Chapter 7 The Kind of Beauty Men Ruin Themselves For
Lorcan
The thornvine is almost perfect. I stand at the long black table in my private chamber, one hand clasped behind my back, the other holding a pair of silver pruning shears as I trim a single curling length of dark green stem from the arrangement before me. Moonlight spills through the high arched windows, catching on cut crystal, polished stone, and the silver bowls of white blossoms set along the length of the room. The briars twist up from a bed of black soil in the centre of the table, carefully trained through an iron frame until they bloom into a disciplined arch of pale flowers and hidden thorns. Order is a beautiful thing when properly cultivated.
A soft knock sounds at the door. I snip one last stem, set the shears down beside the silver tray, and brush a fleck of soil from my thumb. “Enter.” The doors open behind me, and footfalls sound across the polished floor, stopping at a respectful distance.
“My king.”
I lift my head and meet the guard’s reflection in the dark glass of the window before turning to face him. He bows low, one fist over his chest, but the tension in him remains. Interesting. “Yes?”
The guard straightens. “The prisoner opened a road.”
For the first time in a long while, I feel true surprise.
After all these years. After all the blood poured over that ward-stone, after all the failed attempts, all the false pulls, all the trembling seams that led nowhere useful, the prince of Hollow Hill has finally opened a road. A slow smile touches my mouth. “At last.”
“It did not open to his people,” the guard says carefully.
No. Of course it did not. Nothing in this place ever arrives simply.
I move away from the table and toward the hearth, the hem of my coat whispering over the floor behind me. The fire is low, more glow than flame, throwing soft gold over the carved stone and making the thorns worked into the mantle cast long shadows. “What came through it?”
The guard hesitates for a fraction of a moment. “A human girl, my king.”
A human? How curious. How very, very curious. I turn back to him slowly. “A girl.”
“Yes, my king.”
“Alive?”
“Yes.”
“Injured?”
“No, my king.”
Hmm. Cian opens a road for the first time in years, and instead of reaching the dark remains of his court, he tears a path upward and draws in a mortal girl, unbroken by the crossing, and alive somehow. Why her? I wonder. Does she mean something to him? A thousand possibilities move through my thoughts at once. Was it an accident? Was she simply standing in the wrong place when the road tore wide? Or did it reach for her? Is there some thread between her and the prince strong enough to pull across realms? Has the blood and the warding stripped him so bare that the roads answered the deepest instinct left in him? If so, that may prove far more valuable than a surviving courtier.
“Did the prisoners speak to her?” I ask.
The guard shakes his head. “No, my king. We found her cowering in the far corner of the cell, shaking so hard she could barely speak. She begged us not to eat her.”
The laugh leaves me before I can stop it. A human girl flung into the dark and met first by Cian, bloodied in chains. Yes, I imagine that would be a memorable introduction to our kind.
“She was terrified?”
“Yes, my king.”
“Good.” Fear is useful and honest. Fear makes mortals reach for the hand that seems gentlest, the voice that sounds kindest, the door that appears to open outward instead of in. If she is frightened, she will cling. If she clings, she can be guided.
And if the road opened to her because she means something to Cian, because she is somehow tangled in him in a way the old paths recognised when all our warding and torture did not, then she is not only a curiosity. She is leverage.
A mortal girl in the wrong place can be hidden, pitied, soothed, questioned, but a mortal girl who matters to the prince can be used. Perhaps to open the roads again and to locate what remains of Hollow Hill. Perhaps she is the key to force from Cian what years of captivity have not. I cross to the table once more and trail my fingers lightly over one pale blossom. Its petals are cool as silk. A thorn catches the pad of my thumb, but I welcome the sting. I snap my fingers once.
“Bring her to me.”
He bows. “At once, my king.”
The doors close behind him, and I am left for the span of a minute with the quiet crackle of the fire, the night beyond the glass, and the shape of a new possibility unfolding itself before me. A human girl. Brought through the dark by the last prince of Hollow Hill.
The doors open again. I turn, and for one rare, unexpected moment, every thought in my head stills. She is smaller than I imagined. Tiny, really, beside the guards at her back. But there is nothing insubstantial about her. Soft curves beneath mortal cloth—a tumble of honey-blonde hair. Fair skin still carrying the flush of fear. Wide blue eyes lifted to mine, bright and startled and so open in their terror that something low and pleased stirs in my chest. Beautiful. The kind of beauty men ruin themselves for—the kind of beauty princes open roads for. My mouth curves slowly. Well now. This changes things.
I extend a hand to her, palm up, an invitation dressed as kindness. “Come here, little thing.” Her gaze drops to it, then lifts warily back to mine. Interesting. She’s clever enough to hesitate. “Tell me,” I say softly, “what should I call the mortal girl the prince dragged through the dark?”
