Chapter Thirty-Four
“That is, if you can be honest without a truth serum,” I teased, trying to lighten the current mood.
It didn’t work. “I wasn’t compelled when I had the truth serum. I didn’t tell you anything I didn’t want you to know.”
My stomach was in free fall, my heart beating erratically. “That night you told me about your parents, what happened to your mother. Why would you share such personal stories about yourself with me?”
“I know how important it is to you to understand things. To know what drives people.” He finished off the rest of his pasteli. “What is it that you want to ask me?”
“Why did you take Quynh? Why did you let me suffer and grieve for her and not tell me?” My voice broke at the end of my question.
“I didn’t tell you that I had her because it would have revealed who I really was and I needed that to stay secret.
If I’d told you I had her, you would have known I wasn’t a sailor.
It wouldn’t have taken you long to figure out who I was.
I had to adopt the Jason identity so that I could move freely without question while investigating my stepmother.
I couldn’t risk anyone finding out that Jason and Prince Alexandros were the same person. ”
But that connection had been made public when he’d come to the temple to retrieve me. He had revealed himself to the entire city. He could no longer go out as Jason once he showed himself in front of everyone with his scar.
“And I am truly sorry for the pain you felt,” he said, sounding remorseful. “I suppose I didn’t worry too much about your grief because I knew she was alive. It eased my guilty conscience. That, and I intended to reunite you with her.”
“What?” That was the first time he’d ever said that.
“I asked you several times if you wanted to return to Locris. If you had ever said yes, I would have put you and Quynh on a ship together and sent you both home.”
It was true—every time I had seen him in person before I knew he was the prince, he had asked if I wanted to go back to Locris. I believed that he would have let me go.
Which meant he hadn’t taken my sister to blackmail me into marrying him as I’d always thought. My adrenaline spiked and I let out a deep, shuddering breath. “But why did you take her?”
He hung his head. “I did that for you. I knew it would destroy you if something happened to her. I took her to keep her safe. As I said, I intended to reunite you when you were ready to go back. But you insisted on staying.”
There was a flash of white, and for a moment I couldn’t see or hear. This was what Quynh and Thrax had guessed—that Xander hadn’t taken her out of malice or to use her against me, but because of how he felt about me. He hadn’t wanted my heart to be broken.
I had been such a fool. I shouldn’t have kept things from him. I should have trusted him from the beginning. I’d been so caught up in my own feelings and problems and had let us go through anger and fighting and mistrust because I couldn’t see what had been right in front of me the whole time.
We could have avoided all that pain and misery.
There was so much I had to tell him. I didn’t know where to start. There was one thing I had to show him, in case he didn’t already know.
“Stay here. I’ll be right back,” I said. I stood and darted out of the tent, going over to the fire. I picked up a medium-size branch and brought it back into the tent.
His eyes questioned me as I sat down in front of him. I put my hand into the flame and he swore and grabbed my wrist to pull it clear of the fire.
“I’m fine,” I told him.
Xander turned my hand over, checking it on both sides repeatedly. “How is this possible?”
“Part of the prophecy of being flame-kissed. I don’t burn. It was why I pulled you out of that house in Lycia without getting hurt myself.”
“I just assumed that Io had fixed you up the same way she had with me,” he said, the awe evident in his voice. He released my hand and grabbed the branch, taking it back out to the fire and then returning to me.
Why hadn’t his brothers told him? Maybe they hadn’t realized. They’d been focused on him. Perhaps they had thought I hadn’t been close to the flames. Or they believed, like Xander did, that Io had healed me.
“I don’t understand why you can’t be burned,” he said as he retook his spot in front of me. “For what purpose?”
“Like so many other things, I don’t know.” My nerves felt frayed as I tried to think of how to approach the thing I most needed to tell him.
What he had suspected from the very beginning.
My hands trembled, and I tried to disguise it by putting them under my legs but quickly realized that would bring even more attention to my nervousness.
He would soon notice if he hadn’t already.
“There’s a reason why I have to abstain from sex,” I said.
“So you can do magic,” he said with a nod. “I understand why you would choose that over other things.”
“That’s not the choice I’m making.” I was not picking being able to do magic over him. “I am choosing Locris over . . . other things.”
His eyebrows knit together in confusion.
This had been my closest-held secret since I’d arrived in Ilion. “If there was an object of great power that I needed to save Locris, would you take it from me?”
“Why would I do that?” He sounded incredulous.
“During our marriage negotiation, you said that whatever I had planned, you would put a stop to it.” That threat had been in the back of my mind every day since.
He frowned. “I said I would put a stop to it if it would harm me, my family, or Ilion.”
“It wouldn’t,” I reassured him.
“Then why would you think I would take it from you?”
“I . . . I don’t know.” I had let my fears, doubts, and worries control me, right along with my anger.
