CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Autumn

“You just won’t die, will you, Violet Lee?”

I felt my palms burn in shame at those words, and I knew my mouth was open, screaming, but there was only the sound of flesh being torn from flesh, and blood being slurped from the offal that stained the white gravel rosy, and bones clattering to the ground, over and over, rhythmic, until the sound became the ticking of the clock.

A child fled the gagging human, her dress trailing in the breeze. She knelt by the corpse of a woman and knelt as if to kiss her hand . . . instead, her teeth sank into the palm.

I could not see faces, because they were buried in corpses, eating them, but I knew what these creatures were. They were vampires; vampires eating vampires.

And Violet Lee lurched, and swayed, and fell crashing to the ground as the cry of “Stop! Stop!” went ignored.

Yet even as she lay in a pool of her own vomit, the prince of the vampires, blood staining his shirt, sleeve used as a cloth to wipe his face, picked her up with all the gentleness of a lover. He brushed the bangs from her eyes, tipped her head back, and carried her away, hugging her like she might slip away from his arms at any second and never return.

I couldn’t put my finger on why I chose to accept the prince’s invitation a couple of weeks later. Maybe it was simply to defy my mother; or maybe it was because work had crossed the line into being unbearable without Nathan around. He had resigned without warning. My boss couldn’t give any explanation.

Maybe it was because the prospect of the whole thing didn’t seem so awful now. It was my duty to pay them a visit, and in any case, it was becoming harder and harder to keep in my head the thought that they were withholding information about my grandmother’s death, mainly because a multitude of reasons were forming in my mind to explain why they might do that. Reasons that made it harder to justify the distance I had thus far maintained.

I checked my packing one final time. A couple of books, my school bag, and a fresh school uniform were folded and ready for the following Monday at the bottom, followed by underwear, two spare outfits, and riding clothes, which I had ordered especially when the prince had mentioned we might venture out. I did have a full riding habit from when I was younger, but I didn’t want to ride sidesaddle, and I doubted it would fit anyway.

I had rushed home after school—the prince had to stay later even though it was a Friday, but I still only had an hour to get ready. Yet miraculously, by 4:20 P.M., I had showered and dressed and sorted my hair out, twisting it into a spiral bun on the side of my head. A few curls had been left to fall around my face. I looked in the mirror and tugged my skirt down, hoping my outfit was formal enough. The skirt was pleated and patterned, and the reddish-brown of my tights was probably pushing it, but my tucked-in blouse and jacket looked quite smart. I could curtsy in it. That was all that mattered.

I took my bag and placed it at the base of the staircase, then sat down myself on the lowest stair, waiting. A few minutes later, I heard the gate opening and clicking shut again and bounded up. My nerves were making me jumpy, and the only comparison I could make was to the time I had been summoned before the principal at St. Sapphire’s. This occasion, unlike that one, truly mattered.

The bell rang. Before I could cross the distance to the door, however, my father had stepped in front of me. He came from nowhere and I faltered, unsure of what he wanted. I had already had the lecture from my mother.

He hesitated, too, and then placed a hand on each of my cheeks and tilted me forward, kissing the top of my head. “Be good. Stay safe.”

And, with that, he disappeared into the living room, shutting the door behind him. I stared at the wood panels in astonishment until the sound of knuckles rapping the tinted glass broke me from my reverie.

I opened the door to find the prince, smiling. “Ready?” he asked. I nodded and went back in to collect my bag, which he stooped down to take from me before I could protest. I didn’t look back as I got in his car, afraid that my resolve might weaken.

“You don’t need to be nervous,” the prince said as we pulled away.

“I’m not nervous.”

“You’re shaking.” His eyes left the road for a second and focused on my hands. I looked, too. He was right, and I clasped them together in my lap.

The journey progressed largely in silence, and it was almost an hour before we reached the moors, where his family had taken up abode.

Ahead of us the road weaved across the landscape as a gray scar, seeming to disappear completely in places as the land dropped into gullies. I could see for miles—and for miles, there was nothing. A blanket of gorse, burned in places, and thick tufts of elephant grass suffocated any other shrubbery, save for the odd staff of wood that had once been a tree. Dartmoor, I could remember thinking as a child, must be the loneliest place on earth, because here you could walk and walk and never see another living soul.

