Chapter 19 #2
It was a matter of life and death, she was supposed to weigh her words carefully, consider the gods’ game, the stakes, the people involved, the possible outcomes.
She ought to have strategized, even if she’d never strategized before.
But standing close enough to him that she could feel his warmth had robbed her of any tactic she’d believed she had.
“What if you could step away from all this right now?” she blurted out.
“Step away?” His gaze cooled down. “What do you mean?”
“Leave all this behind, the court, the struggle, the impending conflict, all that burdens you, all the unhappiness.”
“Leave it how? Board a ship and sail away? Run into the woods?” A wan smile twisted his mouth.
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” she said. “And a little more final. Like stepping into another world, similar to this one, but also different. A world where you knew me once and could know me again.”
The invitation turned the impossible to possible, and she could almost hear the pieces of the puzzle clicking into place for him, the inexplicable intimacy, the details she knew about him, the immediate feeling of belonging, of fitting together like two halves of a life maliciously broken by the gods.
“It would be just the two of us,” she pointed out, although she was sure he’d figured out as much. “And I don’t know what that world would look like.” Ravaged by the war you failed to stop. “But we’d have each other.”
His gaze was intense, curious, and seeing he hadn’t refused it immediately gave her the courage to continue.
“I know you’ve wondered what it would feel to be ordinary, just a normal man unburdened by the royal duties, the demands of the court.
To make your own way in the world, without the privilege you were born into, without the demands made by others, without the rigid list of expectations you have to fulfill.
It would allow you to see what you are really made of. ”
He averted his eyes to hide the hunger in them.
It was a futile move, because she’d always known it was there.
It ate him from the inside, the thought that all his achievements had stemmed from his privilege, from the fact that he’d been born as the king’s son.
Even though every person who knew him could’ve told him that his kindness, courage, diligence, had nothing to do with his status, and that he worked as hard and fought as bravely as any of his clerks and soldiers, there was always a part of him that wondered, what if?
“It would allow you to shape the world around you with nothing but your sword, your quill, your tongue, and see how far you could get.”
His gaze hovered above her head, faraway and hazy, seeing the strange cities, the unexplored seas, the endless wonders of the world.
“I’d love that very much.” A whisper so soft the silence swallowed it immediately.
The sharp yearning written on his face revealed that he wanted it as badly as she wanted him.
Kiss me, she thought, kiss me and we’ll be off. The rest of the world may take care of itself without us.
The rest of the world.
Amron rubbed his eyes as if waking from a dream and raked his fingers through his hair, disturbing its sleek neatness. “What about everybody else?” he asked.
She could never lie to him, and he would never forgive her if she did. “They would remain here.”
“And face the conflict, the bloodshed you warned me about?”
She nodded.
“If you know anything about me, then you know I’d never leave them to face it alone,” he said. “So whatever it is that you’re offering, I first need to know what I would be running from.”
His rebuke wasn’t harsh, but it made it look as if she wanted to turn him into a coward who’d left his family to fight alone and abandoned his duty.
She couldn’t tell him that his duty would ride him into the ground, squeeze every last drop of blood from him, and get him killed at some insignificant backwater he’d be dragged to on the king’s whim.
His duty would never let him turn into the man he wanted to become because it would always demand too much.
His duty would crush every dream he had of the peaceful life with her and rob them of years of happiness.
And even if she told him all that, he would still choose his duty over his personal interests because that was written into the very core of his being.
Suddenly feeling the weight of her bruised, exhausted body and her impossible quest, she crashed down on the hard chair and buried her face in her hands. “I’m so tired,” she said. “And I desperately need a drink.”
“I’m sorry, I should have asked you sooner.” He produced a silver flask from some invisible pocket. “Take a sip of this first.”
She took a hearty gulp and liquid fire filled her mouth. It was the fig brandy he always carried with him, the one which could pull you back from death’s door.
While she savored the warmth spreading through her body, he poured two cups of rosehip tea from the silver teapot on his desk and offered her one. “This should help you feel better.”
It was warm and fragrant and it did make her feel better.
“Before we get distracted again, or attacked, or separated, I think you should tell me everything from the beginning, because this feels like putting together a broken plate in the dark—every shard is sharp enough to draw blood, and I can’t see the whole.
I wish Darin could be here to hear it all, but our time is running out.
The moment my father remembers to look for you, I’d better have a good reason for stealing you. ”
Where should she begin? With the things she could remember, the things that were true.
“It begins with my parents, Darin and Lela,” she said.
“I’m sure that, being Amris’s heir, you know how rarely the couplings between gods and humans produce children, and how erratic those children’s gifts are.
My blood comes with certain advantages: speed, stamina, strength, hunting skills second only to my mother’s.
I heal fast and age slowly. I’m good at seeing people for who they really are, and seeing divine touch in the world.
” She paused. “I’m telling you this so that you know I’m not some powerful, divine creature, just a very good huntress with some talent for divination. ”
He nodded, but didn’t interrupt her.
“Now comes the difficult part, the part where I need you to trust me.” She closed her eyes. “We’ve met before, and when I say before, I mean when you were twenty-six and I was twenty-two years old.”
