I’m biased, of course, she thought. All lochs are beautiful. But Loch Lomond is…special.

  Sorcha skipped a stone across the water’s surface, watching as it leapt once, twice, three times. On its fourth skip it fell beneath the dark, shimmering surface of the loch, never to be seen again.

  She rearranged the basket and cloak in her arms to make room for the rubbish she had picked up, tossing the offending items into a large receptacle behind her parents’ house when she finally reached it. The house was handsome to look at, and finer made than the nearby farmhouses. Red stone and slate, with painted windowsills and a sweeping garden that circled all around the building. Sorcha loved it; it had been in the Darrow family for as long as anybody could remember. Now it was almost all that remained of their wealth.

  Generations ago the Darrows had been far richer than they were now. They were the landlords for the area, owning the very ground Sorcha walked upon right up through the forest and along the shore of the loch. The farmers in the area were all tenants of her father, and nobody could so much as cut down a tree or keep a boat on the loch without his permission.

  But Sorcha’s father was a kind man, and an understanding one. Despite outside pressure from the cities and an increased cost of living, he never raised the rent for the people who lived on his land. It was part of the reason the Darrows were much poorer now, but Sorcha was happy for it.

  She could never forgive her father if he sold his principles for a more comfortable life.

  Though I have to wonder why he’s agreed to meet this Londoner for the third time in as many months, Sorcha thought as she crept into the kitchen as quietly as possible. She dumped her basket of brambles on the table, hung up her cloak, then used the large window overlooking the back garden to check her reflection. She looked just about as windswept and bothered as she felt, with wild hair, red cheeks and a dishevelled dress.

  Sorcha knew she really should have put her hair up before going outside. She knew this, but it hadn’t stopped her keeping it long and loose down her back instead. She ran her fingers through it in an attempt to tidy her appearance, wincing when she met tangle after tangle. She smoothed out her dress, splashed cold water on her face from a basin by the sink, then left the kitchen to walk down the corridor towards the parlour room.

  She could hear both of her parents inside, as well as the stranger they had insisted upon Sorcha meeting today. Of course she hadn’t wanted to; she had no interest in Londoners. But she was an obedient daughter, and she knew she was lucky to have parents that had not once pressured her into marriage, though Sorcha would turn twenty at the end of the month. She could be polite and lovely for this one Englishman.

  The very notion of being lovely caused Sorcha’s thoughts to return to Lachlan. It had seemed like a dream, to meet the Prince of Faeries. Sorcha had met her share of his kind before, though they tended to slip from her vision just as easily as she had laid eyes on them. On the occasions they had spoken to her they quickly gave up trying to charm her once they realised she would not give them her name.

  I nearly gave it to Lachlan, though. This wasn’t quite true, of course; Sorcha hadn’t given him her real first name. Had she told him her surname was Darrow he could have done nothing with it. And, even then, if he knew her first name was Sorcha, he did not know her middle name.

  Her father was a smart man. He had raised a clever daughter. Sorcha would not be caught be a faerie so easily.

  I wanted to be caught even just for a moment, she thought despite herself, dwelling longingly on the memory of Lachlan’s warm, golden skin and molten eyes. Even his braided, bronze-coloured hair had seemed to be spun of gold when the sunlight shone upon it. The silver cuff adorning one of his inhumanly pointed ears had seemed mismatched against it all, though the sapphire-encrusted piece of jewellery had been so beautiful Sorcha thought she might well have died to possess it for but a minute.

  She brought her fingertips up to her lips, committing the feeling of Lachlan’s mouth on hers to memory. He kissed me like it was nothing at all. Does he go around kissing every young woman he sees whilst hanging upside down from a tree?

  It struck Sorcha that she had not taken notice of Lachlan’s clothes even once, though he had said he was going to a funeral. Were they black? she wondered. I do not think so. Would faeries wear black to a funeral? What are faerie funerals like? And this was their queen. Lachlan’s mother. He did not seem all that sad. Just how did she –

  “Sorcha Margaret Darrow, if you do not get in here this instant I will lock you in your room until the end of the year!”

