Chapter 4
Melia
Three days after the wedding, Amron’s retinue was getting ready to leave.
He watched them, leaning on the window frame in Melia’s room, the morning sun gilding his hair.
Melia’s meager possessions had been packed and loaded on one of the carts.
Having nothing useful to do, she paced to and fro on the carpet worn to a threadbare rag, her feet itching to run downstairs.
“Shouldn’t we get ready?” she asked.
“As soon as they leave.”
“What?” She paused mid-step. “Aren’t we going with them?”
“No.”
“Are we staying in Syr, then?”
“With your father?” He scoffed softly. “No.”
She approached the window, biting her lip, and laid her hands on the warm wood.
After that first night, he treated her in a polite, distant manner.
They took their meals together, walked on the battlements, discussed life at court.
His company was unobtrusive and calming, but now she wasn’t sure if he was teasing her or treating her as an object to be wrapped and stuffed in a saddlebag.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
He didn’t reply immediately, focused on the colorful chaos below. Then he said, “We’re going to the border. I promised my father I’ll personally visit the forts.”
Despite the sunlight pouring in, she felt cold. There was nothing there but the barren wasteland. “I don’t want to go,” she said, her voice barely audible.
He turned to her and frowned, looking pensive. “Why not?”
Because the red sand was drenched in blood and the dry trees lifted their branches to the sky like skeletons in agony.
Because something had been broken there and never got better.
But she couldn’t explain that, she couldn’t put it in words before his pale, calm face, his cold, sharp eyes.
Therefore she shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “Can’t you send someone else?”
“My father wouldn’t trust anyone else.”
It was about the peace with the Seragian Empire, then. The king did not trust Roderi of Elmar, and rightly so. She slowly breathed in, wishing her life could remain small, insignificant, far from intrigues and other people’s ambitions.
“Do I have to go with you? I could stay here and—”
“What do you think about the peace treaty?” he interrupted her.
She opened her mouth to say something, but there was nothing she dared to say to his face. So she mumbled, “I don’t know.”
No one had ever asked her opinion before. She was not a player in this game, she was a prize. Still, Amron refused to let it go.
“That’s not good enough,” he said. “One day you’ll inherit Elmar, you should understand it. I’m aware of your father’s opinion on the treaty, but I want to hear yours.”
She shook her head, looking over the plains and the mountains in the distance. “What do you want me to tell you? That it hurts to think about it? That it feels like a lie, mocking all our sacrifices? Every inch of this soil is soaked in our blood.”
“Every inch, yes.” He crossed his arms, following her gaze into the distance. “But I’d think three hundred years without peace would be enough to make everyone wish for it.”
He’d gotten on his high horse, she could see that.
It was his direct ancestor, Amris the Golden-Haired, who had decided to conquer the borderlands after Abia surrendered to him.
He defeated the tribes that freely roamed Elmar, and laid a bloody, two-year siege to Syr, a city under the protection of the Empire, before slaughtering its population and turning it into a ghostly fortress.
It was Amris and his heirs who profited from the blood spilled on the border, from the men and women who died protecting the kingdom.
To hear Amron talk about peace was like hearing a wolf talk about grazing after he slaughtered the whole flock.
“Two signatures on a piece of parchment will hardly make it better,” she said. “It’s not over just because you say so.”
“No,” he said. “And that’s why I’m going there, to see what it takes for it to really be over.”
He’d spent six months there with Rovin. There was a chance—weak and tiny—that he understood what he was talking about. But it still sounded like gibberish to her. What could a smug, patronizing princeling understand about the border?
“You’re just going to give them hope,” she said.
“Is that a bad thing?” The corners of his mouth twisted in a wry smile. “Have you ever seen how they live? Do you claim it’s better to be locked in endless bloodshed than to hope something might change for the better?”
Nothing ever changed in Syr, she wanted to tell him. But he didn’t want her opinion, he wanted her approval. So she shut her mouth, packed warm, sturdy travel clothes, and followed him into the wasteland.
