“You don’t?” Tawny, who was quickly becoming one of my favorite people in the kingdom, challenged. “You’ve watched him train in the yard—”
“I have not!” The Maiden’s voice rose.
Such a little liar. She totally had been.
Tawny had my back, even if she didn’t know it. “I’ve been with you on more than one occasion as you watched the guards train from the balcony, and you weren’t watching just any guard. You were watching him.”
I really liked this Tawny.
“You seem almost angry about him being named your guard,” Tawny continued. “And unless there’s something you haven’t told me, then I have no idea why.”
There was silence.
“What haven’t you told me?” Tawny demanded as it became clear the Maiden hadn’t shared details about her trip to the Red Pearl with her companion. “Has he said something to you before?”
My lips pursed. What a rather uncalled-for leap of logic.
“When would I have had a chance for him to speak to me?” the Maiden said.
“As much as you creep around this castle, I’m sure there is a lot you overhear that doesn’t actually require you speaking to someone,” Tawny said, sharing another interesting tidbit while proving one of my suspicions correct. One that said the Maiden had a habit of sneaking around. “Did you overhear him say something bad?”
My eyes narrowed. Tawny was quickly losing that coveted spot in my favorites.
“Poppy…”
There was a long stretch of silence where I briefly considered moving farther from the door so I wasn’t eavesdropping, but I quickly dismissed that idea.
Then the Maiden announced, “I kissed him.”
My jaw unlocked as my head cut to the door. I couldn’t believe she’d actually admitted it.
“What?” Tawny said.
“Or he kissed me,” the Maiden added as a bit of concern started to blossom in my chest. Was this wise of her? Could she trust this Lady in Wait with such information? I sure as fuck hoped so. Not only did it jeopardize what I’d been working toward, I doubted the Teermans would take kindly to learning such information. However, the way Tawny spoke to the Maiden said there was a level of closeness there. “Well, we kissed each other. There was mutual kiss—”
“I get it!” Tawny shrieked, causing me to blink as I glanced down the empty hall. “When did this happen? How did this happen? And why am I just now hearing about this?”
The sound of footsteps came again, and then the Maiden shared, “It was…it was the night I went to the Red Pearl.”
“I knew it.” There was another thud, this time sounding like someone, who I guessed was Tawny, stomping their foot. “I knew something else had happened. You were acting too weird—too worried about being in trouble. Oh! I want to throw something at you. I can’t believe you haven’t said anything. I would be screaming this from the top of the castle.”
Okay. I was flattered, and Tawny was now working her way back into my favorite-person spot.
“You’d be screaming it because you could,” the Maiden replied wryly. “Nothing would happen to you. But me?”
What exactly would happen to her? She didn’t elaborate, and their voices disappointedly dropped too low for me to hear, but I did pick up the Maiden’s voice a few moments later.
“It’s just that…I’ve done a lot of things I shouldn’t do, but this…this is different,” she said, and I wondered what the other things were. “I thought if I didn’t say anything, it would, I don’t know…”
“Go away? That the gods wouldn’t know?” Tawny said, and my eyes rolled. “If the gods know now, they knew then, Poppy.”
She had a point. Except the gods didn’t know shit, and if they did, this whole Maiden and Chosen business was a load of bullshit anyway. Despite what the Ascended said. Despite even what Kieran wondered about the whole shroud crap.
If the Maiden responded, I didn’t hear her, but I heard Tawny as if she were standing next to me.
“I’ll forgive you for not telling me if you tell me what happened in very, very graphic detail.”
I waited with bated breath to hear exactly what she said.
“I wanted to, you know, experience something—anything—and I thought that would be the best place. I saw Vikter there,” the Maiden shared. While I wasn’t surprised to hear that, I’d seen him there myself, I was surprised to hear her call him by his first name. “So there was this lady there, and she recognized me.”
“What?” Tawny nearly yelled again.
“I don’t know,” the Maiden said. “But I think she was like a…a Seer or something.”
Huh. I frowned. There were no Seers that I knew of in Masadonia. Or changelings other than Jansen.
“I could be wrong, though. Maybe she just recognized me someway else,” the Maiden said. That had to be it because there was definitely no Seer at the Red Pearl. I would know. “I was probably just so awkward it became obvious. Anyway, I went into this chamber I thought was empty, and he…he was in there.”
“And?” Tawny pressed.
“He thought I was Britta.”
“You look nothing like her,” Tawny explained. A pause. “Her cloak. You were wearing it.”
“I guess the rumors about them are true, because he grabbed me—not in a bad way, in a…passionate, familiar way,” she said, her voice lowering to the point where I had to really strain to hear her. Which meant I was really eavesdropping now.
It was wrong. I knew that.
But I rarely behaved right, so here I was.
“It was…it was my first kiss,” she said.
Every muscle in my body tensed. I knew that already but hearing her say it now… It made my chest feel off. Light and heavy at the same time.
“And did he continue doing so while thinking you were someone else?” Tawny asked. “If so, I’m going to be thoroughly disappointed.”
“In me?” Her voice peaked then.
“No, at him. And I’ll also be concerned for your safety if he didn’t realize after getting all up in your personal space that you weren’t Britta. Nice to look at or not, he shouldn’t be your guard if that’s the case.”
I cracked a grin. She was right.
“He realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t her. I didn’t tell him who I was, but he… I think he must’ve sensed that I wasn’t, you know, that experienced. He didn’t like tuck tail and run. Instead, he…” The Maiden’s voice lowered again. “He offered to do anything I wanted.”
“Oh,” Tawny uttered. “Oh, my. Anything?”
“Anything,” the Maiden confirmed.
And I would have done nearly anything she wanted of me. Who wouldn’t when they had her soft, warm body beneath theirs, her lips plump from kissing, and her eyes bright with desire?
Dammit.
A pulse of want pounded through me, hitting my cock just enough for it to stir.
I should stop listening. It would be really awkward if Vikter arrived and I was rocking a hard-on.
“We just kissed. That’s all,” the Maiden said. But that wasn’t all. I’d kissed her elsewhere.