Page 21 of The Beast King's Bride

I frown as he clicks his tongue and Embar follows us inside the palace. Is that magic? Or is Embar simply so well trained?

We enter a courtyard with white skeletal trees growing out of the flagstones, then step into a silent, cold hall with colonnades and arches over them, an embroidery that looks suspiciously like dead ivy scrolled over them. There is a smell of animals and I wonder if the stables are close by, though it’s different from the smell of horses I know, more pungent, more aggressive.

His grip on my arm is bruising and I stumble alongside him in my one shoe, my other foot numb from the cold, Embar’s hooves clopping behind us. Maybe he sleeps with his horse, I think fuzzily. Maybe the horse has a bed chamber.

We stop when someone comes hurrying toward us—another Fae, I realize, when my first thought was that it was a human man, much more slender than the king. Shorter, too. He doesn’t have horns but his pointed ears poke out of hair the color of rich mahogany wood. His face has the prettiness so common among the Greater Fae, with high cheekbones and uptilted eyes.

“Sire.” He stops and gives a deep bow. “You have returned. We had begun to lose hope.”

And here I was starting to think the Fae king lived alone in his palace, together with his horse.

“Jassin. Take Embar and give instructions concerning the human. I don’t want any trouble.”

“Sire.” The Fae bows again, his green gaze sliding to me, then back to his king. “Your wish is my command. Sire, does she understand when we speak?”

“She’s human, Jassin.”

“Sire. Then may I wish that she succeeds.”

“I don’t know, Jassin. Why would she help me?”

The Fae’s face falls. “Sire…”

I look from one to the other and sigh. “Help with what, king?”

He whirls on me, eyes flashing. “You understood what we said?”

“Yes. Wasn’t I supposed to?”

“She doesn’t speak the fairy tongues,” that spindly Faerie had said.

It seems the Faerie was wrong.

The Fae king shoves me into a room and shuts the door, then all but throws me onto a bed. I scramble as far away from him as I can, slipping on silk and satin, pride be damned, but he only comes to stand in front of me.

“What else have you overheard?”

“Overheard?” I chew on the inside of my cheek. “Nothing much, really.”

“Speak!” His roar shakes me and I swear his canines have grown longer, like a beast’s.

“The Faeries outside the gate. They call you cursed. The King who Never Cried, they said. Oh, and something about an empress. That’s all, I swear.”

“How can that be? You’re human. Have you drunk Faerie wine, eaten Faerie bread?”

“No. You know I haven’t.”

“Then how?”

I shrug.

“You are part Fae,” he whispers. “Human and not. That’s what the riddle meant.”

“That isn’t true,” I say, my voice small. I swallow hard. “I’m human. It’s just stories.”

“But you must have sensed it, if you’re part-Fae. Heard the voice of birds and other animals, wrought some magic. Your body wouldn’t be different, not reversed like ours, but…”

“No.” I shake my head. Truth is, I often thought I understood Poe, but that isn’t possible. “I don’t know what this riddle is about, but it’s only stories. People like to make mean stories about others.”

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