We came over the crest of a hill and descended, and suddenly, through the mist that had sunk into the valley, there appeared the gray outlines of several huge granite buildings. Their walls were sheer, with hardly any windows; from the roof protruded tall chimneys. A chill ran down my spine. They looked like slaughterhouses.

“Dartmoor prison. Hound of the Baskerville territory, huh?”

I thought it more apt to think about the way the town we were passing through was called Princetown. But my attention didn’t linger long on such a depressing place, as the ground leveled out and pine trees began to appear, lining the road for a good mile. Suddenly the car swung left through a gap in the trunks that I would totally have missed if we hadn’t entered it. The trees were tall around us, and if the mist had chosen to descend here, I doubt he would have been able to pick out the narrow lane that eased itself between the wooden pillars and low branches. But there was light ahead, and we moved steadily toward it until the trunks fell away to be replaced with a conifer hedge arch, complete with gates thrown wide open.

I gasped.

We were in a narrow meadow. The ground was completely coated in green, with patches of purple and orange and pink peeping from between the grasses; there was even a small aqueduct running down one side. The drive weaved through its center, enclosed by more of the same trees, which formed a vast evergreen gorge. It swept around a shallow corner, so I couldn’t see what lay beyond us, but when the trees formed a neat row again, the view was as picturesque as the meadow.

The house looked Georgian, with a central wing lined with four engaged, partly embedded columns, and wings on either side. It was only two stories high, and whitewashed. I breathed a sigh of relief. It was a beautiful building in beautiful surroundings, but considering who its owners were, it was very modest.

The drive widened to form a turning circle, and a chauffeur stepped out of a small door just below the raised ground floor of the main house. The prince cut the engine and undid his seat belt, but didn’t move, turning to me with the corners of his lips upturned.

“Welcome back, my lady.”

He didn’t give me a chance to answer or ask what he meant as he grabbed my bag off the backseat and got out. I followed, waiting to move until he had rounded the car. It pulled away from behind us, the chauffeur driving. I watched it retreat, sincerely wishing that I was still in it. But I wasn’t, and that meant I had to face this.

Decorum, child, is everything.

I started to walk forward and the prince quickly overtook me by a stride, leading the way up the steps to the large door, which was already thrown open. I took a quick breath and clasped my hands in front of me to stop them from shaking, and then followed him across the threshold.

I didn’t get much chance to take in the interior, because my eyes went straight to the four people standing in the center of the hall. The prince stopped just short of them and I drew up beside him and then did something that, a month ago, I didn’t think I would have to do for many years yet: I dropped into a full, deep curtsy.

“Your Highnesses,” I addressed to the well-varnished floor. It seemed like a very long time before an address came back.

“Lady Autumn.” I straightened back up, trying to tell myself the worst part was over. “How wonderful to see you again.”

Prince Lorent, the duke of Victoria, the king’s older and closest brother, stood before me, smiling. Immediately my mind was delving through images of the king, reconciling the appearance of the two men. The king had made an impression on me when I was a child, and in his older brother I recognized the same ash-blond hair and, of course, the Atheneas’ blue eyes. But despite being older by several decades, this man looked far younger than I remembered his sibling. There was no gray hair, and the creases in his skin were clustered around his mouth—they were from laughter, not stress.

“You remember my wife, and my youngest son, Prince Alfie.” It was not a question, and I smiled at each of them. Prince Alfie I definitely remembered—I could remember him teasing me at court—yet I was startled to see how adult he looked these days. He must be around twenty-one, but he certainly hadn’t slowed down in his aging, despite being fully fledged. I was shocked, too, by how much he and the other young prince, Fallon, had grown to resemble each other. They could be brothers, not cousins. Even their idea of a smile was identical: lips upturned at the edges; flat in the middle. In contrast, I could barely recollect seeing his wife, the princess and duchess, save for hazy images of her in a black veil at my grandmother’s funeral.

That left only the young woman at the end of the line. She certainly didn’t look like one of the Athenea; and in the back of my mind, I thought her features seemed familiar.

Prince Alfie stepped forward a fraction, taking the woman’s hand. “And this is my girlfriend, Lady Elizabeth Bletchem.”

I was aware of a strangling noise in the back of my throat, which was all too audible in the silent hall, and berated myself for not making the connection sooner. This was the Lady Elizabeth Bletchem: the woman who had toyed with the affections of one of the human princes for the past year. Evidently, she had lost interest in him.

