Oro
Until a woman with eyes like a forest blazed through his life, igniting his heart. Igniting hope in a world worth not only saving . . . but making better. For all this time, he had simply been focused on surviving . . . not truly living.
Isla, on the other hand, was full of feeling. She led with her heart in everything she did, which might not have always ended well, but at least she cared. In a world full of immortals, jaded and bored and angry, she was spring—a breath of fresh air.
They had been enemies, then reluctant allies, then friends, then more. He had never thought it was possible to selflessly love another ruler without politics involved, until he met her.
That is where Enya found him.
He didn’t want to tell her about what Azul had said. Though he knew his friend only wanted him to be happy, she had not made it a secret that she didn’t think he and Isla were a good match.
He couldn’t blame her. Enya was fiercely protective of him. Since he had met Isla, Enya had witnessed him at his lowest. But she also couldn’t deny that with Isla, he had also been at his very best.
After a few minutes of sitting together in silence, Oro asked, “If someone gave you the choice to save me but doom the rest of the world, what would you do?” He heard nothing in response but the roar of the waves, so he turned to look at her next to him.
Enya’s red hair was whipping back fiercely in the wind, glimmering in the sunlight. “I would choose you,” she said at last.
Oro frowned. “You would kill everyone else in this world . . . just to save me?”
Enya nodded. “I would.” She stretched her legs out. A wave broke yards away, its foam reaching them. “But that’s easy for me to say, since it’s a choice I know I’ll never have to make.” She looked over at him. “And I’m not king.”
He hung his head. “This crown is a curse,” he said. It always had been. Part of him wished he could just fling it into the water, but that wouldn’t rid him of his responsibility to his people, or his blood-deep connection to them.
“They all are,” Enya said.
She was right. All crowns were covered in blood. Whether through conquest or through heritage, people had to die for a crown to transfer to a new head.
He felt the weight of his entire lineage on his. Now that he had seen all the histories, he knew what it had taken for his line to survive. For this crown to finally reach him.
Oro couldn’t kill Isla. But he also couldn’t be the one to doom his people and bring all his ancestors’ work to an end.
“I wish the choice was between her or me,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “I would give my life for hers in an instant.”
“Even now?” Enya asked. “After she chose him?”
“Even now,” he repeated.
He could tell Enya had a thousand thoughts about that. He guessed that she wanted to yell at him, to tell him his life had value, to plead with him not to do anything reckless. It was the same thing Oro would have told her, if their positions were reversed.
But in the end, they just sat in silence, side by side, watching the tide rush in.