Page 11 of A Fragile Enchantment

His bluntness all but crushed her every untoward thought. “Huh?”

“You’ve been acting skittish and strange from the moment I walked through the door. If there’s something on your mind, out with it.”

Skittish and strange.Oh, the nerve of him! The last of her patience snapped. “Well,” she drawled, “since you asked so nicely, I thought you might want to apologize.”

Kit’s face slackened with surprise. She watched as he pulled himself back together piece by piece, his expression darkening with understanding. “Sorry.”

Sorry,spat out like a broken tooth. As though she’d extracted a confession from him under torture. If she wasn’t so furious with him, she might have laughed. “Is that all?”

His eyes flashed with bitter frustration. “What else do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know.” Her heart beat so wildly, she could barely hear herself over its thunderous roar. Some distant part of her knew she should demur or simper or stand down, that she should not talk to a prince this way. Perhaps it was her finite days that gave her courage, or perhaps it was the seamstress in her. She’d never been able to resist tugging at loose threads. “That you regret calling my craft atrick?”

He fixed his gaze on the wall past her shoulder. “I was angry when I said that.”

“I’m angrynow. My work is…”Me,she almost caught herself confessing. “It is personal!”

“I’m not going to apologize for not falling at your feet with awe. I’m not the one who asked you to come here.”

“That is not what I meant.” Her voice trembled. If she cried now, she would never forgive herself. “It was cruel, and you know it.”

“I do know it.” He bristled. “I said I was sorry.”

And that, she supposed, was the extent of the apology she could expect from him. How little he must’ve thought of her to believe that was all she deserved. A Machlish girl, after all, was worth less than nothing. In the silence, the gulf widened and widened between them.

“I need to finish my measurements” was all she could think to say.

As she continued her work, her mood darkened. Sinclair had told her that she would be caught in the cross fire of whatever warKit had chosen to wage. Now, Niamh saw the battlefield plainly, with two Carmine-red flags planted in the earth. His marriage to Infanta Rosa would be a union of duty, not of love.

I didn’t ask you to come here.

I am yours to command.

Jack had arranged this marriage. And although Kit had agreed to it, he clearly intended to spite everyone to the bitter end.

Suddenly, Niamh felt terribly sad. She had always loved love. As much as she yearned for it, she couldn’t fathom something so bright and wild. It would burn her up like kindling. Life was too painfully short. She couldn’t burden someone else with the intimacy of that knowledge, which she’d carried with her since she first noticed her fingers turn deathly white in the cold. But while love was not for girls like her, the hopeless romantic within her couldn’t be denied. She couldn’t be entirely certain where it had come from. Machlish myth, after all, was not so whimsical and kind as to promise everlasting love. In fact, her namesake might have the most tragic romance of all.

Long ago, Queen Niamh took a mortal lover and brought him to her castle in the Land of Eternal Youth, where spring reigned forever. Nothing ever died, and nothing ever changed. But after many years together, her lover grew homesick and longed to see all the people he had left behind. Niamh warned him that his family and friends were gone, but she knew she could not keep him like a prisoner. She knew that his loneliness was more powerful than their love.

Reluctantly, she agreed to let him go—but only if he promised never to let his feet touch the earth. As he rode across the countryside, searching for familiar faces, he realized that what Niamh had said was true. Everyone he ever knew and everyone he ever loved was long dead. As he drew away from the village he once called home, his horse spooked at a rustle in the grass and threw him from his seat. The moment he struck the ground, his hundreds of years seized upon him at once, and he transformed into a feeble old man.

No good ever came from loving fragile things.

Niamh had never cared for Machlish tales. They made her terribly depressed, all of them filled with tragedy and war and the impossible weight of honor. But she’d spent many nights as a girl paging through a book of fairy tales imported from Jaille: stories about peasant girls who snuck off to balls in glass slippers, who married princes because of their goodness and beauty, who loved fiercely enough to break terrible curses. They were impossible, wondrous, romantic stories, and they’d filled her up with hopeless yearning. She very much doubted someone like Kit cared a whit for romance, but it seemed a shame he might never get a chance to experience it himself.

When the prickly silence threatened to drive her mad, she sighed. “Is there anything about the wedding you are looking forward to?”

Kit glared at her disbelievingly. “Are youtryingto provoke me?”

“What? No! I…” She resisted the urge to strangle him with the tailor’s tape looped around his neck. “I am just making conversation.”

“Most people might try commenting on the weather,” he said, with a begrudging sort of admiration. “You’re impertinent.”

“Andyouare combative.”

He squinted at her, but he did not look angry. In fact, he seemed almost incredulous. “What, are you going to scold me now?”

Feeling ridiculous and exposed looming above him on the ottoman, she stepped down and found herself at eye level with his chin. “Well… maybe.”