If she noticed my surprise, she chose to ignore it. With her fingers still clasping the prince’s fingers, she bobbed into a shallow curtsy. “Lady Autumn, I am so pleased to finally meet you. My father knew the late duchess of England, and always spoke so highly of her.”

I forced a smile. I never knew what else to do when my grandmother was mentioned in such a context. I saw Prince Fallon glance my way, and wondered how much he had told his family about me.

The lady Sage waited for a reply, and when none came she let go of her boyfriend’s hand and leaned down—she towered over my short frame—and, to my utter astonishment, pecked me on each cheek. “I hope we can become very good friends,” she whispered.

I didn’t move. It was not normal to be that intimate with people when first introduced, and the feeling I was left with was identical to when the prince had put his hand on my knee while giving me a lift home. It left a burn; a burn just like the ones I had felt in each palm in my most recent dream.

The older woman spared me the necessity of replying. “Fallon, why don’t you take the duchess upstairs and show her to her rooms? Then meet us on the terrace. I’ll have some tea and coffee ordered.”

“Sure.”

I bobbed into a low curtsy, and the youngest prince picked up my bag, carrying it toward the staircase.

“Fallon, Chatwin can take that up,” the princess said, beginning to move away.

Her nephew slowed and turned on his heel, walking backward toward the stairs. I was a few paces behind him, and so could see how wildly he was blushing. His eyes widened, as though trying to communicate something to her. “I’ve got it, Aunt,” he said in a tone clearly supposed to make her sound stupid for suggesting he not carry it.

There was a roar of laughter from the retreating back of his uncle, to which the youngest prince responded by blushing even deeper; even his eyes tinged pink, which was unusual, as Sage could mostly keep enough of a check on their eye color to prevent emotion showing. When he saw me staring, he chewed on the corner of his lip and half raised his shoulders, then quickly turned and headed for the stairs.

I was amused but glad the prince wasn’t looking to see my expression, as I didn’t want to humiliate him further. I could only wonder how awful it would be to belong to a group of dark beings that didn’t have the control of magic we did: those whose magic, like the vampires’, was used only to keep them alive, albeit as predators. Their eyes must betray every thought.

The gleaming mahogany staircase we ascended branched into a gallery at its summit, and then into hallways that led into each wing. He led me down the one to the right. It was light and airy, the walls pale yellow and lit by a window at the far end. On each wall were four generously spaced doors. We stopped at the one on the right at the very end.

It was white and paneled; the joints of each section covered in what I thought might be gold leaf, but I didn’t have the chance to take a closer look as he opened the door and stepped inside. I followed.

The modest exterior and hall had been a deception—and that was still an understatement. Only one thing prevented me from gasping, and that was the prince’s presence. Instead I gulped hard.

We were in a sort of reception room: Two large, pale-gold sofas faced each other, separated by a coffee table made of the same dark, highly varnished wood as the staircase. They stood on a large sky-blue rug, decorated like a paint-flecked canvas, with thousands of gold flowers and fleur-de-lis. Three windows, their sills reaching almost as low as my knees, lined the far wall, looking out, in reverse, on the same view I had been enchanted with as we arrived. Yet it was the ceiling that caught my attention: above the sofas, it resembled an upside-down tray, with a chandelier of tens of glass uplighter shades hanging from its center. Within the indent, a mural of pale-blue sky and ivory-white clouds had been painted; around the base of the chandelier, the clouds were tinged peach from the sun, which shone on a cupid on one side.

“You have one of the best suites. It’s peaceful,” the prince said, and I snapped my head back to eye level. He placed my bag on one of the sofas. “We are all in the other wing, and Alfie likes to play his music ridiculously loud,” he continued, as though he felt the need to explain his initial wistful statement.

I paid little attention, eyeing an archway in one corner of the room and a door in the other.

“Dressing room and bathroom,” he said, following my gaze.

I whirled around to face the other wall. To my left was the entrance, but there was a third door. I watched the prince through the corner of my eye, seeking permission. He smiled and that was all the permission I needed to bound away and nearly tumble with eagerness through the door.

