“
I do have a bad habit,” he says. “of falling in love. With regularity and to spectacular effect. You see, it never goes well.”
I wonder if this conversation makes him think of our kiss, but then, I was the one who kissed him. He’d only kissed back.
“As charming as you are, how can that be?” I say.
He laughs again. “That’s what my sister Taryn always says. She tells me that I remind her of her late husband. Which makes some sense, since I would be his half brother. But it’s also alarming, because she’s the one who murdered him.”
Much as when he spoke about Madoc, it’s strange how fond Oak can sound when he tells me a horrifying thing a member of his family has done. “Whom have you fallen in love with?” I ask.
“Well, there was you,” the prince says. “When we were children.”
“Me?” I ask incredulously.
“You didn’t know?” He appears to be merry in the face of my astonishment. “Oh yes. Though you were a year my senior, and it was hopeless, I absolutely mooned over you. When you were gone from Court, I refused any food but tea and toast for a month.”
I cannot help snorting over the sheer absurdity of his statement.
He puts a hand to my heart. “Ah, and now you laugh. It is my curse to adore cruel women.
He cannot expect me to believe he had real feelings. “Stop with your games.”
“Very well,” he says. “Shall we go to the next? Her name was Lara, a mortal at the school I attended when I lived with my eldest sister and her girlfriend. Sometimes Lara and I would climb into the crook of one of the maple trees and share sandwiches. But she had a villainous friend, who implicated me in a piece of gossip—which resulted in Lara stabbing me with a lead pencil and breaking off our relationship.”
“You do like cruel women,” I say.
“Then there was Violet, a pixie. I wrote terrible poetry about how I adored her. Unfortunately, she adored duels and would get into trouble so that I would have to fight for her honor. And even more unfortunately, neither my sister nor my father bothered to teach me how to fight for show.
I thought of the dead-eyed expression on his face before his bout with the ogre and Tiernan’s angry words.
“That resulted in my accidentally killing a person she liked better than me.”
“Oh,” I say. “That is three levels of unfortunate.”
“Then there was Sibi, who wanted to run away from Court with me, but as soon as we went, hated it and wept until I took her home. And Loana, a mermaid, who found my lack of a tail unbearable but tried to drown me anyway, because she found it equally unbearable that I would ever love another.”
The way he tells these stories makes me recall how he’s told me many painful things before. Some people laugh in the face of death. He laughed in the face of despair. “How old were you?”
“Fifteen, with the mermaid,” he said. “And nearly three years later, I must surely be wiser.”
“Surely,” I say, wondering if he was. Wondering if I wanted him to be.
”
”