Heir Apparent

Chapter Twelve

His eyes slid toward me, "I stay out of the Dark Magic affairs of my mistress, and I would prefer to stay out of yours."

"It's not Dark Magic." It was a knee-jerk defense. For all I knew it was Dark Magic that had brought me here, to this earlier time in my life. "At least not mine."

"Better I stay out of it."

"Are you not curious? Of how and what I know?"

The archer turned more fully to me, and for a moment, I saw the Xavi that I had met: no nonsense but a teacher. I hadn't realized how much I had relied on Xavi's strange sort of friendship until I was met with a very different version of the assassin and then longed for it. "No. Nothing good comes of knowing beyond what it is in your power to know."

I opened my mouth to tell him about his friend, the one who died over his arrogance, to prove to him that I knew helpful information, but I stopped. Too many times I had behaved like a bull, running rampant over the fields of others: Gil, Thea, and now, perhaps, the three of them, with my whims.

Instead, I looked back down at my healed arm. "So what does it mean for someone who already knows?"

A shoulder raised and dropped. "It is within your power to know."

"What if it was done to me? Not mine at all?"

I could feel him watching me. "It is still your power now. What good or ill comes from it is within your grasp."

Slowly, I met his gaze, sighing before looking at the road behind us, little bits of dust swirling in the air from the pony and wagon. "I understand battles, Xavi. I understand battlelines and maps and soldiers, the way a sword feels when I swing it, and the way it bites when it wounds you. I know pain and violence. I know this. But after this? After this is completely foreign. I'm not a princess raised at court knowing all the politics and who is who. I'm a general. I know my men, and farmers, and nothing of anything else." I dropped my voice, letting the racket of the wagon cover my voice so only the assassin would hear. "What if I don't want what they're trying to give me?"

The archer was still for a long while, watching as I did, the road behind. "And you tell me this? Knowing I report to my mistress?"

I mimicked his one shoulder shrug. "I suspect she already knows these things about me. Probably long before now."

Xavi hummed. "Perhaps that is precisely why they want you to have it."

"That's insanity."

"That is faith."

"Then I don't want it."

"And that is not for you to decide."

I looked at him, but he refused to meet my gaze. His profile was stern, something I hadn't noticed about him before, but there was also a softness around his eyes when he was at rest. Before, he had always been an assassin, the man who put an arrow through my arm, forced me to pace to regain my strength, who tied me up to a barn post. Looking at him now, I could see something else behind the Hire Hand, the something he had hinted at what seemed like a lifetime ago: that he wasn't always going to be an assassin. Who was that other man?

He would never tell me. I could wait a thousand lifetimes, and he would never reveal a sliver of that man. Where at times, I was far too much of an open book. Nodding to myself, I patted his shoulder, then used it to leverage myself up and make my way back to my seat toward the front. I dropped ungracefully down.

"We'll ride a bit more," Aeron announced, "then stop for the night. The pony needs a rest, and so do I."

"Right." I watched the sky, turning my face up to pick out animals in the clouds. Now I wasn't so sure if I was anxious to get to Icarius, back to my men and enact my plan to put someone else on the throne, or if I just wanted to get lost out here in the farmland, disappear with my sad, little dagger.