A magnificent double bed faced me, framed by a half-tester made of tethered champagne drapes and a massive headboard of the same material, which stretched halfway up the wall. There was a dressing table—definitely gold leaf—and the tray ceiling looked like it was layered with the same expensive coating. Embedded columns surrounded the windows all along the front wall and those in the back wall; there was so much light that it bounced off the white walls and gold leaf and made the wooden floor look like it was covered in shards of glass.

My initial sentiment that nothing could have prepared me for the grandeur faded as I took in the details, the color schemes, the grotesque extravagance, because the palace at Athenea was decorated with near-identical taste.

Excitement diminishing, I reminded myself of what I was going to have to endure in exchange for staying in such a room and reluctantly took myself back through the door.

The prince was waiting. “I wanted to apologize for them.” He pointed down at the floor and I assumed he meant his family. “They are very . . .”

He opened and closed his mouth a few times.

“Very House of Athenea?” I finished, hoping that he didn’t take that as an insult.

He exhaled, finishing with a slight chuckle. “Yeah. That. And very not House of Al-Summers.”

It was my turn to smile, rather sheepishly.

“You have a lovely smile. You should use it more often.”

The very smile he complimented faded, and his eyes widened as he blushed yet again, as though he was surprised at his own words. I tugged on a strand of loose hair.

“We should probably go downstairs,” he said very quickly, looking at everything but me.

The décor on the ground floor was very similar to that above: gold leaf, murals, and high ceilings, with windows flooding the whole place in light. As he had done upstairs, the prince led me to the very end of the hallway, where a set of French doors opened out onto a covered deck. Seated around a wrought-iron table at one end were his uncle, aunt, and Lady Elizabeth; Prince Alfie lounged at her feet on a set of wooden steps leading down to the garden.

“Just in time,” Fallon’s uncle said as we joined them at the two empty seats. A servant dressed in a white shirt, complete with starched collar and a jacket emblazoned with the Athenean coat of arms, was serving tea and coffee. A stand of scones and jam had already been placed in the center of the table. I asked for tea, and watched out of the corner of my eye as Prince Fallon loaded his coffee with sugar.

“It is all vegan, dear, don’t worry. We are quite strict about that here. Do have one,” his aunt said as soymilk was poured into my tea, and I took a scone to be polite, though I wasn’t hungry. As I spread jam onto the crumbling scone, I took in the princess and duchess through my eyelashes. She had immediately struck me as very well put together: her light hair was smooth and glossy, and everything from the jewelsaround her neck to her eye shadow complemented her mint-green jacket and long skirt. She looked out of place compared to the others, who all wore informal trousers or jeans.

Lady Elizabeth Bletchem was what I could only describe as a plain Jane. Her hair, light brown, was parted in the middle and tied up in a ponytail, and her eyes seemed to be too small in proportion to her other features. She was very tall—almost as tall as her boyfriend—and had a similar boyish figure—though, unlike him, she still looked about eighteen, despite being almost a decade older. Over and above all that, she seemed to quite easily capture princes, but then again, her father did have a very firm and wealthy hold on the Home Counties.

Fallon’s aunt saw me looking and smiled just before she pressed her teacup to her lips. My gaze shot down and I took a bite of the scone, wishing I didn’t have to eat it. All was quiet, other than the tinkling of spoons on china and a bird twittering in a nearby bush. I knew it was my cue to say something.

“This is a beautiful spot, and so tucked away. I had no idea it was here from the road.”

Always keep conversation light, child. Avoid politics, and don’t give opinions.

The princess smiled again, and placed her teacup down. “Yes. It was one of the reasons we chose here. But it was in an utter state when we first purchased it. We had to stay in London right through the summer recess to supervise its repair.”

I glanced at Lady Elizabeth, wondering if that was when she had met her second prince. “I was in London during the summer, too.”

“We heard, and must apologize for not calling on you. We were trying to keep a low profile.”

“Of course.” I smiled, reassuring her that no offense had been taken. The truth was that if I had known their whereabouts, I would have fled the capital.

She seemed satisfied that I had participated enough for the meantime, and turned to her husband, whose face had shaped itself into an expression of polite interest, while his eyes were firmly trained on the pastries being loaded onto the cake stand by the servant. “We really must go back to London soon. I have not even started buying Christmas presents for the children, let alone the grandchildren.”

“Yes, dear,” was his only reply, as his son’s head popped up over the rim of the table.