The twenty-three-year-old Amron sitting across from her raised his eyebrows, but instead of claiming it was impossible, he merely asked, “How old are you now?”
“Two days ago, I was thirty-six. Now?” She shrugged. “I can’t tell. I’d be nineteen if I were still in Till, but I’m here instead, so…”
The lack of shock on his face reminded her that he had a mother who was far more versed in dealing with the uncanny than Liana. He must have heard a fair share of the queen’s stories in his childhood.
“Am I right to assume that you knew the forty-year-old me, then?” The incredulity in his voice was not tied to the fractured time, but to his age. No one at twenty-three could imagine themselves at forty. “How was I doing?”
You were dead.
She didn’t say it, for what good would it do?
For the first time in her life, she lied to him by omission and glided around his question.
“I can’t—and won’t—tell you anything about that future, because it’s not real, it exists only in my mind and nowhere else.
The gods cursed me with it, and then left me here. ”
“So…the things that happened there won’t necessarily happen here?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. But what I do know is when I met you, the kingdom was at war with the Seragian Empire, and that war started here, in Abia, at your brother’s wedding. When I found myself at this moment in time, I thought there was a reason the gods put me here.”
“To stop the war?”
“To stop it, to make it worse, to save someone, to kill someone, who knows?” The battlefields, the blood, the kiss that would lead into a war-torn future.
“But I don’t care what they intended. I want to stop it.
They muddled my memory, so I had to piece all this together from the hazy fragments and things I’ve learned here. ”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “So, Amril’s party, everything you said there, and the fight afterwards, you were trying to warn me?”
“Yes.”
“Why me, though?”
It was her turn to raise her eyebrows.
“Oh.” He blushed again. “How well do we know each other, exactly?”
“Fairly well.” Despite the grief, the bad news, the complexity, she paused to enjoy the sweetness of the moment, his eyes resting on her, the questions he dared not say aloud.
His soft laughter broke the tension. “I’ve had my share of strange encounters with women, but this one beats them all. I almost wish this was a prank by Amril to set me up with a girl.”
“Your brother is not that imaginative.”
“No, he isn’t.” His laughter fizzed out. “Something else bothers me, though. If you were still in Till when Amril got married, how do you know the war started here?”
“Because it’s common knowledge. I don’t know the details, you’re right about that. That’s why I ran around like a madwoman, whispering strange warnings to anyone who crossed my path.”
“But the things you said to my father this morning, they were precise.” He frowned.
There it was: the moment for the hard truth.
“Yes.” She hesitated. “Things have changed in the meantime.”
He’d never talked about his wife when they were together.
Liana had asked a few tentative questions in the beginning to see where they stood, to assess the risk of falling head over heels for someone who was, technically, still married.
But Amron had refused to discuss Melia. It’s over, she’s gone and she’s never coming back, was all he’d said.
“At dawn, after talking to my father, I went looking for you,” she said. “I saw your wife in the corridor and something felt off, so I followed her. She met with a woman in the garden, a woman wearing a Seragian uniform.”
“Melia met with a Seragian woman in the garden at dawn?” Incredulity rang in his voice.
“No, I said the woman was in a Seragian uniform. She was Elmarran, though. And she was one of the attackers from last night. Their leader, actually. I recognized her voice.”
He sat very still, looking at her.
“The woman’s name is Ferisa, I found out. Perhaps you’ve met her?”
A brief, barely visible nod.
“I followed her out of the palace, through the streets of Abia, and into the house that belongs to Roderi of Elmar. I found the yatagan there, and got these cuts and bruises. She knows I know about her now, and she’s after me.
I ran to the palace, I didn’t know I’d encounter your father.
I was stupid enough to let the guards catch me with a weapon in my hand.
I tried to warn the king, but Roderi of Elmar was there, and I looked like a madwoman and spoke like a raving prophet…
I should have been more subtle. I think no one believed me. ”
“My mother did,” he said softly.
“And you?” she asked. “Do you believe me?”
He stood up and walked to the window, his figure sharply outlined against the darkness behind him.
“It’s bothered me for months, the Elmarran reaction to the peace treaty.
Their contempt, their quiet displeasure, their failure to acknowledge it.
I was confused at first. I saw so much death at the border that I thought they would surely welcome peace.
They deserved it more than anyone else in the kingdom.
” His voice trailed off, swallowed by the night outside.
He shook his head. “I was wrong, and my father was wrong too, misjudging human nature. Roderi of Elmar doesn’t know how to stop fighting, how to forgive and forget.
What he wants after all those years of fighting is not peace, but revenge. ”
She’d heard this reasoning a long time ago, in a battlefield tent, but she didn’t interrupt him. He had to figure it out by himself.
“Revenge against the Seragians, yes,” he continued, “but even more than that, revenge against the people who forced him to make peace with the Seragians.” He turned away from the window. “Against us.”
“Your wife is a traitor,” Liana said.
“I know.”
Commotion in the corridor disrupted his quiet words. Voices, shouting. Fists banging on the door.
“Prince Amron, you must come, now! It’s your brother!”