She set a hand against her neck, massaging it, but the stiffness refused to leave until she looked back at him. It was as though her gaze was being pinned forward. As though something demanded that her attention stay with the prince.
“What changed, Miss Hawthorne?” His words echoed, as though the two of them sat a great distance apart. Her eyes locked to his, mesmerized by the depth of their gold. She blinked, and the entire room filled with the color, casting Aris in a hazy glow.
“You’d never believe me if I told you.” Blythe spoke without any sense of her lips moving. She couldn’t control herself, unable to look away as Aris whispered, “You’ve no idea the impossibilities I believe.”
She couldn’t say no. Blythe sat rigid in her seat, mind numbed and with only a vague understanding that this conversation was happening. She was coherent. She was there. But she had no control over herself as the words were coaxed from her. “I watched her kill a foal… and then I watched as she brought it back to life. She did the same thing to my brother, though he was left for dead.”
Only then did Blythe reclaim herself, the fog dissipating from her mind. She was sweating profusely and grabbed a handkerchief from the table. Slowly, carefully, she allowed herself to glance up to see that the fox kit they’d rescued earlier that week had jumped onto the chair beside Aris, and that the man’s hand had stilled upon it. He didn’t seem to be breathing.
She must have been feverish. That was the only way to explain the strange mistiness over her thoughts, or why she’d been foolish enough to let even a word slip, let alone the entire truth about Signa. Her hands clasped in her lap, a leg bouncing beneath her skirts as her mind worked to unravel what to do next. What to say.
“You’re certain you saw her do that?” Never had she heard Aris speak as quietly as he did then, nor seen his eyes so gentle.
“I was only joking,” she tried, hoping her voice sounded even half as amused as she tried to make it. “It was nothing as serious as that, it was just time for her to leave—”
His entire body had gone rigid, and Blythe realized with a rush of terror that he knew the truth. She tried to make herself smaller beneath the weight of a stare that frightened her to her core. Around Aris the golden haze flickered once more, gone one moment only to reappear when she blinked.
“You believe me.” Blythe whispered those words aloud several times before she could convince herself of that reality. “You believe me… because you’re like her, aren’t you?”
God, what a fool she’d been not to see it sooner. While Signa had been trailed by shadows and darkness, Aris radiated light. He wasn’t surprised because he’d expected this. Blythe would never have offered up all her truths to him on her own accord. He’d drawn the words from her. Forced her to speak them into existence.
“Touch me, and I will kill you.” It was a weak threat, given that she had not a single weapon on her, but Blythe poured as much belief into those words as she could. She’d take the pins from her hair and stab them into his throat if she had to. “What did you do to me?”
Aris started to lean even closer, only for Blythe to kick his knee, startling the fox awake. Aris hissed a breath, doubling over while Blythe leaped from her chair and circled behind it, plotting her next ten steps.
“Stay where you are.” She assessed their shared space for anything she could use against him. A poker from the hearth. The shard of a broken teacup she could smash against his skull. “What is Signa, and what are you? And you’d better explain to me why in the bloody hell you’re glowing.”
“You can see that?” Aris sounded surprised enough that Blythe tensed, wondering if he was plotting something. “It’s not a glow. They’re threads, Miss Hawthorne. Look closer.”
She didn’t want to take her eyes from his again, every part of her tensed and ready to spring should he try anything. But Aris, to his credit, kept remarkably still. It took at least a full minute before Blythe listened, turning her attention back to the glow and staring. Blinking. Staring again. Her vision swam if she looked at any one spot around him for long, yet she held her eyes open until they were dry, just barely able to see one of the threads, then two, before everything became hazy again.
“Three times you have knocked upon Death’s door.” The coolness of his whisper sent a long chill feathering down Blythe’s spine. “Three times you have defied your fate. It would seem that each of those three times was not without lasting effect.”