“Presents are easy. Get a year’s supply of diapers for Nari and her bump, a romantic getaway for Clar’ea and Richard—”

“A punching bag for Chucky,” Fallon interrupted, grinning.

“Don’t joke about your brother’s anger problem, Fallon,” his aunt said, but Prince Alfie was already talking over her.

“How to Talk to a Girl for Henry, and Politics for Dummies for Uncle Ll’iriad—”

He was promptly cut off as his mother smacked him on the top of his fair head. “Behave, young man, we have guests.”

He bobbed up to stick his tongue out at his mother and then settled back down, looking every bit like a child sitting on the naughty step. I didn’t mind his joking. I thought it funny that he had just called the king “Uncle Ll’iriad.”

Prince Lorent had just polished off a cream cake, and was sliding flakes of pastry around his plate, trying to catch them on his finger. “I don’t know what all the hype about Christmas is. They say it’s peace and goodwill to all men, but it’s most definitely hell and gray hair to all Sage in Athenea.”

His wife slapped him playfully on the knee. “Bah, humbug!”

He raised an eyebrow. “You are not the one chasing the devils you call toddlers around.” He turned to me and Lady Elizabeth, shaking his head. “I don’t remember a year when dinner did not end in a food fight or somebody setting fire to the decorations.”

The winter season, beginning with the Autumnal Equinox and ending at New Year, was a grand spectacle, and everybody who was anybody attended the larger court events. But Christmas Day was always private; the palace was taken over by the entire Athenean family—all hundred or so of them. It was a recipe for chaos.

Lady Elizabeth laughed in a surprisingly girlish way—I had expected something deeper. “Never ask me to be your plus-one at Christmas, Al.”

He muttered something back to her and kissed her hand. I quickly looked at my plate, pretending I hadn’t seen and taking a nibble of my hardly touched scone.

I became aware of voices again and tuned back in to hear the princess speaking to her nephew.

“Fallon, why don’t you take the Lady Autumn around the gardens before the light fades? Dinner will be ready by the time you return. Don’t worry, dear, it’s not a formal affair,” she added to me.

The prince stood up, and I hastily followed, leaving a crumbled half a scone behind.

A gravel path snaked around the side of the house, and I walked in his shadow until it was utterly eclipsed by the house and a wall of ivy, between which a garden was sandwiched. The wall was actually a cliff, rising high above the house and sheltering us from the searching wind. The flower beds were full of more wire and trellis than actual flowers, dispersed among young shrubs, but once it matured, I thought, it would be a very pretty garden.

We walked side by side along the path, which mirrored the course of a small gurgling stream, occasionally crossing it on miniature arched bridges.

“Sometimes I think I must be crazy, but I actually prefer England to Australia,” he said quietly.

“You do?” I replied, very surprised. How could anyone prefer somewhere as barren as here to somewhere as vibrant and Sagean as Sydney?

“Maybe not the lack of tanning.” He pulled his hands from his jacket pockets and extended his arms so his sleeves slipped up, revealing very obvious tan lines on his wrists. “But I like the greenness, and I like the peace.”

“You don’t miss Australia at all?”

“No.”

I stopped and chewed on the tip of my tongue. He took two steps before he realized I was not beside him.

“Autumn—”

“Do you not miss Amanda?” I blurted out, almost stumbling over the name of the prince’s former girlfriend.

He swallowed hard; I saw his Adam’s apple rise and fall an inch. “No. Not how you think I should, anyway.” He span on his heel and kept walking.

It seemed hopeless, but I called after his retreating back. “I don’t understand.”

He had disappeared through a veranda and around a corner, and I jogged after him, rounding a large, concealing fuchsia bush to find him leaning against the railings of yet another small bridge. I approached him slowly. He was staring at the water, and it was as though it was a portal, because snatching a glance at his eyes I could tell he saw things in the liquid that I could not see and thought thoughts in which I could not share.

“I never loved Amanda.”

I gripped the railing tightly. “Pardon?”

With my harshly spoken word, he was back with me, and the water reflected nothing but the shadow of the overhanging bridge. “And she never loved me. We were . . . I don’t know how to explain it, but friends with benefits, I suppose.”

“Oh,” I breathed softly. “I . . . I hadn’t realized you were like that.”

