Chapter Twenty #3
I expect him to bite at me, to warn me not to question her motives, like he did before. Like Maia did. Instead he leans back on his elbows. “I think she does the best she can, all things considered.”
Both our feet still dangle in the water, but I pull mine up to wrap my arms around them.
“I’m trying to understand her, but everyone is so cryptic—and that includes you.
Why? Why does everyone so willingly adapt to the order of things here when she’s an absent queen? Why do you trust her so implicitly?”
“Her act in creating this realm was a selfless one, and it saved multitudes of souls from vanishing from existence. We owe her much—faith being the least of it.”
“They say she tricked a Fate and stole his powers to do it. How is that deserving of anything?”
The Unknown Fate. Emilia had speculated about who he might be, why he came to our world in the first place. She seemed to think the two fell in love, but knowing Moranya, her methods of deceit…
“The story is not so simple as that.”
“And how would you know?” Perhaps Moranya has filled his head with lies.
“Because I was more skeptical than anyone.”
“And what? She refuted the tale and exchanged it for a few honeyed words?”
He snatches my chin, turns it toward him. “No,” he breathes. “Only over time, once I had painstakingly gained her trust, did she reveal the truth to me. And now that I know it, it fills me with such sadness that I wish I had never found out. Consider yourself fortunate.”
I search his face, the light spangling through the waterfall’s fringe to flicker across the sharp planes of his jaw.
He died many times in his youth, I remember.
He had seen her often, perhaps had developed some sort of friendship, and yet he hadn’t seemed overly friendly when he bargained for my life.
“Why is it so tragic a tale?” I whisper, thinking of Emilia’s speculations. “Are you saying she loved the Fate she is said to have killed?”
“It is tragic,” he says, releasing my chin, “that she wasted so much time believing in love.”
Frustration crowds my throat. “Can’t you just tell me what happened?”
His glare, once soft, now carves to a point. “The story is not mine to share. But now you will answer something for me, miscreant. I’ve been more than patient.” There’s a finality to his tone I haven’t heard since the isle—one that makes my heart lurch.
“I do not remember you from my court, and yet you were conspiring with those I believed to be my friends. I suggest you start at the beginning.”
I want to tell him so badly, make him understand that not everything is as it seems. But it’s as if there’s a cord around my windpipe, and all that comes out is a cough—as if Moranya’s curse can sense my intent.
“Was your past really so painful?”
“Painful,” I breathe, “is an understatement.”
“So let me share the burden,” he says. “Surely—”
“You won’t tell me Moranya’s past for the same reason, to the point of admitting you wish you didn’t know it,” I say, wringing my hands. “Yet you demand I tell you mine? What if it’s a truth you aren’t ready to hear, Majesty?”
“For you, I would bear it.”
I don’t know what to make of that.
Perhaps…I could find a way to share vague information, twist it somehow like Sundar did. I could tell him I worked for someone I thought cared for me, even loved me, but he betrayed me in the end. Except that would only serve to sour Anton toward love even more.
He clamps his bottom lip with his teeth, a bead of water hanging from his lashes. I want to brush my thumb across it—want to cup his cheeks and force him to look at me until he sees who I was to him.
There’s little he can do to rebut my argument, reed-thin as it is. But he’s yet to loosen his tongue about Moranya, and for that to happen, I need to gain his trust. Temper him, somehow. There must be another way without crossing the boundary I set for myself.
His heart is wounded, enclosed in a shield of glass, but I need only find a crack where I might pry my way in.
For now, I place my hand on his, where it rests on the rock just to the right of my thigh. He goes very still as I settle my gaze on his—pry into the low-lit green as if I could see the soul trapped within its depths. “I will tell you everything one day soon. I vow it—on my life.”
He escorts me to my room in silence, the both of us finding ourselves in the too-small lift once more.
I turn away from him, unable to handle the feel of his breath on my brow, too frightened to look up at him and see what I suspect has taken residence in his gaze, if the heat on my nape while we climbed from the pool was any indication.
So I face the glass as we ascend, narrow my focus to the aurora reflected in the pool below, rippling under the ruffle of water like the sun glancing off fragmented glass.
A single knuckle falls down the line of my spine, almost as if by accident. An idle, absent-minded gesture.
I nearly collapse on the spot.
But he can’t know that. And when we stand before my door minutes later, he whispers, so softly I almost don’t hear it, “You’re beautiful.”