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He picked at a loose thread on the hem of his trousers. “That’s easy for you to say. Children are bread and butter to you, love.”
She bristled at the unwarranted familiarity, but something else had pricked her even deeper. “You don’t know anything about me or what I may wish for my future.”
The words escaped against her better judgment. Had she taken the time to consider, she wouldn’t have said anything. But it was too late to back out now that he was staring at her again. He arched an inquisitive eyebrow.
“I didn’t always want to be a governess.” She forced herself to maintain eye contact. “I wanted to marry and have children of my own. To grow old alongside my sister, and her husband, and her children. To have everyone I loved close around me. That dream is not to be, yet you do not see me shirking from my duty.”
No, let it never be said that Anrid Fray shirked her duties.
It was how she had gotten herself into this horrid mess, after all.
“Why? Why is that life not possible?”
She didn’t want to tell him. It wasn’t any of his business, but nor was it a secret, either. “I’m supposed to marry a dark elf—it’s part of the treaty between us and them. I wasn’t given a choice, but I did what my people needed me to do. I left my sister to marry him.”
“That’s why you’re here, then. You were on your way to get married.”
She studied the opposite wall with deliberate intensity. “Yes. So don’t think I do not understand you, Kora. Neither of us are where we may want to be.”
“Why not just return home? Now that you’ve been...derailed from your plans, what is keeping you from just going home to your sister?”
“I can’t do that. I’m still expected in Gelaira by him.”
Shades, she didn’t even know his name.
It made her stomach sour and twist into a painful knot. “Besides. They only take one girl per family. If I go home, if I don’t fulfill my duty...”
They could come for Dagmar.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a lengthy pause. “I see now that I’ve misjudged you. But perhaps the same can be said of you. You cannot claim to know me any better than I know you.”
But he hadn’t told her anything to change her opinion of him. She should tell him as much, but she’d grown weary and uncomfortable at the turn of their discussion.
“No,” she agreed as she rubbed the sudden ache in her forehead, “I can’t claim to know you either. I apologize if I came across as rude. It wasn’t my intention. Children are precious to me, and I tend to be overprotective where they’re concerned.”
His gaze narrowed. “I don’t think they aren’t precious. I just don’t think I’m the one to take care of them. They’d be better off in someone else’s care.”
Anrid stared down at her lap, her hands idle. “If fewer people thought like that,” she began with aching slowness, “there wouldn’t be as many homeless orphans in the world.”
He stiffened beside her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his hand curl into a fist, his knuckles white. But then his fingers flexed and relaxed.
He chuckled and bumped her shoulder with his. “Well, love, it has been enlightening, this little chat of ours. And as much as I might long for you to reprimand me all day, I do have a few duties I must attend to.”
With that cool little speech, he rose and walked away without a backward glance. She watched him go, annoyed with herself for hurting his feelings.
But she didn’t regret anything she had said.
Sometimes the words that hurt were the things that people needed to hear the most.
Chapter 14
It had not been a good day, but what was one more bad day in a week full of bad days?
Jael dragged himself back to Imenborg, his sack empty of runestones. He’d used every last one from his satchel as well as most from Math’s. By the time the lad returned with reinforcements and another load of runestones, Jael was bone weary and more than a little alarmed. Two of the runestones he had replaced first had already started flickering, a sign they might be about to fail after only eight hours.
But he couldn’t do anything to problem solve other than replace runestones. He’d been too busy to think. Now, however, as he walked home with nothing to occupy his hands, his thoughts kept returning to the Bifrost. The why and how questions plagued him. He had no answers, though.
He didn’t understand what was wrong.
