He could hear her approaching. For all his internal conversations today, the conversations with the old man, the fight with Aelin, the hope, her approach agitated him.
And he understood why. He was angry with her for losing hope, for leaving her people, and forsaking her duty to protect.
“What?”
She opened the door and just stared at him like this was the first time she actually looked at him, saw him.
“What do you want?”
“I thought you might want this.”
She tossed the tin of healing salve he had given her that first day. He almost laughed at the reversal of their situation.
“I deserved it.” And he did, he almost failed to protect her.
“Doesn’t mean I can’t feel bad.”
Turned the tin in his hand. For her hard exterior under it was a heart.
“Is this a bribe?”
“Give it back, if you’re going to be a pain in my ass.”
“You could heal yourself, you know. Heal me, too. Nothing major, but you have that gift.”
“It’s—it’s the drop of water affinity I inherited from Mab’s line.”
“My mother told me that the drop of water in my magic was my salvation—and sense of self-preservation.”
“I wanted to learn to use it like the other healers—long ago, I mean. But never was allowed to. They said … well, it wouldn’t be all that useful, since I didn’t have much of it, and Queens don’t become healers.”
He was reminded that she was once a little girl that dreamed, and not to become a queen, but to be a healer. Like himself she was raised for a position, what they wanted did not matter, they had a larger responsibility than their dreams. He looked at her hands, the promise she had made to free a kingdom.
Until now he had no idea how to give a person hope, to free a kingdom to keep her word she would need to train. He could help her become a warrior of legends. Greater than an assassin.
“Go to bed. Since you’re banned from the kitchen tomorrow, we’re training at dawn.”
That look of helplessness slammed into him, that longing.
She has no hope left in her heart.
“Wait. Shut the door.”
There was something else he could give her, understanding. He could not look at her, he could not handle the pity she would give him, but he could tell her.
“When my mate died, it took me a very, very long time to come back.”
“How long ago?”
Her voice said it all, she understood what it meant to lose a mate.
“Two hundred three years, twenty-seven days ago.”
He turned towards her, waving his hand towards his tattoo.
“This tells the story of how it happened. Of the shame I’ll carry until my last breath.”
She was not alone in the shame she felt, this is how he could give her hope.
“Others come to you to have their own grief and shame tattooed on them.”
“Gavriel lost three of his soldiers in an ambush in the southern mountains. They were slaughtered. He survived. For as long as he’s been a warrior, he’s tattooed himself with the names of those under his command who have fallen. But where the blame lies has little to do with the point of the markings.”
“Were you to blame?”
He was surprised by her question, he felt it was an obvious answer, but to her it was not.
“Yes. When I was young, I was … ferocious in my efforts to win valor for myself and my bloodline. Wherever Maeve sent me on campaigns, I went. Along the way, I mated a female of our race. Lyria,”
“She sold flowers in the market in Doranelle. Maeve disapproved, but … when you meet your mate, there is nothing you can do to alter it. She was mine, and no one could tell me otherwise. Mating her cost me Maeve’s favor, and I still yearned so badly to prove myself. So when war came calling and Maeve offered me a chance to redeem myself, I took it. Lyria begged me not to go. But I was so arrogant, so misguided, that I left her at our mountain home and went off to war. I left her alone,”
“I was gone for months, winning all that glory I so foolishly sought. And then we got word that our enemies had been secretly trying to gain entrance to Doranelle through the mountain passes.”
“I flew home. As fast as I’d ever flown. When I got there, I found that … found she had been with child. And they had slaughtered her anyway, and burnt our house to cinders.
“When you lose a mate, you don’t …”
He took a deep breath, remembering those first years, the sudden loss, the despair, the hopelessness.
“I lost all sense of self, of time and place. I hunted them down, all the males who hurt her. I took a long while killing them. She was pregnant—had been pregnant since I’d left her. But I’d been so enamored with my own foolish agenda that I hadn’t scented it on her. I left my pregnant mate alone.”
Recognition flooded her eyes, she understood the words she had said to him had caused him to snap.
“What did you do after you killed them?”
“For ten years, I did nothing. I vanished. I went mad. Beyond mad. I felt nothing at all. I just … left. I wandered the world, in and out of my forms, hardly marking the seasons, eating only when my hawk told me it needed to feed or it would die. I would have let myself die—except I … couldn’t bring myself …”
“I might have stayed that way forever, but Maeve tracked me down. She said it was enough time spent in mourning, and that I was to serve her as prince and commander—to work with a handful of other warriors to protect the realm. It was the first time I had spoken to anyone since that day I found Lyria. The first time I’d heard my name—or remembered it.”
“So you went with her?”
“I had nothing. No one. At that point, I hoped serving her might get me killed, and then I could see Lyria again. So when I returned to Doranelle, I wrote the story of my shame on my flesh. And then I bound myself to Maeve with the blood oath, and have served her since.”
She looked at him like he held the answers to the world. THe answers she needed.
“How—how did you come back from that kind of loss?”
He thought for a second, was he back? Functioning yes, but back from that dark frozen abyss? The nightmares plagued him nightly. He alienated his family. Lorcan and Gavriel were the closest fae he could consider a friend.
“I didn’t. For a long while I couldn’t. I think I’m still … not back. I might never be.”
He did not even know where to start, what it would mean to be back. No one had understood that loss, not until this girl. This girl had loss her parents, kingdom, a friend and a lover. She had no one left. Hope, she was not the only one that needed hope. She made him feel, unlocked the feelings he had frozen within himself. Somehow this girl was his hope, deep down he cared more for her than he should.
There is nothing that I can give you.
Nothing I want to give you.
You are nothing to me.
I do not care.
Lies. Such lies, because deep down he knew she was something to him. Since the first time she stuck her tongue out at him, he knew that somehow this girl was his hope, deep down he cared more for her than he should. His ice danced with her fire, underneath it all there was a yearning his magic refused to reject.
“But maybe . . . maybe we could find the way back together.”
“I think, I would like that very much.”
“Together, then.”
“Together.”
And somewhere far and deep inside him, the ice began to crack.