“I see. So tell me, how did Lady Saoirse of Kilmorda, a child, grow to be Queen Saoirse of Dendar?” He matched her tone, the unemotional delivery, the feigned boredom.
“I was Gifted, and my parents were afraid. They knew what happened to Lady Meshara of Corvyn. I was just a little girl, but I could see terrible things. I would tell them elaborate stories that always seemed to come true. I made their lives miserable.” She paused, collected her thoughts, and proceeded without inflection.
“An arrangement was made between Kilmorda and Dendar. A betrothment. I was sent to Dendar along with three ships filled with gold, fine silk, and exotic spices. When I was twenty summers, I became Queen. A year later, King Aren sent me back to Kilmorda. He told me it was just for a while. Dendar was under attack, and unlike the rest of Caarn, I couldn’t spin to protect myself.”
She wrapped her story in concise sentences and careful words. She didn’t embellish, didn’t add drama or flair the way she usually did. The delivery was dry, flat, and colorless. Everything that Sasha wasn’t.
“Why did Padrig take your memories?” he asked the question with just enough disdain to let her know he was no longer convinced that he had. It was theatrics. He knew Padrig had taken Sasha’s memories as surely as Kjell had stolen her kisses.
“King Aren ordered him to. He told Padrig if Kilmorda fell, I would try to return. He knew if I could remember Dendar, I would try to go back, and I would be killed.”
“And will you?” he pressed, nonchalant.
Finally, her eyes found his.
“Will I . . . what?” Ah. There she was. Sasha of Quondoon. Persecuted servant, looking to him.
“Will you go back?” he asked. And there he was. The Kjell of old, scathing and sharp.
She didn’t explain herself or say, “It is expected,” or “I must,” or “I have no choice.” She simply replied, “Yes.”
Yes.
She would be going back.
“King Tiras and Queen Lark have agreed to arrange a small contingent of soldiers and supplies from Corvyn to Dendar,” she expounded. “There was wealth recovered in my father’s house. It is now . . . mine. Padrig has not been back since we fled. He doesn’t know what we will find, but he is confident Caarn is waiting, and we will be welcomed home.”
How kind of King Tiras and Queen Lark. How very considerate. They were arranging all the details. He wanted to kill his brother.
He bowed slowly, with great pomp, the way he used to bow before Lark, just to make her seethe. “I wish you safe travels, Your Highness. It has been a pleasure to have served you.” He kept his gaze locked on hers as he straightened.
She didn’t reply, but her eyes grew bright and her lips parted slightly, as if she wanted to speak but hadn’t decided what to say. He stared at her a moment longer, waiting for words that didn’t come, before turning on his heel and striding from the room.
For days he avoided all the chatter, all the glorious gossip of the long-lost Queen of Dendar who had miraculously been found alive and rescued by the valiant king and his good queen. He didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to hear. Didn’t want to count the days until she was gone. But there were preparations he couldn’t ignore and people he couldn’t evade. Jerick cornered him—making everything decidedly worse with his effusive sympathy—only to run from his presence. Tiras summoned him several times, but Kjell defied his edicts.
He spent hours in the yard, taking his rage and impotence out on anyone who would come against him with a jousting stick, a sword, or a spear. When he realized his men were eyeing him with more pity than fear, he abandoned them too, leaving Jeru City for endless patrols with only Lucian and his sour thoughts for company. Still, avoiding a Seer indefinitely proved impossible.
Sasha found him four days later in the royal stables, mucking stalls that he’d already cleaned, feeding horses that were too full to eat, and oiling saddles that were already gleaming. Her hair was arranged in a crown of braids and loose curls that hung obediently down her back and past her breasts, as if each one had been carefully placed. Her gown was the same soft green as the scarf he’d bought her in Solemn, her lips pink, her nails buffed, her presentation perfect. But her dark eyes were bruised and weary, and her cheeks were pale beneath the smattering of copper. She didn’t appear to have slept, and the starch he’d observed in the throne room was missing from her posture.
“We are leaving the day after tomorrow,” she said softly.
“Go and do no harm,” he shot back, the traditional Jeruvian parting sounding like a slap. She turned away from him and pressed her palms to her face, easing the sting.
“I remember. But I haven’t forgotten,” she said, her voice breaking slightly.
“I don’t know what that means,” he answered, but he abandoned the bales of hay that didn’t need to be moved again and dropped down onto one of them.
“I remember. I remember everything. And everything has changed. But I have not forgotten how I feel about you.”
His throat closed and his skin burned, and he fisted his hands in his hair so he wouldn’t reach for her. He kept his eyes on the wooden slats of the stable floor, waiting for her to continue. But she didn’t. Instead she began to cry. It was not the keening of the night when Padrig returned her memories. It was not the gentle sniffling of a tender moment, or the pretty cries of a manipulation. Her cries were so deep and raw, they ricocheted through his chest and reverberated in his head. She shook with them, her hands covering her eyes and her hair creating a shroud reminiscent of the day she sank to her knees and declared herself his.
“Tell me what you remember.” Maybe it was foolish, but it was a story he wanted to hear, even if it killed him.
“They’re gone. My mother and my father are gone,” she cried. “I remember Kilmorda. I remember my life. I remember my . . . self. And I am gone too.”
“No,” he soothed. “You are not.”
“I remember the king. I remember King Aren,” she rushed, as if she had to tell him, had to get it all out.
He couldn’t breathe.
“He was a good king. He was kind to me. I grew to love him, and I was happy.”
How could relief and despair exist together? Yet they did, and his heart rejoiced even as he mourned the truth that sealed his fate.
“I am glad,” he choked, and made himself say it once more. “I am glad.”
She shook her head adamantly, her curls dancing around her, caressing her neck and her face, stroking her back, touching her arms when he could not.
“Please . . . don’t . . . say that. Don’t tell me you are glad. If you don’t mourn with me, no one will.” She turned toward him and extended her hand, pleading, asking for comfort. She’d held his hand so many times, taken it in support, in solidarity, in supplication.
He rose and took it, gripping the long, slim fingers, counting the freckles on her skin with his eyes so he wouldn’t touch them with his lips. She clutched his just as tightly, but neither of them stepped closer, neither narrowed the space nor crossed the new divide. Clinging to his hand, she continued, her thoughts tumbling over each other, her words coming quickly, confiding and confessing.
“I remember Caarn. The castle. The people. The forests and the hills. The valley of Caarn in Dendar became my home. And I loved her even more than I loved Kilmorda.”
“Caarn is not gone. She is waiting for you. You can go back,” he reassured. He didn’t know what she wanted to hear. He didn’t know what she needed to hear. Knowing was not his gift. It had never been his gift. Compassion, empathy, self-sacrifice and self-denial—he was not equipped with any of them. Yet the moment Sasha fell into his life, he’d been asked to continually exercise them.
“You told me once you were lost. There is a whole world waiting for you. A whole life. You aren’t lost anymore,” he said.