blinking at him, our breath mingling as he finished the poem with a smile.

Without waiting for my response, Tamlin took the papers and stepped a pace
away to read the second poem, which wasn’t nearly as polite as the first. By the
time he read the third poem, my face was burning. Tamlin paused before he read
the fourth, then handed me back the papers.
“Final word in the second and fourth line of each poem,” he said, jerking his
chin toward the papers in my hands.
Unusual. Queue. I looked at the second poem. Slaying. Conflagration.
“These are—” I started.
“Your list of words was too interesting to pass up. And not good for love
poems at all.” When I lifted my brow in silent inquiry, he said, “We had contests
to see who could write the dirtiest limericks while I was living with my father’s
war-band by the border. I don’t particularly enjoy losing, so I took it upon
myself to become good at them.”
I didn’t know how he’d remembered that long list I’d compiled—I didn’t
want to. Sensing I wasn’t about to draw an arrow and shoot him, Tamlin took the
papers and read the fifth poem, the dirtiest and foulest of them all.
When he finished, I tipped back my head and howled, my laughter like
sunshine shattering age-hardened ice.

I was still smiling when we walked out of the park and toward the rolling hills,
meandering back to the manor. “You said—that night in the rose garden …” I
sucked on my teeth for a moment. “You said that your father had it planted for
your parents upon their mating—not wedding?”
“High Fae mostly marry,” he said, his golden skin flushing a bit. “But if
they’re blessed, they’ll find their mate—their equal, their match in every way.
High Fae wed without the mating bond, but if you find your mate, the bond is so
deep that marriage is … insignificant in comparison.”
I didn’t have the nerve to ask if faeries had ever had mating bonds with
humans, but instead dared to say, “Where are your parents? What happened to
them?”
A muscle feathered in his jaw, and I regretted the question, if only for the
pain that flickered in his eyes. “My father …” His claws gleamed at his knuckles
but didn’t go out any farther. I’d definitely asked the wrong question. “My father
was as bad as Lucien’s. Worse. My two older brothers were just like him. They
kept slaves—all of them. And my brothers … I was young when the Treaty was
forged, but I still remember what my brothers used to …” He trailed off. “It left
a mark—enough of a mark that when I saw you, your house, I couldn’t—
wouldn’t let myself be like them. Wouldn’t bring harm to your family, or you, or
subject you to faerie whims.”
Slaves—there had been slaves here. I didn’t want to know—had never looked
for traces of them, even five hundred years later. I was still little better than
chattel to most of his people, his world. That was why—why he’d offered the
loophole, why he’d offered me the freedom to live wherever I wished in
Prythian.
“Thank you,” I said. He shrugged, as if that would dismiss his kindness, the
weight of the guilt that still bore down on him. “What about your mother?”
Tamlin loosed a breath. “My mother—she loved my father deeply. Too
deeply, but they were mated, and … Even if she saw what a tyrant he was, she
wouldn’t say an ill word against him. I never expected—never wanted—my
father’s title. My brothers would have never let me live to adolescence if they
had suspected that I did. So the moment I was old enough, I joined my father’s
war-band and trained so that I might someday serve my father, or whichever of
my brothers inherited his title.” He flexed his hands, as if imagining the claws
beneath. “I’d realized from an early age that fighting and killing were about the
only things I was good at.”
“I doubt that,” I said.
He gave me a wry smile. “Oh, I can play a mean fiddle, but High Lords’ sons
don’t become traveling minstrels. So I trained and fought for my father against
whomever he told me to fight, and I would have been happy to leave the
scheming to my brothers. But my power kept growing, and I couldn’t hide it—
not among our kind.” He shook his head. “Fortunately or unfortunately, they
were all killed by the High Lord of an enemy court. I was spared for whatever
reason or Cauldron-granted luck. My mother, I mourned. The others …” A too-
tight shrug. “My brothers would not have tried to save me from a fate like
yours.”
I looked up at him. Such a brutal, harsh world—with families killing each
other for power, for revenge, for spite and control. Perhaps his generosity, his
kindness, was a reaction to that—perhaps he’d seen me and found it to be like
gazing into a mirror of sorts. “I’m sorry about your mother,” I said, and it was all
I could offer—all he’d once been able to offer me. He gave me a small smile.
“So that’s how you became High Lord.”
“Most High Lords are trained from birth in manners and laws and court
warfare. When the title fell to me, it was a … rough transition. Many of my