  Sorcha flinched at her mother’s voice reverberating through the door. The woman had the uncanny ability to know when her daughter was lurking where she shouldn’t be – which was often – and was quick to scold her. She sighed heavily, forced all thoughts of Lachlan away for another time, then fixed a smile to her face before swinging the door open.

  “I’m sorry, mama, I was cleaning up by the loch-side,” Sorcha apologised. Her mother clucked her tongue.

  “It is not befitting a young lady to go around cleaning up filthy bottles and – look at your hair! That is no way to appear in front of a guest! Go and –”

  “It’s quite alright, Mrs Darrow,” interrupted a low, gravelly voice. Though it was largely smoothed over with the typical accent of upper-class London that Sorcha had come to resentfully recognise from tourists, there still existed a trace of local, melodic Scots that she liked the sound of.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw her father, a mild expression on his face that suggested he did not care what Sorcha looked like. He was simply glad she had shown up at all. He inclined towards his guest with a hand.

  “Sorcha, this is Murdoch Buchanan, a gentleman who grew up not ten miles from here before moving down to London when he was twelve. Mr Buchanan, this is my lovely daughter, Sorcha.”

  She withheld a wince; Sorcha did not like her real name revealed to anyone but her closest friends, despite the fact her mother thought this silly. But the lessons her father had instilled in her from a young age – to be wary of strangers, for they might be faeries – very much filtered into her attitude towards tourists. And this man, Murdoch Buchanan, had already heard her full name.

  Thanks, mama, she thought dully as she turned towards the man with an apologetic smile on her face, curtsying as she did so. “I am truly sorry for my appearance and my lateness, Mr Buchanan. It was an accident.”

  “No need to be sorry for wishing to keep the loch-side clean. It is a truly beautiful place; those responsible for sullying it ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

  Maybe this Londoner isn’t so bad. He was born around here, after all. He might not be detestable.

  Sorcha allowed herself to look at the man properly for the first time. Murdoch was tall and dressed impeccably in a white shirt, dark grey tail coat with matching waistcoat, ebony trousers and shiny leather boots. His black hair grew in loose curls around his head, and his face was clean-shaven. His eyes were dark.

  Not just dark, Sorcha thought. They are as black as his hair. They were the most striking thing about him, though Murdoch was, by anyone’s measure, a very handsome man.

  His impossibly dark eyes watched Sorcha intently as she watched him. She did not know what to say; she had the most unsettling feeling that something bad was about to happen.

  “Mr Buchanan is going to be staying with us for a few days, Sorcha,” her mother said, dragging her daughter out of her own head.

  “Why?” she asked, though she knew she could have worded the question a little more politely.

  “You know things have been getting harder for us around here,” her father said. “Something has to be done to preserve the area so that nothing bad can happen to us, or to the farmers. I don’t want what’s happening in the Highlands to occur here.”

  Sorcha nodded. Everyone knew about the Clearances. An icy chill ran down her spine.

  “What does this have to do with Mr Buchanan staying with us?”

  It was her mother who answered. She sounded excited, which was a bad thing. Margaret Darrow being excited was a very, very bad thing indeed. “Why, Sorcha,” she began, standing up to envelop her daughter’s hands within her own. She smiled brightly. “You are going to marry him!”

  Sorcha’s mind went blank. She could only stare at Murdoch Buchanan in horror. He was a Londoner. A stranger. She did not know him, nor did he know her.

  Yet he had already agreed to marry her.

  She took a step towards the door, then another and another.

  “No,” was all she said, before fleeing for her bedroom.

  No, no, no.

  Chapter Three

  Lachlan

  "Lachlan, where have you been?! The ceremony ended five minutes ago!"

  Ailith came rushing towards Lachlan just as he pushed open the heavy, ornate wooden doors to his bedroom, her breathtaking face full of genuine concern. When she touched his shoulder he shrugged her off.

  "I consider it a blessing to have missed it," he told her. "We both know my mother herself hated funerals. Who do you think I learned to loathe them from? But she looked forward to the feasts that followed them and I'm here for that, at least.”

