CHAPTER NINE
They started a routine of meeting in Mira’s room directly after dinner. Tarquin had tried to pull her to his, once, but she’d refused with a strange expression. He hadn’t pushed the issue, grateful that she still wanted him at all after what he’d done. He did wish, though, that she would ever be willing to talk to him about anything. She’d stopped entirely, ignored him completely unless his hands were running over her bare skin or she was wrapped around his cock.
She had changed. She was no longer the strange woman who kept to herself, who wore trousers under her gown and chopped her hair off on a whim. She was someone different, someone cold and aloof, someone who reapplied her lipstick before he came to her— so she had a reason to not let him kiss her. It was only to him, though— on the rare occasions he saw her with Lily or the other ladies, she was relaxed. She was just Mira. He could feel the change in her demeanor when she noticed his presence. And she absolutely refused to let him kiss her mouth— she adored his lips on every other part of her, especially between her legs, but she anytime he tried to caress her, tried to show any kind of affection, she shook him off.
It shouldn’t have bothered him as much as it did because he was Aurelia’s, and it was a better situation if Mira knew that nothing would ever come of this. He should appreciate her iciness; the sooner he was able to control his conflicting feelings about her, the sooner he could just accept their routine as the best that things would be again.
He continued to come back to it, though. He wanted her— and not just physically, he found— as time passed. He wanted her rare smiles and her whispered ridiculous jokes and her laughter; her real laughter, not the one she so frequently forced out when she was uncomfortable. She’d done that laugh as long as he’d known her, but rarely around him, until he’d called her the wrong name and ruined everything.
He regretted it. Of course he regretted it, because despite the loathing of himself that had settled in his chest as he’d accepted it, despite the fact that he didn’t know if he could ever hold her and not feel like he was betraying a dead woman, it had clearly hurt Mira to the point that she’d shielded herself from him. The worst part was that as she became more of a stranger to him— despite how many times a week he was inside her— she seemed to grow closer with everyone else. He should have been glad of it, should have been happy that she wasn’t alone for once, that she seemed to be making friends, but he was selfish and possessive and it just made him envious.
The only time she talked to him, beyond murmuring filthy things to him, was to question him endlessly about Aurelia. He didn’t know what the fascination was there, why she so desperately wanted to know, but he remained silent on the subject, refusing to give her the barest details. He’d accepted that he was mad for Mira, and that felt like enough of a betrayal. Telling the woman he wanted about the one who’d been his mate was just too much.
She ignored his obvious refusal to talk about it, protesting that it had been eight years and he clearly wasn’t in a healthy emotional state if he couldn’t even mention her. She didn’t understand mates, he’d told her, didn’t understand the importance of the bond that fate had places between two people before they’d even been born. He hadn’t told her that worst of all, he would never be able to experience that with her.
So when he ran into her guiding Caelian’s lost mate one day, several weeks after Helias had returned and Caelian had departed to search for her, it had been easy to spit venom at her before leaving to find Caelian. It had been easy to hate the concern on her face over his injured wing— so easy to hate it when the stupid injury was the least of his worries, was the last thing that kept him up at night. She swore at him, then turned her pretty face away and marched off. When he left to find Caelian, there was relief for his brother there, but so much bitterness, too.
The palace had come alive with planning a wedding. It was strange to Mira, a strange thing to witness here in this ancient castle with no concept of marriage but full of strange traditions surrounding mates. Caelian and Maggie deserved it, she supposed, although Mira had wondered aloud whether Maggie’s first marriage had actually ended. Lily had glared daggers at Mira, and Vivian had shushed her. Mira had shut up then, embarrassed, trying to figure out why what she had said was so very awful.
She seemed to say things frequently that made others take offense, but she genuinely never tried to. Her father liked to tell her she had a talent of putting her foot in her mouth, and she agreed with that assessment, but wasn’t sure how to stop. She tended to avoid the other ladies for that reason. Tarquin had been her only frequent companion for some time, and that thought unsettled her.
She tried to spend time with the other ladies, especially since Maggie had brought five more women with her, but she couldn’t ever shake the feeling of being slightly different, of being an outsider allowed to witness certain interactions. More often than not she just sat back and observed, afraid of accidentally causing offense to someone. She spent many days as she currently was: in the queen’s parlor, pretending to read a book that was spread across her lap, full of words far too long for her to understand.
