but . . . well, the dresses can cover it, I suppose.”
“Dresses?” He was standing so near that she could see the fi ne thread
detail on his jacket, and smelled not perfume, but horses and iron.
Dorian grinned. “What remarkable eyes you have! And how angry
you are!”
Coming within strangling distance of the Crown Prince of Adarlan,
son of the man who sentenced her to a slow, miserable death, her
self- control balanced on a fragile edge— dancing along a cliff .
“I demand to know,” she began, but the Captain of the Guard pulled
her back from the prince with spine- snapping force. “I wasn’t going to
kill him, you buff oon.”
“Watch your mouth before I throw you back in the mines,” the
brown- eyed captain said.
“Oh, I don’t think you’d do that.”
“And why is that?” Chaol replied.
Dorian strode to his throne and sat down, his sapphire eyes bright.
She looked from one man to another and squared her shoulders.
“Because there’s something you want from me, something you want
badly enough to come here yourselves. I’m not an idiot, though I was
foolish enough to be captured, and I can see that this is some sort of
secret business. Why else would you leave the capital and venture this
far? You’ve been testing me all this time to see if I am physically and
mentally sound. Well, I know that I’m still sane, and that I’m not broken,
despite what the incident at the wall might suggest. So I demand
to be told why you’re here, and what ser vices you wish of me, if I’m not
destined for the gallows.”
Th e men exchanged glances. Dorian steepled his fi ngers. “I have a
proposition for you.”
Her chest tightened. Never, not in her most fanciful dreams, had
she imagined that the opportunity to speak with Dorian Havilliard
would arise. She could kill him so easily, tear that grin from his face . . .
She could destroy the king as he had destroyed her . . .
But perhaps his proposition could lead to escape. If she got beyond
the wall, she could make it. Run and run and disappear into the
mountains and live in solitude in the dark green of the wild, with a
pine- needle carpet and a blanket of stars overhead. She could do it. She
just needed to clear the wall. She had come so close before . . .
“I’m listening,” was all she said.