  "You didn't answer my question."

  Lachlan rolled his eyes, pouring a goblet of wine from the bronze pitcher on his bedside table when he reached it. Wordlessly he handed it over to Ailith before pouring another for himself. "Here and there," he finally replied. "Nowhere of consequence."

  “Lachlan –”

  “The outskirts of the forest. I sat in a tree and watched the world go by. Are you happy now?”

  Lachlan didn’t look at the beautiful faerie as he lied. Well, it wasn’t exactly a lie. Faeries could never truly lie. The human girl Clara was part of the world, but he hadn’t simply watched her. That was a secret he had no desire whatsoever to divulge to Ailith.

  I want Clara’s full name, he thought longingly. I want it now.

  “You don’t seem affected by Queen Evanna’s death at all.”

  Lachlan was struck by the sadness in Ailith’s voice. Most faeries didn’t wear such negative emotions on their sleeves for everyone else to see; the blue-eyed creature in front of him was different. Perhaps it was because her father died almost a decade ago, and she was yet to get over it. Perhaps she was just as emotionally impulsive as humans were. Perhaps it was something else entirely.

  Either way, it was one of the reasons Lachlan had loved her so. Now, because he couldn’t have her, it was one of the things he could stand least of all.

  “I shall deal with my grief however I like,” he said before swallowing a large mouthful of wine. He glanced at Ailith out of the corner of his eye. “Shouldn’t you be consoling my beloved stepbrother, anyway? Or your future father-in-law? I’m quite certain they are both missing your company.”

  Ailith grimaced. “Lachlan, don’t talk about your family like –”

  “Those two? My family? Don’t make me laugh, Ailith. Innis and Fergus are no more my family than you are.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  Lachlan lay back onto his bed, careful not to spill his wine as he did so. Ailith wasn’t his family, but it was a cruel thing to say nonetheless. She stood in front of him, close to tears, though even in her misery she was beautiful. It was as if her pale, elegant face had been carved to display such an emotion.

  His own expression softened. “You’re right. I apologise. You’re all I have left in the world. You know that. I’m merely…handling my grief in my own way. I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

  Being polite was the only way the two of them managed to deal with their intimate past, though ultimately all that meant was that they ignored how they’d felt towards each other before Fergus stole her away. But that suited Lachlan just fine.

  Give it a few decades and I’ll forget I loved Ailith altogether.

  “Speaking of Fergus,” Ailith said, though her tone suggested she was bringing him up reluctantly, “he and his father were looking for you. There’s a lot that needs prepared before your coronation ceremony.”

  He made a face. “It is still two weeks away. If they wish to speak to me they can find me themselves.”

  “Lachlan –”

  “Alright, alright,” he sighed, swinging up from his bed and waltzing over to the large, gilded mirror hanging on the opposite wall. Lachlan fiddled with his hair, inspecting the braid that crawled across the left-hand side of his scalp. After hours spent climbing in the forest he knew he could do with unravelling the braid to comb it out, but he resisted. He liked having his hair styled this way; it ensured his mother’s earring was on full display. Despite this, Ailith seemed determined never to notice it, as if she knew exactly for whom it had been intended.

  In the mirror Lachlan could see Ailith walking towards the door. She sighed when she saw Lachlan watching her. “You do not have to be king if you don’t want to, remember.”

  Lachlan scoffed at such a notion. “Where did you get that idea? If I’m not king then my half-Unseelie stepfamily will have the crown. That’s almost as bad as allowing the creatures lurking deep in the lochs to take over our court.”

  Ailith laughed softly into her hand. “That your mother named you after the thing you so hate never fails to amuse me.”

  “You and me both. Though it’s not the lochs I mislike,” Lachlan corrected, fitting on a chestnut-coloured tailcoat over his loose white shirt and dark breeches. “Merely what lives in them. You know every dark thing in there hates Seelies.”

  “And we hate them right back,” Ailith said. “Perhaps it’s time to reassess such feelings. After all, both the forests and the lochs are having to fight humans nowadays.”

