The Faceless Woman by Emma Hamm (i love reading .txt) 📕

guards, some missing limbs, others eyes, but all covered in the history of battle.

Bran glanced over his shoulder. “Have you started decorative scarring since I’ve been gone?”

Daragh shoved him forward again, grasped his arms, and twisted them roughly behind him.

Bran flicked his head, flipping a curtain of dark hair over his shoulder so his raven eye could stare over at Aisling. She was still handling it well, although she looked sick to her stomach. Likely because the faerie next to her had laid the stump of his upper arm on her shoulder to keep her in place.

“Hey,” he murmured, “witch.”

She glanced over at him.

“Still good?”

“Last time you were here?” she asked. “Why were you here at all?”

“Foolishly got captured by the duchess.”

“Why did she capture you?”

“She liked the look of me. Said I would easily fit into her ranks, even though she thought I was a little too pretty.”

He hated the memory, and walking up the cobblestone steps towards the palace with guards all around him was like stepping into his past. This was a path he’d journeyed the last time he tried to snoop in the Dusk Court, and he despised it as much as the last time. The duchess was too twisted even for his liking.

“Why do you have to do everything the hard way?” Aisling grumbled. “I’m not sure I can curse the lot of them.”

“Cursing them wouldn’t be any good. They like pain.”

Aisling set her shoulders, when she squeezed her fists in preparation for a fight, Bran felt an answering thump in his chest. She shook herself and replied, “They haven’t felt my kind of pain before.”

Every inch of him wanted to know what her choice of pain was. His muscles tensed, his mind blanked, and Bran vividly saw himself killing the entire personal guard just to see what she would look like with blood streaked through her hair.

“Eyes forward,” Daragh growled.

Bran gritted his teeth and told himself that attacking the pathetic excuse for a faerie wasn’t going to end well. The duchess was already angry with him. He didn’t need to make it worse by delivering her guard’s head to her front doorstep. But, oh, how he wished he could.

The palace of Twilight was a crumbling ruin. Once a beautiful building, age and mistreatment had seen it fall from its former glory. Moss covered the floor, trees grew through the walls, and holes dotted the ceiling. Spears of light illuminated the strange gathering of Underfolk nobility.

They were all missing pieces of themselves. Some of them limbs, others eyes, a few even half their bodies. They lay prostrate upon the ground before a throne made of gilded leaves.

The duchess sat upon emerald green cushions, her hands resting on armrests carved in the shape of two great cats, their mouths forever frozen wide open. She was a delicate little creature. Small hands, small body, and a face that always looked slightly childish. There was a hole in the center of her chest where a glass heart glowed a bright green.

Before them was one of the deadliest women in all the faerie courts, and she looked like a child.

“Unseelie prince.” Her voice rang out, sweet like the first drop of honey in the fall. “It has been a long time since you graced our court with your presence.”

“I had little choice, Duchess of Dusk.”

“That is not what my little birdies say.”

He almost swore. He’d forgotten about the pathetic little creatures she called “birds.” Their wings were leathery like bats, but they were still a form of bird. She’d twisted them with dark magic, and now they spied for her.

“Is that so?” he asked. “What did they tell you?”

“Many things. But first that you enter my kingdom with a woman on your arm. I thought you weren’t interested in a bride.”

Aisling snorted behind him.

He held his breath as the duchess cocked her head to the side and narrowed her gaze on the witch behind him. “Something to say?”

“I wouldn’t marry him if my life depended on it.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. Why couldn’t she ever manage to stay silent? The woman had challenged a faerie with those words, and now he didn’t know what the duchess would insist upon.

Bran needed to get close enough to steal the heart from her chest. He had to rip it from her tiny form, and then they could run. He would do whatever it took, even if that meant marrying the little witch to entertain the duchess.

But, he didn’t want to marry her like that.

The thought disturbed him. He didn’t want to marry at all. That wasn’t the steps his life would take him. He was going to break his curse, then galivant off into the world without a care for anyone but himself.

He was Unseelie. That was their way.

And yet… his gaze cast toward her. Aisling stared defiantly at the duchess, no fear or indecision softening her straightened spine. She was a powerful woman in her own right, and he stood between two pillars of feminine wiles.

Bran couldn’t decide if he was the luckiest man in the Otherworld, or the most cursed.

The duchess chuckled. “I wouldn’t marry him for all the gold in the world, either. In that, you and I see eye to eye.”

“Good.”

“But you are wrong.”

Aisling flinched. “Excuse me?”

“You are interested in him. A woman in love moves differently than those who are unattached. Your eyes remain fogged with the promise of a future. Your heart beats in a rhythm that is unnatural as it tries to match his. And your hips sway as you try to capture his attention.”

Bran lifted a brow and turned to stare at her.

“I do not,” Aisling replied caustically. “I don’t appreciate you trying to ascertain what I’m thinking when you have no idea who I am.”

“I’m not reading your mind. I’m reading your body, and that is a very different thing.”

“You’re reading nothing, because you’re wrong.”

The duchess tapped her fingernails on the tops of the giant cats’ heads. “Interesting. You don’t want him to