Rise of the Fallen Court by Lilly Inkwood

Author:Lilly Inkwood [Inkwood, Lilly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008672683
Publisher: One More Chapter

Robert leads me to his tent. ‘You sleep here tonight,’ he says.

I scoff. ‘Yes, sure.’

His green eyes sparkle in a way that tells me he isn’t joking.

‘How about your secret meetings with your captains? Am I allowed to be in the tent then, too?’ I try to school my face into innocence, but I think I’m failing. He wasn’t meant to find me. Oddly enough, I’m on the edge of giggling, just looking at how furious he is.

‘You’ll be put under guard then. And I swear to you, Blanche, a single absent gaze, and I’ll tell them to throw a spear at you. Just to snap you out of it.’

‘You wouldn’t,’ I chuckle.

‘I advise you not to test me.’ He sweeps around to the entrance of the tent. ‘Stay here,’ he says, before he barks some orders at some unwitting guards who are standing outside.

He then positions himself in front of me. I sink onto the edge of the bed, exhaustion washing over my bones in waves. I can’t believe that only yesterday, at this time, I was still at the Tower.

‘Where did you go?’ he says. ‘Were you looking for your nephew?’

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘And did you go anywhere else?’

I pull at a loose thread from one of the wool blankets on the bed. It’s a travelling bed, and an expensive one, the kind that the rich seigneurs carry from residence to residence for their exquisite bedchambers.

‘Blanche.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where were you?’

I toy with the idea of telling him all of it. After all, oddly, we’re in this together. Me, him, Henri and the Guilds. He’s bound to hear about the plans from the Guilds himself, but I don’t know how much they would tell him.

Let them handle all the rest, then.

I reveal only as much as I did to my Fallen Court. ‘Henri asked me to marry him. As soon as we reach Langville.’

So many expressions change on his face. ‘Oh,’ he says.

I can’t look him in the eye. ‘Yes.’

He doesn’t say anything for a long time and I return to toying with the strand. ‘So.’

‘So.’

‘So.’

Isn’t it absurd, I think, that my fate should be decided in Langville? And that I’m here, face to face with Robert, while someone else decides what we are, in fact, to each other. Whether I’m a prisoner, or the betrothed of the next seigneur of Valmons.

Too many have too little power in the Red Kingdom.

Our brilliant conversation is interrupted by the panting of two guards, carrying my wooden chest. They stop in the middle of the tent, hovering, and Robert indicates to them a spot close to the bed.

They thunk it down with a resounding thud. ‘Good,’ he says, and they part without a single word.

He is serious about me sleeping in his tent tonight, then.

I prefer not to examine how I feel about this.

There is so much I have to think about already.

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