Between her nearly subsided nausea and the assurance that they weren’t letting the Chosen run off on their merry way entirely unhindered, Angelique was finally starting to feel better.
She shuffled around to face Evariste, whose eyes never stopped moving as he looked around the room, watching guards and soldiers come and go according to Snow White’s orders.
Angelique was pretty certain the princess was hunkered down in the study with some of the Seven Warriors, Queen Faina, and the lords that had helped infiltrate the castle.
Naturally, this means we will not be going to the study.
Angelique ran a hand through her unevenly cut hair as she studied Evariste with a more critical eye.
He looked fairly terrible, but not quite as bad as Angelique had expected given how long he’d been in the mirror.
He’d filled in a few of the missing pieces for Angelique when she’d been meekly waiting for Berhta to let her leave—namely that he’d been stored in a mirror in some kind of cave system for the longest portion of his captivity, and he had been moved to the Snow Queen’s mirror last summer after the Chosen had shipped him north—creating the trail Angelique and Quinn had picked up on.
But given that it was now spring, that meant Evariste had spent roughly two thirds of a year inside the twisted mirror—and Angelique couldn’t imagine that his previous captivity had been “easy.”
He had dark circles under his eyes; his skin was pale compared to his usual healthy tan, but what worried Angelique the most was how tenuous his smile seemed. He didn’t seem physically wounded, but he’d been cut off from his companions, magic, and all friendly contact for years.
I don’t know that Berhta’s “special care” could help him.
It was understandable—expected, even—that he’d still carry that kind of pain even after being freed. But Angelique also wasn’t entirely certain how she could help him—or even if she should prioritize it above the need to make certain he was not captured again.
I’m quite possibly the worst when it comes to the mechanics of relationships. It doesn’t bode well for Evariste that I’m the only one here.
Evariste finally peeled his gaze off a brightly painted wall mural—which had so many gems encrusted into the surface, it would have made the Loire palace and its tacky obsession with gold positively envious. His eyes settled on Angelique, and his smile solidified a tiny bit—but it was enough to squeeze Angelique’s heart.
“Is anything wrong?” Angelique asked.
Evariste arched an eyebrow at her. “I’m not the one that was sickly green a short time ago.”
Angelique awkwardly clasped her hands together. “Yes. Well. It seems we have a lot to talk about.”
Evariste sighed, his expression looking a little haggard. “I imagine so. Have I really been gone six years?”
“Yes,” Angelique said, the word heavy with feeling.
There was a gap between them that she couldn’t quite put into words, and she knew it was the time span that was the cause.
Not that during the years apart, Evariste had suddenly come to his senses about her core magic and suddenly no longer liked her. It was just that so much had happened.
And though Angelique still felt strongly for Evariste—and would fight to her death to keep the Chosen from getting him again—it almost felt like there was too much that they needed to tell each other, that it made things…awkward.
If that’s the case, then we should start talking. We need to!
Angelique drew herself up and thumped her wooden bucket on the side of her thigh—a splinter poking her straight through her trousers. “Is there some place you’d like to go—or see?”
Evariste tilted his head. “Outside,” he said.
“Very well—then let’s find ‘outside.’” She awkwardly hovered at his elbow for a moment. Typically, Evariste had been the more physically demonstrative person in their friendship before, but now Angelique had to hold herself back from grabbing his arm just to assure herself he was really there.
But do I really need to hold myself back? I don’t imagine he’d mind it if I grabbed his elbow like I used to.
Evariste was staring at Angelique with a curiously mixed expression that was a cross between bemusement and pain.
Angelique mashed her lips together hard enough to make her cheeks pucker, then she awkwardly held out her hand.
To her relief, Evariste’s smile bloomed into something larger, and he took her hand in his, intertwining their fingers.
Angelique breathed a sigh of relief—yes, he really was there—then casually swung her bucket by its rough rope handle with her free hand as she felt her magic drift off in interest. “Let’s try this direction,” Angelique said.
“Are you familiar with the palace?”
“Not really. Snow White dragged us back and forth through it today, but I have no hope of remembering anything about it,” Angelique said. “But there are more weapons this way, which likely means more guards, which also most likely means we’d be moving away from the center of the palace and to the outside.” She paused when they passed by a decorative arrangement of war axes and finely wrought daggers and briefly pulled her hand from Evariste’s so she could remove one of the daggers off the wall and toss it conveniently into her bucket.
Snow White won’t mind.
Once she finished, Evariste took her hand again. “You’ve grown quite skilled with your magic in my absence.”
Angelique cringed. “I didn’t have much of a choice. So much has happened—there have been so many near losses…”
Evariste squeezed her hand as they left the hall they’d been standing in and stepped into a corridor of some sort that was decorated in dark, emerald green tones. “I’m glad—not that you experienced such difficulties, but that you’ve gotten so skilled. Are you an enchantress, yet?”
“No—the Council wouldn’t even consider it since you were missing.” Angelique swung her bucket so it smacked her in the thigh again. “I had a lot of trouble with them. But my troubles are pretty minute compared to what you went through.”
“There’s no judging pain, Angel,” Evariste said. He’d been scanning every decoration they passed, but at Angelique’s words, he narrowed his gaze in on her. “Because there is no comparing it. Pain is pain—no matter how it occurs.”
Angelique’s smile turned dangerously misty, and she nudged her shoulder into Evariste’s. “Now I really can believe you are here.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Because you’re sharing deep truths.” Angelique’s gaze strayed to an arrangement of jeweled flowers displayed on an end table.
It was only the tickle of her magic and her experience with Elle that made her recognize the decorative roses—and their sharpened metal stems complete with sharpened thorns—were a possible weapon. She snagged one for her bucket.
“It’s not so much that I am deep as much as Clovicus drove such principles through my skull. But in this case, it is a personal observation,” Evariste said.
Angelique paused when they walked past a tiny, closet-like room that she recognized as a guard outpost, chortling to herself when she found a handful of broken arrows. She dropped these into her bucket to add to her growing arsenal—she would be prepared if the Chosen so much as breathed in Juwel this day!