“Relax, I’m not interested in Florian’s toys.” Avrin straightened from the bottom of the stairwell, a crooked grin sparking those gold eyes as he strolled closer. “Or shall we call you his failure?”
I will have what I want.
Fresh fear chilled my nape. Florian and the word failure would never coexist.
I shrank deeper into the water until it tickled my chin. “I’m trying to bathe.”
“Oh?” Avrin’s smile stretched. He tore off his tunic and unfastened his tight pants. “Unfortunately, Princess, these springs are communal.” He pushed his pants down. “You must share.”
I snapped my slack mouth closed and scowled, averting my gaze from his toned and tan abdomen.
“How’s the neck?” the rude creature asked, descending the steps into the pool entirely naked and far too slow.
“Fine.”
He swam to the other side of the spring, then slipped underwater. I was more annoyed than impressed by his dramatic exit from the water.
He swept his fingers through his short black hair. Droplets slid over sculpted cheeks and clung to his long lashes. “I’m curious, Princess.”
I nearly told him not to call me that, but it could no longer be ignored. It was who I was, no matter how ill-fitting.
“Curiosity indeed kills,” I drawled instead and stared at the formation of sharp rocks behind his head. “Or at least it tries.”
“Yet here you are.” I could hear the grin shaping his words. “How did you escape him?”
I met his gaze then, absorbing the unwavering way he watched me. Almost laughing, I suddenly understood why he’d rudely joined me in the springs. “You think he sent me to you?”
Avrin said nothing, just continued to stare.
“I wish,” I admitted, though it lacked the sarcasm I intended, my fingers climbing to my neck again.
His eyes followed and narrowed upon the healing skin. “He did that to you?”
“No,” I said. “Some of his loyal guards with a hatred for this kingdom did.”
Avrin’s head tilted, his lips pursed in thought. “Florian is not the type to have others do such a deed for him. Not with someone as important as you. He’d make a show of it.” At my failure to respond to that, he concluded with a touch more tact, “He didn’t know.” A pause. “You were ambushed.”
He was good, whoever this Avrin was to my long-lost father.
I could only nod while pushing my hands back and forth through the water in an effort to keep the burn within my chest from reaching my eyes.
“You will be asked more questions regarding him, Princess. The winter king is skies-bent on plucking your father’s flesh from his bones until he bleats in surrender, and you’ve spent a great deal of time with him.”
“That’s fine,” I lied, as it was to be expected, and I reluctantly understood.
“But is it?” Avrin pressed.
I made the mistake of glaring at him, and he barked a laugh.
His teeth caught his lip, his study of me completed with furrowed brows and a slight shake of his head. “He burrowed beneath your skin, didn’t he?” There was no use in lying, but that didn’t mean I would put voice to the truth. “As was his plan, I suppose,” Avrin murmured with a smirk.
I looked away, my chest cinched tight. “What will be asked of me?”
He continued to watch me, and it was confirmed that he hadn’t merely decided to take a bath. The interrogating had already begun.
I would need to grow used to it, though all I wanted was to return to my small chamber and sleep until I could find the excitement I should be feeling over finally being exactly where I’d always longed to be.
“Well, you will be asked how you managed to get away from those guards for a start.”
“I materialized.”
His arched brow said he knew there was more, or I would have materialized long before a blade caught my throat.
“I jumped from a carriage when I realized it wasn’t heading into the city.” I saw no harm in telling him, even as I found it hard to explain. “The horse. One of the guards untethered a horse and chased me, and when he dismounted, and I was trapped, I wished only to keep from looking at him if I was going to die.”
The peace that had encompassed me so entirely at that moment still baffled me. If there was ever a time to feel anything but utter contentment within my being, it was when a hate-riddled male with a dagger was trying to end my existence. “I stared at the horse, and the creature reared when the blade…”
“It helped you,” Avrin finished.
I nodded. I’d been too hesitant to admit even to myself that it had happened. But it had. It had, and I didn’t know how I’d done it. “I remember meeting his eyes, the horse,” I said. “And as I did, everything just washed away. The forest around us seemed to mute all else. I was no longer afraid.”
“Your mother had such a gift,” Avrin said.
My lashes lifted, my lips parting.
Avrin informed, “The bond with animals. Most in this kingdom with noble blood do, but for some, it runs deeper. A form of communication where no words are required—only feeling.”
Some of the ice encasing my heart thawed. That I’d been blessed in such a way…
Avrin squashed my awe, his tone mocking. “A useless gift, really, but in this case, it served you well.” A crooked smile curled his mouth, and I wanted to punch it. “Do not despair. Have you any affinity with the land?”
I glowered. “What do you mean?”
“The soil,” he said with a tug of his brows, as if I should know. “And what grows from it.”
“No,” I said, wondering if I should be ashamed when I didn’t care.
Perhaps I should have been. Avrin wiped his hand over his mouth, evidently hiding another stupid grin, and shrugged. “I suggest finding out if you do. Vines and quaking earth make for far more impressive escapes, Princess.” He dunked into the water, emerging some feet away near the mossy steps. “I’ll give you that privacy you were seeking now.”
I didn’t dare look at his naked form. I listened to the slap of his wet feet over the stone and the unfolding of a sun-dried towel pulled from a carving of shelves in the rock. “Avrin,” I said. “Do all the servants have no tongues?”
I sensed that he’d stilled, the rubbing of the towel over his body ceasing.
Carefully and quietly, he said, “Would you keep help in your household who might one day be captured and forced to tell the enemy every secret they’ve heard within your walls?”
My empty stomach roiled. I turned to rest my arms on the ledge of the spring. Water dripped down my hairline.
Avrin watched its descent to my chin. “Didn’t think so,” he said softly.
I didn’t tell him that one of their servants, who I now understood had been captured by Florian, was employed by him and likely various other nobility within Hellebore.
My eyes shifted to the ripples in the water as Avrin padded to the stairs and left me with, “Most are illiterate, too.”
My eyes opened with the incoming dawn. Sleep had been elusive, and the patches of dreams that visited haunting.
Blue eyes. Soft hair. Cold and bruising hands.