I almost smirked at that. For all that she professed not to love her son, she had some similarities. He'd displayed himself to me in not that different a way, putting the physical before the mental. I didn't think the Queen was flirting with me, despite the sensuality of her movements; it read more like she expected me to be dazzled by her elegant beauty. She looked fine, I guessed, but I had a bit too much adrenaline going to even consider getting dazzled.

To distract myself from my amusement, I said, "I don't feel much different, except that it feels as if I've known the crown prince my whole life. Not interpersonally, of course, but in the way where I know intuitively how he moves and sounds."

"That part is the same for all soulmates," she said, talking to me like she was bestowing grace on some impoverished relative. "It is what comes after that many consider so beautiful. Perfection itself, if those with soulmates are to be believed." The Queen turned towards me, putting her face at another practiced angle. She must have spent hundreds of hours perfecting her poses, ensuring that she was always seen at her best. "Do you have hopes for your relationship with him?"

"I confess that I don't even know the options," I said. "In all the stories I know, soulmates are trueloves, but I've been told that isn't so."

The Queen laughed again, with a sharp edge to it. "Oh, my dear girl, could you ever imagine loving such a creature? You might as well choose to love a chaos beast. It might even be safer."

With every word, I disliked the Queen more. I didn't expect familial piety from her, given that Dain was a real piece of work, but she talked about him with the same tone Susan had used to call him a monster. It seemed the Beast of Phazikai had come by his cold cruelty and casual disdain for the lives of others honestly.

"Having never seen a chaos beast, I couldn't say," I replied, holding onto my polite smile. I dug my thumbnail into my palm to remind myself that pissing off the Queen and the crown prince was probably a bad idea. Anyone with that much power wouldn't like getting bearded by an upstart human, let alone one who'd been dragged in mostly dead and who owed her life to them.

I heard movement and the ringing sound of swords being drawn from the doorway and turned around to see my two guards, and the two who'd already been standing there, blocking the way in with their swords. Beyond those swords stood the crown prince, with a bored expression on.

"You are not allowed to enter, your highness," one of the guards said, her voice tight. "Her majesty is occupied."