Child of Darkness-L-D-2 by Jennifer Armintrout Page A

her. “She wishes that I should mate myself to her daughter.”
    “Oh.” She did not meet his eyes.
    “I will not. She is a mere child.” He stumbled over this, as he wasn’t certain Dika was much older than Cerridwen. He wasn’t sure how Human age worked, really. “She is old enough to find a mate, but she has been coddled and spoiled. I do not wish to spend an eternity with her.”
    Dika looked up, a glint in her eyes that was caught between amusement and anger. “And me?
    Would you wish to spend an eternity with me?”
    He opened his mouth to answer, and realized it was a trick. He could no more spend an eternity with her than she could spend one with him. “If it were possible, yes.”
    “Then you content yourself to living with me until I am as old and withered as the Dya?” She came closer now, and gripped the front of his robes to pull their bodies together. “Will you still love me then?”
    “I will love you for as long as I am able.” He knew now what had taken so long in the caravan, what the Dya’s muffled voice had been saying. “You know that I am merely an inconstant Faery, with no heart for Human love.”
    “I know this,” she said, rising on her toes to touch their mouths together. Her breath moved over his lips. “I wanted to know that you knew it.”
    Four
    C erridwen did not go to her mother that night. She didn’t have the stomach to, after the scare in the tunnels, and after she’d left without telling Fenrick goodbye. Fenrick. His face tumbled over and over in her memory. She brought her fingers to her lips to better remember the touch of his mouth. In the safe darkness of her room, her refusal of his advances made no sense. Why had she not let him do what she had secretly wished he would do—what she had been wishing he would do for the long weeks since they’d met?
    She was a coward, she decided. And she did not like cowards.
    You are furthermore being cowardly by not going to your mother and facing whatever punishment she has in store for you, a nasty voice taunted in her head, and she blocked it out. She would face her mother. After the Great Queene made her morning audience, before the Royal Heir’s day became another endless series of dutiful appearances at her mother’s side. It was so she could learn the way to be Queene, or so everyone told her. When would she ever need such knowledge? The Queene that had ruled before her mother, Mabb, had only fallen when slain by her brother.
    Cerridwen did not like to think of her gone father murdering his own sister, so she put that from her mind.
    But Fae were an immortal race, and, despite her mother’s half-mortal blood, she had never grown older once she’d come of age. No one would kill Queene Ayla, worshipped as she was. And if someone did, well, there were others who were more qualified for—and interested in—ruling the Faeries. Cerridwen would happily quit the Faery Court altogether. These thoughts, and thoughts of her impending punishment, and thoughts of Fenrick—she tucked his knife under her pillow and rested a hand on it—kept sleep from her. By the time it arrived, it seemed only to pay her a short visit before Governess was shaking her awake, muttering angrily about her mother wishing to see her.
    Cerridwen sat silent through Governess’s torturous grooming, though she scrubbed her skin raw and pulled at tangles mercilessly. She was thinking of a plan. Cedric had made a bargain with her. Had he kept to it? What if he had not? Should she barge into her mother’s chambers and tell her exactly where she had been, stand defiant and argue that it was her right as a grown Faery to go where she pleased and do what she wanted? Or would it be more prudent to stay silent, play the wide-eyed innocent if her mother already knew of her stray into the Darkworld? She’d overplayed wide-eyed…perhaps outrage would suit her. Wait and see if her mother knew about the Darkworld, about Fenrick. She smiled at her freshly