If he heard the heartbreak in my voice, he didn’t say so, but his brown eyes softened as he looked over at me, the campfire crackling between us like tension.
“The kingdom is broke.”
I scrunched up my nose. “How can a kingdom be broke?”
Midas smiled over at me, swiping grease-stained fingers down his pants as he tossed the last of the bones from our meal that he’d caught. “Kingdoms can go broke quite easily, actually. But in this instance, Highbell has struggled for years. They’re little more than a frozen wasteland at the tip of the world. No farming to speak of, no mining lucrative enough to sustain them. They’re crumbling without the proper allied ties and trade. It’s a wonder the other monarchs haven’t struck already.”
I curled my toes inside my fur-lined boots, trying to leap from his words to his intentions. He had the advantage of age over me, being seven years older, but I wasn’t naive.
“What about me?” I asked him. I wasn’t sure how I was able to talk with the lump in my throat.
Midas came in front of me, snow reaching the laces of his boots. “You stay with me. I made a promise, didn’t I?” he asked, and my relief was instant and warm, almost enough to ward away the chill of the night.
“With you by my side, we’ll save Sixth Kingdom from ruin.”
I smiled up at him, appreciating his smooth face that he insisted on shaving every morning, despite the fact that we were weary travelers, oftentimes with no one to look upon but each other. He was meticulous about himself just as he was about everything else.
He didn’t have to spell it all out to me, but he did anyway. He trusted me with his vulnerabilities, his hopes, his dreams. A man with no important bloodline, with no family, no land. He wanted to save a kingdom. To bring back glory to a place that was dying in a frozen tomb.
We talked long into the night as he laid everything out, all his plans, his intentions, my role in his life. It was a brilliant plan, one he’d clearly thought through right down to the smallest of details. I was in awe of him.
Midas pulled me up to my feet, his hands warm, steady. “I’ll put you in a palace, Auren. You’ll be safe. With me.”
“But you’ll marry her.”
He petted my cheek with the edge of his thumb, and I leaned into the touch. The first man I’d ever done that with. It felt like petals opening to soak up the sun.
“Yes, if all goes well, she’ll have my name. But you have my love, Precious.”
And what’s a ring when you have a heart?
He made love to me there, over a puff of snow that somehow felt like clouds, beneath a thick tent made of leather that brined in the salt of our sweat, soaked in the heat of our murmurs. He held me until the last of the stars winked out.
My eyes slowly adjust to the brighter light of the hallway as I begin to walk downstairs with the guards on either side of me. Gone are the weathered browns of wooden floorboards. No more are the walls a solemn weathered gray stone. Scratches are buffed into the gold floors, thousands of footsteps worn into the malleable metal. The walls gleam with a servant’s touch, the banister to the stairs smelling slightly of vinegar and salt, the abrasive varnish used to polish its every surface.
My rooms are on the very top floor, so that means we have six grand staircases to walk down. My legs begin to burn by the second, telling me I’ve been confined for too long.
Painted portraits of long-dead royals watch me as I pass by, the number of sconces growing in number with every level we descend to banish the night away with their flames. My pulse pounds in my ears as I’m led down to the first floor, where I hear music drifting out of the ballroom.
My escorts stop outside a pair of carved doors. The guard standing beside it opens it, stepping aside for us. “You may go inside.”
“Yeah, I just don’t really want to,” I mutter back.
Digby clears his throat, and I inhale a tight breath as I take in the flood of light, heat, and sound coming from the room.
I can’t scurry off to hide, because I’m not a mouse.
My ribbons squeeze around me, just slightly, a prompt to brace myself as I walk inside. The moment I step through the threshold, my eyes sweep around the space.
Musicians are playing in the very center of the room, instruments a
lull of pretty composition. They’re surrounded by people dancing, the notes encouraging sensuality, the tune dipping into a heated croon. It’s a collection of fabric and skin, of limbs weaving through an impalpable melody.
The whole space is lit up with three huge chandeliers that cast sparkles against the floor. There must be at least two hundred people here, all of them basking in King Midas’s ostentatious wealth, their clothes a splash of lavish color.
The scent of their collective sweat and perfume is enough to overwhelm me. Despite the blizzard raging outside and the massive size of the room, the collective heat from all of these bodies makes the back of my neck prickle with beads of perspiration. Or maybe it’s from nerves.
Along both sides of the walls, there’s more reverie. Long tables are set up where guests are drinking, alcohol-faces gone ruddy and open. There are saddles everywhere, making the party far more licentious than it already is, which tells me that this gathering started a while ago.