Page 8 of Enchanting the Fae Queen

“Planning how best to mount an invasion on your emperor’s behalf, you mean?”

“No,” said Gerard. He left his answer at that as he lifted the mug of bubbling cider from the tray to his lips. It tasted of apples and autumn and something wild, sweet, and undefinable.

Lady Katrin’s glance flicked momentarily from his face to the plain wallpaper to the left of the bed before she turned back to him with a smile that was anything but friendly. “Well,” she said, “I was told to loosen your bonds after you ate, so that you could make use of the water closet.” She tipped her head at the door to his right—the only door that had been visible until her arrival. “Based on what I’ve seen so far, though, I’ll wager you can manage that by yourself. Still, we shall meet again soon.”

“No doubt.” Gerard watched her stride back out the outer door … which sealed shut into an unbroken wall once again in her wake. Interesting.

He chewed through the rest of his meal with methodical precision, fueling his body for the next steps as he considered his options.

The fae were notorious for their use of glamours to distract and fool humans. That door might be magically sealed against him if Lorelei had asked for help from her friend the Witch Queen of Kitvaria, but it seemed far more likely that it was merely hidden from his view.

As it happened, Gerard had an excellent visual memory … but Queen Lorelei, for all her theatrics, was rarely careless. If she hadn’t wished him to know the location of that door out of his carpeted prison cell, she would have used one of her infamous portals to transport her cousin back and forth.

If he simply walked out the same way Lady Katrin had, he would no doubt step into another, waiting trap. On the other hand …

It took him far less time to free his feet now that he had the use of both hands. Once he was up and had done enough stretches to loosen his cramped limbs, he turned to the door on his right that had been visible all along. It would be foolishness to take anything he was told by Lorelei’s handmaidens at face value.

The handle turned easily under his touch, and the door swung open to reveal a surprisingly large and airy room with a modern, flushing water closet as well as a marble sink and a luxuriantly proportioned bathtub decorated in images of frolicking water sylphs. Of course the Queen of Balravia would accept only the best and most lavish features in her palaces … even for the rooms where she kept her prisoners. Had the woman ever acknowledged a single limit to her own personal pleasures?

It was only too easy to imagine Lorelei draped in that bathtub among the painted water sylphs, her golden curls trailing over the rim of the bath, no doubt indulging in lushly fragranced bath salts and—

Gerard’s jaw clenched, and he closed the door firmly on that irrelevant image.

There would be no safe exit through that antechamber, nor through the door that Lorelei had allowed him to see. Still, he remembered that swift, telltale flick of Lady Katrin’s gaze when she’d looked past him and seen something different from what she’d expected.

Ignoring the door that she had used, Gerard strode around the bed and ran his hands with methodical care across the wallpaper from the front to the back wall of the room, working from the ground upwards every time. No helpful doorframes or handles pressed against his skin … but when he shifted his search upwards, the unmistakable ridges of a window frame pressed against his fingers.

Aha. He’d known there must be a window somewhere, to light this room so well! Fierce satisfaction rippled through him as he explored the surface beneath his fingertips. No iron bars were to be found here, of course; no fae could ever bear their touch. Once he escaped, he’d have to remember to start sleeping with iron on his own skin, now that he understood the reckless lengths to which Queen Lorelei would go.

But in the meantime …

His fingers closed around the long window latch, and he let out a hissing sigh through his teeth. Naturally, the latch was locked into place. Gerard had no key to fit into its hole, nor any helpful pins on hand to pick the lock—but he was no foppish aristocrat to despair at that discovery. A controlled, hard yank in exactly the right direction made a pained sproing! sound within the latch’s pivot point. Incipient victory surged within his veins, adrenaline urging him to push the window open and hurtle towards freedom before the ticking clock could doom him …

But long experience made him pause, breathing deeply through the pounding in his veins. The fae queen was wily and cunning, and she knew his strengths all too well. Any true escape couldn’t possibly be this easy.

His eyes narrowed on the still plain-looking wall. The lock itself was broken … but what would happen to any victim foolish enough to think themselves already done?

Pulling his hands back, he took a painfully long moment to think it through. Then he stepped even closer and, knotting his hands behind his back, leaned forward to use a different set of senses.

Lorelei’s own floral scent still caressed this room, teasing and flicking at his attention as he sniffed his way across the window, taking care to stay a careful inch away from the illusion. Mingled with that arousing—no, annoying—hint of roses was a faint pine scent that could have come just as easily from cleaning materials or from any deep woods beyond his prison. But what tingled at his senses next …

Jovar’s scars! Gerard jerked backwards just in time as he recognized the next scent in his olfactory search.

That was elfshot in its purest form … and if he had so much as brushed against it with his bare skin, he would be lying on the floor now, knocked unconscious, only to wake hours later with a rash that burned for days.

Damn it, Lorelei—!

He drew a deep breath through his nose and then released it.

“Giving in to your emotions will never aid you.” One of his teachers had told him that decades earlier, when he’d found a young Gerard raging and panicked after stepping into a painful trap designed by his classmates. It was a lesson Gerard had put to use again and again across the years, and it helped him find his way again now.

The serving tray with his empty dishes and silverware still sat neatly on the bed beside the abandoned ropes of flowers. He retrieved the long silver spoon and fork and held them before him like twin spears as he approached the wall once more.

All in all, he found three different spots where long, sticky vines of elfshot had been plastered against the windows. He scraped them all into a pile in one corner of the room, well out of stumbling range. Then he filled his empty cider cup with hot water, making use of that decadent bathtub after all … and imagining with grim satisfaction how annoyed Queen Lorelei would be by his discovery.

It took three thorough rounds of hot splashes across the wide stretch of glass, followed by a careful scrubbing with lilac-scented soap and layers of the bed’s silk sheet wrapped around his hand as a shield, before he could be certain that the danger was fully removed. By the time he finished, simmering impatience had risen to a hot boil in his gut, but he could finally sense his victory ahead. Only a few more minutes, and he would be free.

He pushed both invisible panes of the large window firmly open, leaned forward through the illusion of wallpaper, and felt triumph settle through his veins. Snow-covered flat ground waited for him scarcely eight feet below the windowsill, lit by a low, late-afternoon sun. Beyond that patch of snow loomed tall, equally wintry trees in an unbroken line to the horizon—but Gerard had trained for combat in forests, too. He would find his way without trouble.