She flinched and tried to pull away, but he didn’t let go.
“Who are you?” His tone allowed no prevarication just as his grip permitted no escape. “What kind of person gets burned by iron?”
“No kind of person.” Her voice sounded hollow to her ears. “I am phae.”
She said the last word with the flowing tones of her kind, and from the widening of his eyes, she knew he understood, on some atavistic level: She was other.
But he did not release her hands. Of course he didn’t. He had put a horseshoe through an imp’s eye. He would not be frightened off by a musetta.
She let out a long, slow breath. “You humans call us fairies.”
He lifted one eyebrow. “You aren’t pink. And where are your sparkly wings?”
She grimaced. “Did you ever read the original fairy tales? They run red with blood. Pink is the watered-down version.” She tugged at his grasp again. He resisted another moment then let her go. She paced a short distance away. “Some phae are winged, but I am musetta.”
“Musetta.” He wrapped his lips around the word in a way that made her shiver in memory of his lips on other parts of her. “What does that mean?”
“Your stories call us muses, inspiration to artists, poets and the like.”
His gaze sharpened. “That’s why you were interested in the belt buckles.”
“I wondered if you had iron,” she admitted.
“Because you knew that imp might come?”
She hesitated, just a moment too long.
His gaze sharpened another strop. “What is going on, Adelyn?” He drew out the syllables of her name just a touch, as if he questioned it.
The suspicion stung, although of course she had lied about everything else.
But how could she explain without putting him in danger? The Queen had strict policies against initiating humans into phae mysteries. At least humans who weren’t trapped in the phaedrealii and her bed. Turning the accusation around, she challenged, “If I had said, ‘I’m a fairy princess in need of rescue,’ would you have believed me?”