Page 27 of To Wake a Kingdom

“You shouldn’t be in here,” I said, but there was no heat in my words. I was tired of pretending, and he would figure out some of the truth, no matter how much I tried to fight it.

“I missed you at dinner—I mean, we missed you at dinner.” His gaze shifted to me, curious and considering.

“I must have dozed off.”

“Is this where they kept you?”

“They didn’tkeepme, but yes. This is where I slept.”

“For how long?”

“Exactly one hundred years. I woke up the day before my twenty-first birthday.”

He drifted around the perimeter of the room, looking out of the windows.

“Why did you wake up? Why not anyone else? Why Kianna?”

I’d deduced it must have been his father’s interference that resurrected me and Kianna, but I couldn’t tell him that.

“I don’t know,” I lied. “Kianna said the spell has gone wrong, and she doesn’t know how to fix it.”

“Why did you have to sleep for so long?”

“That’s a long story.”

“I have time,” he responded, his gaze challenging.

I rolled my eyes. “I suppose you won’t relent unless I tell you.”

“You would be correct. I’m not sure how much longer you expect me to pretend we aren’t in a castle full of enchanted sleeping people.”

I sighed dramatically, catching the hint of a smile as he leaned against the windowsill, one ankle crossed over the other. He’d been asking questions for the past three days, trying to unravel my secrets, but I’d dodged them all with the grace of an acrobat. As he watched me now, there was an openness in his face. Something that told me I could trust him, and I found I wanted to unburden myself with at least some of the truth.

Legs crossed beneath me, I sat on the bier and told him the story of my mother, the Fae who’d helped her, and Mare’s threat. I told him about the gifts the Fae had given me and the curse Kianna had tried to stop with her ill-fated spell.

When I was done, he was stunned, eyebrows high on his forehead. “That’s a hell of a story, Princess.”

I offered him a tight smile.

“What happened to the other Faeries? Twelve Fae—there are twelve chairs out there.”

Damn. He didn’t miss much, but the circumstances around their deaths would lead to questions I didn’t want to answer. So I lied a bit more.

“Gone,” I said. “I don’t know where they are.” I made a mental note to fill Kianna in on my deception. I also kept the deal I made with Mare to myself. That felt like one truth too many. Ronan was still a stranger, and I had yet to understand his intentions.

“I have a question for you,” I said. He tilted his head, waiting for me to continue.“How did you find the castle? It’s hidden by the forest. What made you come here?”

He looked out the window, the snow-capped pines standing like chilled sentinels. “I’m not sure, to be honest. We were passing by, and something tugged at me, so we turned off the road.” He gave me an inscrutable look. “And then it was hard to miss a castle entirely covered by brambles. How did you get past them?”

“I think they must have lost whatever magic was in them when I woke up.” What I didn’t add was that I didn’t understand how the king had breached them in the first place. “What do you mean, you had a feeling?”

“It happens to me sometimes. A sense that guides me, and I felt it that day.” We both fell silent, lost in our thoughts.

“There’s no one else here,” Ronan said a few moments later.

“What?”

“They left you alone here. No one stayed with you when you fell asleep?”

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