could possibly make him so uneasy.
"And you are going to think about it before you decide," he added.
My curiosity was definitely piqued by then. "Alright."
He lowered his voice even though we were too far away for anyone to hear us. "There is a place where it's likely that I can find some more information about what we discussed before."
He waited for me to understand that he meant the Withian children who had been disappearing from Nightfall, and then he continued. "It's a place where...a man alone might be noticed quite quickly."
My brows drew together, and he winced at my lack of understanding.
"It's a place where I would be expected to accept the company of another if I went alone," he tried again.
My mouth made a little 'o' as understanding dawned.
He continued. "Aben and Britaxia have already ruined any chance of going unnoticed with their bloody misadventure in the streets...and well, there is not another person in this city who knows why I havetruly to Albiyn."
"Of course I'll go," I said eagerly.
"I told you to think about it," he said with a wry grin.