She thought life in Syr had made her tough, but three days of riding on the dusty roads under the merciless sun battered her into humility.
She was unused to the saddle, to being in the open all day.
She thought she would feel fine among the soldiers—she’d grown up among them, after all—but not a single one of them dared to look at her, let alone talk to her, wrapped in her dark cloak.
Amron had fallen quiet as soon as they left the walls of Syr behind, and she realized his earlier polite chat had been just another court ruse, like fine clothes or dancing.
Under the vast red sky of Elmar, he turned into a taciturn, self-contained stranger.
She gritted her teeth and refused to complain, terrified that she would look weak, defeated by the land she was supposed to rule.
She was embarrassed of her saddle sores when she disrobed in the first room they shared at an inn, but he bid her good night without so much as a glance, and left to join his escort.
When he tiptoed back late that night, and slipped beside her in silence, she expected his hands on her body, but he turned his back to her instead and fell asleep.
He repeated this routine every night after that, as an unspoken deal between them.
She lay awake on various hard, dubiously clean beds, her skin bruised and scratched raw, her muscles cramping, her body crying for rest, and tried to convince herself she wasn’t insulted by his disinterest. The opposite would have been worse.
She missed Ferisa, her firm hands, her brusque words, her friendship.
On the fourth day, the border mountains loomed high on the horizon, their sharp peaks piercing the heavy clouds above them.
The lay of the land, the lonely crossroads they chanced upon, stirred something in her memory.
A nightmare she had as a child: a horse lying in the middle of the road with its entrails spilled, an overturned carriage with dead men strewn around it.
Blood soaking into the dust, a bloodstained female hand reaching for her.
A sudden wave of terror gripped her, her vision darkened and she would have slid out of her saddle had Amron not caught her.
She came to on the ground, her head in his lap.
“Here, take a sip of water,” he said.
Her head must have still been muddled, otherwise she wouldn’t have said, “I thought I saw something on the road.” She sat up and swallowed the tepid water. “A dead horse. Dead men.”
Amron studied the empty landscape, the lonely fig tree beside which their escort waited. “Is this where—” he started and paused, clearing his throat. “Have you ever seen the border forts?”
She shook her head. It was uncanny, the thought that he knew this land better than her, that he’d spent six months here with her brother.
Was the carnage she’d seen connected with her brother? But no, he’d been wounded closer to Syr, and she had no idea what the attack had been like.
“Do you ever think of Rovin?” she asked.
“Out here?” He looked over the dry red plains to the stony foot of the mountains and up towards the snow-topped peaks. “All the time.”
She could almost see Rovin then, the black-haired youth on his swift horse, the warm rays of the setting sun burning red on the bronze and steel of his armor.
“I miss him,” she said, and it was a strange statement, because she didn’t really miss the reckless, fiery boy fascinated by the stories of blood and steel, eager to throw himself in the path of the Seragian arrows.
She missed the man he might have become, the man who had a spark of cleverness and a morsel of love inside him that would have made him a good lord one day, and a good brother to her.
She missed the future she imagined he would have given her.
Amron helped her get back on her horse and motioned at their retinue to keep moving. “I’m sorry he died,” he said. Then, as if reading her thoughts, he added, “And I’m sorry his death left you with such a heavy burden to carry.”
A sharp blade of grief slashed her from the inside just when she thought she was safe.
She squinted into the sunset, again wishing that Ferisa was here with her.
She understood her rage and sorrow, knew how to fight them away with rough, insatiable fire.
Melia had no use for kindness. This scathing sympathy, this arrogance of her soft-spoken husband, made her furious.
“I don’t need your pity,” she snarled and spurred her horse.
She spent the afternoon angry, though she wasn’t sure who she was angry with. Her father, for his schemes; her brother, for dying; Amron, for being polite? Herself, for failing to control her emotions?