Chapter 44
Forty-Four
Fear
Isent Inida to retrieve Tesa. Then I sat alone in the darkness on the sea wall, watching the black waves crest and move in.
Sea monsters sometimes rose from the ocean to find their dinner among anyone who dared the beach at night. It added some interest to the slap of the waves against the rocks, wondering what else might be moving under the cover of that noise.
“Do you think your long-suffering little mortal realizes you are beginning to depend on her wisdom?” Shadowbane mused.
“I’m tired of you referring to the wisdom of someone who tried to murder me.”
I saw Tesa coming because she allowed me to see. Then she was sitting on the sea wall beside me. She kicked her heels lightly against the wall, the movement so familiar that it jolted me back into the past. I had forgotten her restlessness; she had lost it when she was a Nightwalker.
“This situation is untenable,” she said to me, as if she knew why I’d called her and she wanted to beat me into the conversation. “Riven and I should leave.”
“No,” I disagreed. “That’s dangerous. The queen will hunt you both.”
“Or is the trouble that you want me to serve your rebellion, schemer?” She bumped my shoulder, gently, as if she were the old Tesa. Then she stiffened, as if she had startled herself.
“I do,” I admitted. “You and Riven are formidable assets. You’re also my old friend. I don’t want to see you hunted down by the other Nightwalkers. Both things can be true.”
“Many things can be true on your lips, even when they contradict themselves.” She smiled slightly, affectionate toward my shortcomings. The way Ander had been once too. The thought made something inside me writhe.
Had she truly gathered all her memories back to herself?
“But for me to stay…” Her shoulders braced. “You’re going to tell him.”
“I’d like your permission.”
Her voice turned sharp. “But you don’t need it.”
I’d had every intention of asking for her permission, genuinely, but she spoke as if she were already angry about my decision.
As if she had been wrestling with her choice. As if, perhaps, she didn’t really want to make a choice at all.
I wanted to see whether that was true, so I didn’t answer her directly. I wouldn’t commit to asking or commanding. Not yet. I wasn’t sure what Tesa needed from me.
“You should have the right to decide how to re-enter your old life, or if you even do. But you are not the only one to consider.”
She studied the horizon with an intensity it didn’t seem to deserve, given nothing was visible. Whatever she was thinking, she didn’t want to speak out loud. But she needed to, so I waited.
“What if he’s better off without me, Fear?”
“Do you think you’ve changed so much that he’s better without the person he’s mourned for years?”
Tesa tilted her head, considering. My question was genuine, and she treated it genuinely. “Ander is a good man.”
“Tiresomely so,” I agreed.
Her lips pulled into a smile. My heart sank as I saw her take my insults for Ander as affectionate, the way they had once been. She had no idea what had become of us.
She would be so disappointed.
She would choose Ander, of course, and I would lose her as inevitably as I had lost him. But also, she would be disappointed in both of us, and something hollow and aching and unexpected opened in my stomach.
“He could always be difficult for us to understand, couldn’t he?” she mused, still looking out at the ocean. “Even then. I could be petty and mean—you and I could be quite petty and mean together—”
“The good old days,” I agreed. “Do you remember what we did to that spy of my mother’s?”
She grinned. “I don’t regret it at all, still. Despite Ander throwing up his hands in exasperation at the two of us.”
“I don’t regret it either.”
Her smile died, and her gaze had gone faraway. “I’ve done far worse things since, Fear. Things that go beyond mean.”
“So have I.”
“You’ve done them for a good cause,” she said, so quickly and confidently that the hollow deepened. “I did them for the queen. Do you want to know?”
“It doesn’t matter to me what you did when you were a Nightwalker. It matters what you do now. But I’ll hear them if you want to tell me.”
“I tortured people for her.” She pressed her hand over her mouth, but the words still spilled out between her fingers. “It feels like a nightmare now, but it wasn’t just a nightmare. I don’t think it was just a nightmare.”
“You were under an enchantment.”
“Does that matter enough?” Her eyes shone with unshed tears. “I think some of them were our rebels. People who knew me. And she didn’t even want information from them anymore. I didn’t listen to them or carry it back to her…I just…hurt them.”
She rocked slightly on the wall, her heels battering too hard as her kicking went from an absent habit to her hurting herself. I pressed my hand over her knee to still her.
“Tesa.”
Her name seemed to pull her back a little from the memories. “I’m sorry. You didn’t want to know. I’m sorry.”
“You’re my friend. I can carry anything you want to tell me.” I patted her knee and pulled my hand away, watching to make sure she didn’t hurt herself. “And I’ve done horrible things too, Tesa. Quite recently.”
I could still smell the smoke from Obsidian’s pyres.
I had never been enchanted as she had been. I had simply been certain I was right, that my cause was just, which had its own costs and its own kind of trap.
I let the silence hold long enough to tell her I’d heard the full weight of it.
“Will he still want me back?” she whispered. It was the question underneath everything else she’d said tonight.
I didn’t answer immediately. She needed the pause just as much as the answer; she needed to know the answer was going to be true rather than comfortable.
“I cannot tell you what he will feel when he hears your story. But I can tell you that he does not love in half measures.” Or hate in them, either.
Shadowbane scoffed in my mind. “Does it comfort you to believe the two of you just hate each other?”
I did my best to ignore the dragon. “He made a sacrifice tonight. Of his own pride, his respect within the clans. For the sake of our rebellion. A lesser man could not have done what he did.”
“That’s what makes it so hard to face him.”
“That’s what will make him the man with whom you can rebuild. But first, you have to step out to meet him.”
She stared out at the horizon. Frustration was etched into the lines of her face.
She wanted to see Ander, but she couldn’t say yes. Making that choice meant owning what followed, and if it went wrong, she would have chosen her path to unhappiness. She was frustrated by having to choose.
It would be easier for her if I forced her hand. If I commanded rather than asked.
If Ander despised her, she could blame me, and there would be somewhere to focus her anger. There would be anger, and that was more manageable than shame and fear and grief.
“We will tell him tonight,” I told her. “He deserves to know. He shouldn’t even have to wait for morning.”
She would not enjoy the sleepless night before her, knowing she’d face him later. Best to rip off the bandage cleanly.
“You changed your mind. From before when we spoke, when you said you would wait for me to be ready.”
She sounded reproachful. She was already angry with me, even though I was giving her what she needed. That was alright. I could hold her anger when it was what was tying up all her terror and loss into one messy package, containing it enough so she could carry it.
“Someone wiser than me gave me counsel on what we should do,” I told her.
“You should tell your wife just that.” Shadowbane sounded as pleased with himself as if I had complimented him.
“Not a chance.”
Tesa sighed. I slid off the sea wall and offered her hand.
She ignored it, jumping down. She had never needed my hand when we were young, either, but she would have taken it once; she had once teased me that she was trying to teach me to be gallant like Ander.
Trying to make me fit to be a husband one day.
Side by side, Tesa and I walked toward a conversation that we both dreaded.