Page 50 of The Stolen Heir

He did not belong here, sleeping in dirt. Scrabbling out an existence at the very edges of things.

“No,” I made myself tell him. “Go home.”

I could see the hurt in his face. The honest confusion that came with unexpected pain.

“Why?” he asked, sounding so lost that I wanted to snatch back my words.

“When you found me tied to that stake, I thought about hurting you,” I told him, hating myself. “You are not my friend.”

I do not want you here.Those are the words I ought to have said, but couldn’t, because they would be a lie.

“Ah,” he said. “Well.”

I let out a breath. “You can stay the night,” I blurted out, unable to resist that temptation. “Tomorrow, you go home. If you don’t, I’ll use the last favor you owe me from our game to force you.”

“What if I go and come back again?” he asked, trying to mask his hurt.

“You won’t.” When he got home, his sisters and his mother would be waiting. They would have worried when they couldn’t find him. They’d make him promise never to do anything like that again. “You have too much honor.”

He didn’t answer.

“Stay where you are a moment,” I told him, and crept off through the grass.

I had him there with me for one night, after all. And while I didn’t think he wasmyfriend, it didn’t mean I couldn’t be his. I brought him a cup of tea, hot and fresh. Set it down on a nearby rock, with leaves beside it for a plate, piled with blackberries.

“Would you like a cup of tea, prince?” I asked him. “It’s over here.”

“Sure,” he said, walking toward my voice.

When he found it, he sat down on the stone, settling the tea on his leg and holding the blackberries in the palm of one hand. “Are you drinking with me?”

“I am,” I said.

He nodded, and this time he didn’t ask me to come out.

“Will you tell me about the constellations?” I asked him.

“I thought you didn’t like me,” he said.

“I can pretend,” I told him. “For one night.”

And so he described the constellations overhead, telling me a story about a child of the Gentry who believed he’d stumbled onto a prophecy that promised him great success, only to find that his star chart was upside down.

I told him the plot of a mortal movie I’d watched years ago, and he laughed at the funny parts. When he lay down in a pile of rushes and closed his eyes, I crept up to him and carefully covered him in dry leaves so that he would be warm.

When I woke up in the afternoon, he was already gone.

CHAPTER

9

Iam dragged through the halls and brought not to the prisons, as I supposed I would be, but to the bedroom where I readied myself for the revel. My bag is still on the hook where I left it, the comb Oak used still on the dresser. Revindra, the rose-haired knight, pushes me inside hard enough that I hit the floor with my shoulder. Then she kicks me in the stomach, twice.

I curl around the pain, gasping. I reach into the folds of my dress, hand closing over the scissors I stole from Habetrot’s rooms.

Here is what I learned in the Court of Teeth. It seemed, in the beginning, that fighting back would only bring me further pain. That’s the lesson they wanted me taught, but soon I realized I would be hurt anyway. Better to hurt someone else when I had a chance. Better to make them hesitate, to know it would cost them something.

Revindra is wearing armor, so when I go for her, I slash where she is most unprotected—her face.

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