**BOOK II OF THE FOUR REALMS SERIES**
When war came for Azura, Fara of Calate lost everything. Her husband, her new home, her freedom. When her captor - the formidable commander of the Leoth army - saves her life, she begins to see the enemy as som...
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She wanted to tell him that she had never been Azura's trinket, neither had she been Galyns, for Galyn had never sought to own her. Galyn had always recognised her as an equal, as his wife. Sadness settled over her heart at the thought of him, at what she had done to him.
Could he have loved me without the curse I'd put upon his heart, she wondered.
He had been a good man. Noble. Honest. Brave. Nothing like the man who stood before her now.
'And that is how you have ever seen me,' she fixed him with a disdainful glare. 'A trinket. Something pretty to possess. Something you are convinced your divine blood has given you ownership of.'
'You sell yourself short, sister. You are, by degrees, far more than pretty; you are the most beautiful treasure in the four realms.' He smiled. 'In fact, I think you have grown even more so since I last looked upon you. Widowhood is to you as Sunalven is to the White Laurel tree.'
'And you are a monster!' She spat. Did he think this another of his games? War was not a game. Death and enslavement of innocents was not a game. Fury tore a path through her. 'We were taught as children to fear and hate the Leothine; inhuman beasts that are not like us. Monsters who will one day come to slaughter us all while we sleep, that will drink our blood like wine. But the monster has always been you. My monster has always been you, has it not, brother?'
The smile fell from his mouth as he strode forward and struck her hard across the face, the force of it sending her to her knees at his feet. Sharp hot pain flamed across her cheek.
'You would dare speak to me thus?' He thundered. 'When I have grieved and mourned and enshrined you, you would say that to me!? When everything I have done, I have done for you!?'
She took a deep breath and pressed her palm to her cheek and turned her head up slowly to look at him.
'For me?' she asked, her voice calm. 'I watched children ripped from the dead arms of their mothers. Priestesses raped and beaten by the men you now call your allies, farmers forced to watch while their lands were destroyed and their wives and children were...' she could not speak the words. She did not have to. For he knew, of course, he knew. 'Gods, how lucky I am to be loved as you love me, brother.'
Valdr's eyes were a black fire, pitiless depths of inky darkness. When he spoke his voice was cool as stone. 'Did not I warn you what would happen if you should try to leave me? Did not I warn you too what would become of whoever tried to take you from me?'
Yes. He had. She should have known. She should have stopped him. Should not have run from him. Galyn's fate would have been his own then. Would there have been fewer deaths? Perhaps. But she also knew the kind of male Torrik was and after taking Azura through the bedchamber it would not have been long before his eyes had turned eastward toward Calate.
Fara swallowed the bile which had risen to her throat, letting her eyes say all that her tongue did not.
Valdr stared at her a beat, then another, before his fury disappeared completely, like mist in the heat of the sun. Sinking to the floor beside her, he pulled her into his arms. 'Forgive me,' he pleaded softly. 'Please forgive me. It is not what I wish, Fara. It has never been what I wished...' His voice was riven with guilt now.
