Daphne blinks her surprise away. A whole day, gone. “You need sleep too,” she says.
“I’m fine,” he tells her. “I’m not the one who was poisoned.”
“No,” she agrees. “But for some reason you’ve been sitting there for an entire day, taking care of me. Whatever sleep you’ve found in that chair couldn’t have been comfortable.”
“It’s a small chair,” he admits. “But I’m fine. You need sleep.”
She holds his gaze as she finishes the second glass of water. “I won’t sleep if you don’t,” she tells him.
“You can’t be serious,” he says, raising his eyebrows.
She pats the space beside her in the large bed. “You don’t want to call my bluff,” she tells him. “Come on, there is plenty of room and I don’t want to hear you complaining about your aching back tomorrow.”
“It’s not proper,” he tells her.
She laughs, but it comes out weak. Already, she can feel her mind growing fuzzy again, sleep clawing at her. “I didn’t think you cared much about that,” she says. “Besides, we’re betrothed, and I can’t imagine you’ll have trouble keeping your hands to yourself. I must look a fright.”
“That’s an understatement,” he says with a belabored sigh, pushing up from the chair and sliding onto the bed beside her, though he stays on top of the covers. “You look an inch from death.”
Daphne tries to give him a shove, but her arm is so heavy and weak it has no effect.
“Just sleep,” he tells her, rolling onto his side to face her, his cheek against the pillow.
She should sleep—exhaustion is ready to pull her under any second—but instead she lets her eyes scan his face, tracing his sharp cheekbones and the long, dark eyelashes fanned over them. His jawline is dotted in stubble. After a second, he opens his eyes again, meeting hers with a quiet intensity that makes it impossible for her to look away.
“I’m glad you aren’t, you know,” he says softly.
“Aren’t what?” she asks.
“Dead,” he says.
She pulls the blankets tighter around her, hugging herself to ward off the cold. “Are you?” she asks. “I thought it would be a relief—you said it yourself. You never asked for this, for me.”
“You didn’t ask for me, either,” he reminds her. “You didn’t ask for Cillian, or to come to Friv in the first place, you were just thrown into all of it. You didn’t ask for any of this.”
You didn’t ask for any of this.
It’s the first time it’s occurred to her that she didn’t. She never protested, never fought it, but she didn’t ask for it, either. Her mother decided her fate before she’d taken her first breath, and she was content to go along with it, but that isn’t the same thing. She never had a choice. A thought pierces her fevered mind, striking true—if she’d had a choice, she might have chosen differently, a life without poisons or subterfuge, without learning to pick locks or code letters, a life without lies.
Suddenly, it occurs to Daphne that she’s tired of lies, of pretending. She wants to touch him, so she does. She places a hand against his cheek, feeling the stubble rough beneath her palm.
“Daphne,” he says, her name a whisper. At first she thinks he means it as an admonishment, but he doesn’t pull away.
“I’m sure I would have liked Cillian,” she tells him, though she doesn’t mean to. The words fall from her lips before she can think to stop them. “But I don’t think he would have looked at me the way you do.”
“And how do I look at you?” he asks. He sounds like he doesn’t know whether or not he truly wants the answer.
Daphne smiles, though even that hurts. “Like I’m a bolt of lightning,” she says, tracing her fingers along his jawline. “And you can’t decide whether I’ll kill you or bring you back to life.”
He doesn’t say anything, but she feels the bob of his throat beneath her touch when he swallows.
“Daphne,” he says again, and this time there is no mistaking it, the sigh in his voice, the meaning lurking just below the surface.
“I’m fairly sure that’s how I look at you, too,” she says quietly.
He closes his eyes, then opens them again. “You’re sick. You need to sleep,” he says. “You said you would.”
Daphne nods, hugging herself tighter. “I’m just so cold, Bairre,” she says. “Why is it so cold?”
“It’s not,” he says. “It’s sweltering in here. It’s the poison leaving you, making you feverish.”
Distantly, she knows that makes sense, but it doesn’t ease her shivering. She burrows deeper under the covers.
“Here,” Bairre says with a sigh. “Roll over.”
When she does, he brings his arms around her, settling her against his chest.
“Better?” he asks.
It’s not, really, but she likes the feeling of his arms around her. It might not help the shivers wracking her, but it does make her feel safe. She feels his breath, steady and deep, feels the rhythm of his heart beating, and it grounds her.
“Much,” she says, closing her eyes.
Silence falls over them and sleep begins to tug her under once more.
“Why are you here?” she hears herself ask again, though she doesn’t remember deciding to ask. The words slip past her lips, half question, half yawn.
Bairre doesn’t answer—asleep already, she thinks—but before she can join him there, she feels the low rumble of his chest as he speaks, his voice soft in her ear.
“I’m here because I want to be. Because you are lightning—terrifying and beautiful and dangerous and bright all at once. And I wouldn’t wish you were anything else.”
A ball is the last place Sophronia wants to be tonight. The crowd around her is giddy and boisterous, sipping drinks and making small talk, discussing the coming war with Cellaria as if it’s the most recent tidbit of scintillating gossip rather than a devastating mistake for the country. If one more courtier congratulates Sophronia on it, she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to keep herself from striking them. But she understands that the optics matter—if they will be dragged into a war with Cellaria no matter what, it needs to appear to have been their choice. No one can know about Violie’s forgery or that Leopold tried to go back on the falsified declaration. So she keeps her smile firmly fixed, even though she wants to scream.
Leopold passes her a crystal flute of champagne. “I’ve had no word from Pasquale,” he tells her, keeping his voice low. “Have you heard from your sister?”
Sophronia shakes her head. After she sent coded letters to Beatriz and Daphne, she suggested Leopold write Pasquale as well. It’s only been a few days since then, but Sophronia has been watching the post with a growing sense of desperation.