He took both of my hands in his, holding them between us. “You are not my enemy, Lia. You never have been.”
One last fear to put to rest. “What if it could be used as a weapon? If taking it meant you could save Ilion?”
“From my understanding, you’re supposed to do that,” he said with a half smile. “So I’d never do anything to hinder you.”
I pulled in a deep breath to fortify myself. “You were right about why I came to Ilion, why I entered the tribute race. I was looking for something. The eye of the goddess.”
Telling him was actually a relief, as if a giant boulder had been lifted from my chest and I could breathe again. Now he knew almost everything.
“Like what the life mages wear?”
I nodded. “There were two eyes in Locris in the statue of the goddess. One was taken and split up and given to life mages. The other was used by Lysimache to curse Locris so that nothing would grow.”
“Then Ilion should also have two eyes,” he quickly surmised.
“Yes. Lysimache used one to keep herself alive for a thousand years and put pieces of it into the fountain water to make us strong. When we found her at the temple, she had destroyed what was left of it. But there’s still one eye out there, and Lysimache gave it to Artemisia.
I can use it to fix Locris and remove the curse. ”
“How?”
“I’m not exactly clear on that point yet, but I hope I’ll figure it out. And if I can’t”—because I had died—“Io said she would try and restore it for me.”
“And you have to stay worthy to wield the eye,” he said.
“That’s what I keep being told,” I said. I desperately wished it could be different. “It’s why I told you I feel like there’s two terawolves inside me. The things that I want and the things that I have to do—my responsibilities and duties to the goddess.”
“Oh.” He looked surprised. “When you said that, I thought you were talking about being torn between me and your other man.”
“What other man?”
“The Locrian man that you love.”
For twenty seconds I had no idea what he was talking about. I didn’t love anyone else.
Then it came rushing back to me. The way I had told him at the end of our marriage negotiations that I loved someone in Locris.
He asked, “Do you remember the dream you had, when you were in a large cave with a pool of water, and one of the walls was a giant mirror?”
“You were there?” I asked in surprise.
“I was at the top of the cave, calling down to you, but you didn’t hear me. I watched what you were doing. I heard the voice asking what you wanted. And you said you wanted to see your fate. I couldn’t see in the mirror—I could only see you.”
Why had he been in the dream? Had I done that? Or was that the goddess?
“You said that you were seeing people that you loved. And you said the name of the man. Haemon.” Xander’s expression was flat but I knew what that meant. That he was hiding his reaction.
I had hurt him.
“Haemon was my brother,” I said. “I did see people that I loved in that mirror. My family, my adelphia, and I didn’t understand what the message was.”
“Your brother? Haemon is the one who died?” he clarified.
“Yes.” Had I really never said Haemon’s name to him at any time since we’d met? I couldn’t remember.
“Did you see . . .”
I waited for a few beats, but he apparently didn’t intend to finish his sentence. Was he wondering if I had seen him? The voice had told me that I would see my fate, my true reflection, in the water.
And it had been Xander that I saw.
What a mess I had made. When we had been in his house during the negotiations, he’d wondered how I could have done the things I had with him while loving someone else and I’d callously told him, “You were there. He wasn’t.”
Then I remembered all the other times he had brought up this other man. It had bothered him. He’d been jealous. It had been a nonissue for me because it wasn’t real and I frequently forgot about it.
Maybe this was one of the reasons why he had kissed Chryseis. To have me feel a bit of what he must have been feeling because of a lie I had told him.
I squeezed his hands tightly. “When I told you that I loved someone in Locris, I was talking about Demaratus.”
His face went blank as he tried to place the name. “The Daemonian whose hand you cut off?”
“I didn’t cut off . . .” When he’d seen Demaratus in our shared dream, Xander had assumed I’d cut off his hand. But that didn’t matter. “Demaratus is Daemonian, yes, and he was my battle master.”
He looked utterly confused. “I suppose that makes a certain kind of sense. You do love fighting. But he’s much too old for you.”
“No, I’m not in love with Demaratus. I love him as my mentor and friend. I lied and pretended like I was in love with him to upset you. I wanted to knock down your arrogance and ego. And because I wanted to hold on to my pride. I wanted to hurt you.”
“You always have been an excellent shot,” he said wryly. Silence stretched between us as he turned my hands over so that they were palms up and ran his thumbs along them. “All this time we were both acting out of pride and spite.”
“It was why you kissed her, wasn’t it? Why you wanted me to see? You thought I loved someone else and you were showing me that you didn’t care about me.”
He nodded and stayed quiet.
“You wanted to hurt me the way that I had hurt you,” I said, finally understanding what that whole thing had been about.
“And because I refused to be like my father,” he said.
Now I was the one confused. What did his father have to do with any of this?