  Lachlan said nothing. He knew Ailith was right, of course, but that didn’t mean he wanted to let her know she was right. Humans really were becoming a growing problem with every tree they felled, every badly-extinguished bonfire they left behind and every broken bottle abandoned upon the forest floor.

  “Come find me after you’ve spoken with your stepfather,” Ailith murmured when Lachlan joined her by the door, brushing her elegant fingers along his sleeve before leaving his room. He touched the fabric where her fingers had been.

  Another few decades, Lachlan reminded himself. Another twenty or thirty years and Ailith will not matter to me at all. And so Lachlan left his room, once more alone, to venture down the palace corridor with his wine goblet in hand. He veered in the general direction of his mother’s old chambers, where Lachlan knew he’d find both his stepfather and stepbrother.

  The building wasn’t so much a traditional palace as it was a network of connected rooms carved into the very forest itself. The fair folk were a vain and prideful race, so the labyrinthine home of the royal family was painfully exquisite to look upon. The very walls were aglow, lighting the way to Queen Evanna’s chambers in soft, golden tones the colour of Lachlan’s skin. The tunnels and hallways were perfectly curved; not a single sharp angle existed anywhere within the palace. Some days Lachlan adored this – it was beautiful, after all. Other days he detested it, for there was nowhere to hide.

  Nowhere to cry, or scream, or keep secrets from one another.

  “Lachlan, there you are!”

  Lachlan resisted grimacing at Innis’ voice. It wasn’t that he hated the faerie – he hardly bothered to hate any faeries at all – but rather that Lachlan simply did not have the patience to deal with him. Innis and his son were always scheming and plotting, their silver skin and hair stark and obvious against the gold of the Seelie Court. When his mother first announced her engagement to Innis, Lachlan had been convinced the marriage was somehow a scheme concocted by the faerie himself.

  But my mother would never have been so stupid to fall for an Unseelie plot. Lachlan knew this. He knew it, but it didn’t stop him indulging in his paranoid beliefs, either.

  “We didn’t see you at the funeral,” Fergus said, smiling slightly as he patted Lachlan on the shoulder. Lachlan hated the way he tried to act brotherly towards him. It was all a lie, that much he was sure of. After all, had Fergus ever felt even vaguely brotherly towards him then he’d never have orchestrated a betrothal to Ailith.

  Lachlan was still unsure how the faerie had managed it. Ailith certainly never told him.

  Perhaps she was enamoured by his silver countenance, Lachlan supposed. It certainly looks better against her fair skin than mine does.

  “I was grieving in my own way,” Lachlan replied, giving both faeries the same answer he’d given Ailith.

  Innis nodded in understanding. “Whatever you need to do, I support you. We all do. In two weeks you are meant to be king, after all.”

  Lachlan said nothing. Fergus’ hand was still on his shoulder; when he tried to shove it off his stepbrother instead moved his hand to the silver cuff on Lachlan’s ear.

  “This was meant for Ailith, wasn’t it?” he asked, removing the piece of jewellery before Lachlan had a chance to protest. “It truly would look beautiful on her. Have you ever considered giving it to her as a betrothal gift? Or a wedding gift, perhaps?”

  “I’d rather keep it to remember my mother by,” Lachlan replied, on-edge from the drastic change in subject. Something was off. Wrong. He didn’t know what.

  Fergus held the earring up to the light, his mercurial eyes transfixed by the way the sapphires shone. “A shame,” he muttered. “It really doesn’t suit you. Neither does being king.”

  Lachlan froze. A terrible shiver ran down his spine. “Excuse me?”

  “Now, now, Fergus,” his father said, shaking his head in disapproval, “you can afford to be more delicate with the boy. He just lost his mother.”

  Lachlan bristled. “I’m not a boy. Fergus is barely two decades older than me.”

  “And it shows.” Innis’ face grew stony, all previous sympathies gone. “Lachlan, you must know that you are not fit to rule. You despise the Unseelie Court –”

 

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