Goblin Ball Read Online Free Page B

was failing at being queen. I’m not like my mother at all. I’ll never be magnanimous.
    She was so miserable.
    She opened the box. When Max gave it to her all those years ago, he’d promised one day she would feel happiness again, that as the compartments filled with treasures, her heart would fill with eagerness for simply being alive in the world.
    You’re a fairy princess, he had said. It’s in your nature to find delight in all that is pretty and sparkly and lovely.
    She’d thought she heard like you, tagged on in barely a whisper at the end, but she had most likely imagined it. Over the years, the gob had given her little presents from time to time to put in the box. Breaking all fae tradition, he’d never asked for anything in return.
    “Until this,” she said aloud.
    She took the dewdrop bracelet from the top compartment. When she put it on, her heart felt lighter. A smile tugged at the side of her mouth, and the irritations of the day fell away somewhat. It was made of diamonds cut to look like the morning dew in sunlight. Not pretty at all. Oh, no. The bracelet was beyond beautiful. She wanted to wear it all the time.
    But she didn’t dare. This was the one gift from Max that had come with an obligation.
    “And what do I get in return?” He’d said when she put it on.Their exchange played over again in her head:
    “But you never…”
    “Yeah, I never. This time I do.”
    “What… what do you want?”
    “I’ll have to think about it.”
    He hadn’t said a word about it since. Maybe he’d changed his mind. Maybe he’d forgotten. After all, he’d been in a terrible mood when he said it. Maybe he didn’t mean it. Even so, except for here alone in her bower, she didn’t wear the bracelet. She wouldn’t risk him seeing it and remembering that she owed him.
    It was the fairy way. Give a present, get a present. Accept a favor, owe a favor. Cissa had lived over two thousand years owing no one, and she wasn’t going to start now.
    Not even with Max.
    She put away the diamonds and slid open another part of the box, the drawer at the bottom of the compartment. Without a sound, she held its secret up to the light, the one thing in the puzzle box Max hadn’t given her. Her favorite possession, more dear to her even than the dewdrop bracelet.
    An emerald necklace.
    It wasn’t her best pretty. Max had made her countless lovelier things. But this was her most treasured object. It contained more than the green fire of emeralds and sparked within her more than a bubbling tickle of delight.
    She ran her tongue over her lips, lightly bit the upper lip, then the lower. Slowly. She clenched the muscles between her legs and grew warm there—and everywhere.
    The memory of her first real kiss had never faded. It was so long ago… she was only a little more than two hundred years old. Her eyes had begun to change, and her curiosity was at the crazy, dangerous stage when a fairy enters young adulthood.
    Every morning her explorations took her farther and farther from her mother’s court. She tested the very boundaries of Dumnos. One day she found a secret vale far, far beyond the faewood or any place she and Dandelion had ever known. It might have been in the realm of Edmos—or even the Tuatha Dé Danaan , though she hadn’t crossed any great waters to get there.
    One morning like any other, she left the Dumnos court proper and flew lazily here and there, telling herself she had no destination in mind at all. At last she reached the far edge of the realm and flew beyond and on and on, to the cottage she’d discovered the first time she explored the foreign vale.
    Whoever lived in the little house had the prettiest jewels she’d seen in her life. The cottage overflowed with loose diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires—everything sparkly you could imagine. And bright-cut gold and silver too! In the workshop, the bounty was in different stages of being made into bracelets, necklaces, tiaras, rings—so many