“No! No, it wasn’t like that.” He dropped his head into his hands, muttering to himself. I couldn’t discern what he was saying until he removed his hands from his mouth and ran them through his bangs. “It was a mutually beneficial partnership.”

Sighing, he straightened up, crossed the bridge, and half turned back, inviting me to join him. I hesitated.

“Let me explain,” he offered, and then added, “Please, duchess.”

Something in my stomach stirred my legs into moving, and I found myself falling into pace with him. His hands found his jeans pockets and he exhaled in one long breath, then took a shallow one in.

“Perhaps you won’t know what I’m talking about because of what happened to your grandmother at the time, but do you remember feeling very impatient to be grown when you graduated from the juniors?”

I was confused by how his question was relevant, but understood his meaning. At fourteen, I thought I had done my growing. I had thought I was an adult. I doubted my younger self would accept that I could mature more in eighteen months than I had done in a lifetime; that by the eve of sixteen, I would be an utterly different person. “Yes, I do.”

He closed his eyes briefly and laughed drily. “My fourteen-year-old self had far too much of an inflated sense of maturity. I was tired of being under the thumb of my parents at the Athenean school; I thought I was above that, so I chose to be a guardian in Australia. I had high expectations of what was to come. But so did the media.”

He looked quite pitiful, staring at the cliff but not seeing it, his hands buried so deep in his pockets his arms were rigid. I wondered if this was how I must look when my mind was otherwise occupied. I did not want to be pitied.

“I was placed as guardian in a boarding school in Sydney, with a flock of security. It wasn’t a large school, but there were still ten other Sage acting as guardians, and I fell in with them and a group of humans pretty quickly.”

I already knew that. As a preteen wired to have crushes on celebrities, I had dutifully been obsessed with his every move—I wasn’t about to reveal that to him now though.

“Everything was great in the first year. I had friends; I was doing well in school; I was finally able to manage aspects of my life I had previously had no control over, like my money . . . but then everything got nasty at the end of the year. I was fifteen and . . .”

He trailed off, and creases appeared between his brows as he cocked his head slightly, looking at me. “Lords of Earth, I was your age . . . but you’re more mature than I ever was.”

I didn’t know how to respond—I thought he had just complimented me, yet his voice remained too distant for me to be sure that was his intention. I stayed quiet.

He shook his head slightly. “I was getting older, and that meant the paparazzi were paying me more and more attention. There was report after report about girls I had supposedly been on dates with, or even slept with—none of which was true,” he hastily added. “But they did notice how close I was getting to Amanda. We were just good friends, dating had never crossed my mind, yet the media read more into it than there was. Suddenly, I was under enormous pressure to create the next big royal romance, and she was being chased around by reporters. Life was impossible.”

He fixed his gaze on me every other sentence, and I was left with the sense that he was searching for a reaction. I kept my face as blank as I could.

“Mandaz . . . Amanda, even then, was ambitious. She wanted a court career, like any noblewoman, and she was fiercely interested in politics. But her family had made their money from the bottom up, and she knew that background wasn’t going to be enough to gain any immediate influence at court, which is what she wanted. And I . . . I needed to give the media what they wanted.”

The sound of roaring water reached my ears as we continued through a canopy of roses and I was processing what he had said and what I thought he was suggesting.

“You struck a bargain.”

He winced. “We never meant it to last. It was just supposed to be a few dates and some pictures of us kissing. And it worked: the paparazzi went crazy for the first few weeks, and then everything died down. I took her back to Athenea over the summer and she was able to network. My family liked her. They helped her. But I think they knew what was going on. They knew it wouldn’t last.”

“But it did last.”

He laughed nervously and ran a hand down the back of his head, ruffling his slightly damp hair—there was a fine mist in the air. “I guess neither of us wanted the hassle of a breakup. And we were . . . we were sleeping together at this point.”

“Ah. And you’re sure you had no feelings for her?”

Again, he chuckled. “Please stop looking so perceptive. It’s making me feel like a naughty schoolboy.” I didn’t know what expression my face held for him to say that, but I smiled bashfully at the path. He carried on. “I admit that I had some. I cared for her, and would protect her, but there was never any passion or need involved. We spent almost two months apart during the summer of last year, but it wasn’t painful. We didn’t yearn for each other.”