She was afraid of saying the wrong thing, of laughing at the wrong moment or not laughing enough. She missed Tarquin in moments like this; missed the fact that she’d been able to talk and laugh easily with him. Then she’d remember why she couldn’t, she’d think of Aurelia and how much she envied a dead woman, and then she’d hate Tarquin some more.
The wedding was planned to be three months after Maggie and her friends had arrived at the palace, and Mira bit her tongue painfully when she’d unconsciously opened her mouth to comment on how soon that was. The months had passed quickly, especially because Ingrid had announced new requirements for women who wished to live in the palace: self defense training. They couldn’t— wouldn’t be permitted to live here in this dangerous land without any hope of defending themselves from dragons. Mira had tried not to roll her eyes, but wasn’t sure if she’d been successful when Lily gave her a look.
Each woman had been scheduled to have a preliminary lesson with the old mage who looked after the palace, to see if there were any potential for them to perform magic. Mira knew that the queen had been training with him, had heard rumors that she’d blocked her mate’s dragonfire to save her own life, and while the thought was interesting to Mira, she knew before she stepped foot in the mage’s tower that she would be hopeless.
The mage had declared her worthless upon setting eyes on her, and over the next several hours she had indeed proven herself to be.
“Not a single inkling of magic in you, not one tiny scrap of anything special at all,” she mimicked to the ladies after her lesson was finished. She laughed at it, threw her head back, but couldn’t help the odd disappointment that settled over her. It hadn’t been a complete loss as far as finding new trainees, Ingrid had been excited to share. Two of the people who’d come with Maggie had shown potential: Magda, her mother, and Elisabeth, a girl of eleven who’d come with her sisters.
The rest would need to learn archery, they’d been informed, and when Mira questioned the use of an arrow against a fire breathing dragon the size of a house, Ingrid had reassured her.
“We have magic, Mira. Morwich is working on it.”
Mira was as worthless at archery as she’d been at anything remotely magical, she had to admit to herself after several weeks of daily practice. Tarquin had begun to attend almost every day, close enough to Mira to tease her about her form or pester her about her terrible aim, but not close enough that she could make him shut up by telling him the filthy things she would do to him later. So she had to content herself with telling him off as politely as she possibly could while trying not to make the other ladies suspect anything. He didn’t seem to care if anyone knew about their nighttime meetings anymore, and that made her want to guard the secret even more.
“Fuck off,” she spat at him before he could say anything, after an arrow fell to the ground at her feet. It had been weeks, and even tiny Olive had figured out how to shoot at least near the target. Mira wasn’t used to being so terrible at something with no way to hide it. It certainly didn’t help that the man assigned to instruct them, Berric, had been chosen because he’d learned once, in his childhood, and they were learning from a book. Dragons didn’t seem to need to be able to fire a puny arrow because, she thought again, they were dragons.
Mira had pointed this out constantly, but although the ladies had grumbled along with her, no one seemed to want to cave on the issue. She knew the queen just felt helpless about the women being defenseless, and she harbored no ill will over it, but that didn’t help the exasperation she felt each morning as she woke early and dressed for it.
The worst mornings were the ones when Tarquin was still in her bed. She didn’t want him there, and the first time he’d fallen asleep after having her she’d tried to wake him to no avail, although she wasn’t sure if he was a heavy sleeper or just pretending to be. He’d been more persistent with his affectionate touches, and although she’d tried to shake him off as best as she could, he still would brush his thumb across her cheek or kiss her forehead when she wasn’t vigilant.
She sat on her terrace and considered him while holding a cup of tea brewed in her stolen— was it possible to steal from the dead?— teapot. It was a cold night, freezing really, she thought as she watched her breath form a puff of fog and then disappear in front of her. It almost hurt to breathe, but around her was a heavy fur cloak, the hood drawn tight around her face, and above her, a million tiny twinkling lights that made her feel less alone. It hurt to breathe, but at least she could breathe out here. She glanced at the door to her room, her haven, and the light from the hearth illuminated it well enough that she could see that he was still there, sprawled across her bed in sleep. It annoyed her.
When he slept in her bed he always, always tried to hold her as he slept, but she’d managed to wriggle away each time. She rose from her seat with a sigh, then gathered all of her blankets, leaving him none, and made a little nest to sleep in on the settee.
He was gone when she awoke in her cocoon of blankets, and before she remembered to be pleased, she was sorry.