We had finally emerged from the veranda and I gave a gasp—not that he or I could hear it over the rush of water plummeting thirty feet down the cliff, and then even farther down through a hole in the ground. I could hear it hitting stone, great splashes bounding back up. It reminded me of the storm the prince had driven me home in.

“This place is an old quarry!” he shouted over the water as he came to a rest against the railing that ran in a crescent around the drop. He placed his elbows on the metal and swayed back and forth on his heel slightly—he was such a fidget. As I watched him, he spoke again, though I could only see his lips moving.

“What?” I yelled back. He only looked bemused and repeated whatever he had said. I laughed. I couldn’t hear a word he was saying and tried to tell him so, but he just started laughing as well.

Bending down, he tucked my hair behind my ear and spoke, still quite loudly, from right beside me. “Would you like to see the view?”

I froze as his hand made contact with me, aware of how, if I leaned just slightly to the right, my shoulder would be touching his chest. My eyes focused on the white shirt he was wearing, framed by his tan jacket. I could see him breathing. I nodded.

He pointed skyward and started backing around the waterfall, narrowly avoiding a splash of rebounding water that appeared to curve in an arc over the railings and toward him. The affinity it showed for him snapped me out of my trance and I laughed, batting the water back as it tried to reach me, too.

Suddenly, with a running leap, he had disappeared into the fine mist. I carried on a little farther beyond the dampness and bent my knees, springing directly up. Even this far away from the waterfall there was vapor, and I broke through the suspension, spotting the prince standing behind another set of railings along the edge of the cliff. I dropped down beside him.

I was glad I took his suggestion. The view was magnificent. The cliff was high enough to look right over the top of the house and down into the hollow with the meadow at its bottom. The pine-tree perimeter looked like a funnel from our vantage point, tapering toward the road. In the distance, I could just make out the green line becoming gray and disappearing back toward Princetown.

The lively stream that plummeted down into the old quarry was to my left, and I traced its path upriver, turning behind me. It ran down a gentle incline across moss and scrubland; in the distance, I could see gorse and faraway granite tors.

I lowered my brow and felt my right cheek tug at the outer corner of my lips as I circled to take in the full panorama. “Are you not a little vulnerable here?”

He grinned in his usual cheeky way and crouched down. His hand brushed the ground until he closed his fingertips around something. Standing up, I could see it was a small stone. He lobbed it from waist height in the direction of the nearest tor.

Abruptly, it halted in midair and dropped to the ground. With its sudden stop came an eerie crackling sound; and with that, a humongous dome shield revealed itself. The point where the stone had struck looked like it was fracturing, splitting into shards, divided by lightning-like forks of bright blue; these faded and it glowed paler, like it was healing. I could see its quickly disappearing boundaries stretching right across the quarry and stood in awe of the setup they had. It was like Athenea—it, too, had massive dome shields, through which nothing but the elements could pass without permission.

When the shield had become invisible again, I leaned down on the railing and debated how to steer the conversation back toward Amanda. The whole thing intrigued me: they had pulled it off very well, and his story was a revelation. But in hindsight, it made sense. They had never appeared to be that lovey-dovey.

“So when you and Amanda broke up, it wasn’t as big a deal as the papers made out?”

He looked surprised that I had returned to the topic. “Essentially, yes. Technically, it was me who ended things, but it was all on good terms. She knew I wanted to come to England and I think she was ready to move on, too. We’re still friends. Just friends.” He blushed very deeply again, though it didn’t reach his eyes.

A buzzard hovered at our height to the left of the house, and I admired its brown plumage, determined not to seem too intrigued by my next question. “Your Highness, why are you telling me all this?”

I heard him exhale. “Remember what I told you about treating you as my equal? I didn’t want you to be under the same illusion as the rest of the world.”

I was flattered; properly and wholeheartedly this time, unlike in the car. He seemed to be ashamed of this particular chapter of his life, and definitely embarrassed about telling me, but he had still done so despite that.

“Thank you,” I murmured, unable to actually tell him I was glad he had recounted his experience, but wanting him to know I didn’t think any less of him; that I was grateful.

“For what?”

“Just thank you.”

A drop of water landed on the end of my nose, and then another on my hand, and I looked up, immediately exposing my face to several more droplets. “It’s starting to rain,” I muttered. “Perhaps we should go back inside?”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose we should,” he said with a sigh.