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Chapter Thirty-Seven
Blithering, Romantic Fool
Numair sat atop Hellack in the shadows just back from the Inner Gate, waiting for his better sense to materialize. He was early, and Clare was not yet here. If he took the forest path, he could return to his room without her ever knowing he’d been here. He could pretend he’d never been here.
But every time a muscle in his leg twitched, a precursor to the gentle pressure that would turn Hellack back whence they’d come, he once again saw the water closing over her head and he stopped. He hadn’t thought he had it in him to care any longer. If people lived, if they died. He’d cared so much, once, and all it had brought him was pain.
When he was younger and even more foolish than he was now, he’d thought the efforts he’d made in secret would have some effect. Would produce some light in a world drenched in darkness and that, even if no one else would ever know it was his hand behind those efforts, he would know. Then he’d watched those minuscule effects, those minuscule goods, drown beneath the sea of death and power and inevitability that was the king of Faelhorn and he’d known that nothing he did would ever matter.
Twice the fool, he’d kept trying, anyway. But he’d stopped caring—if what he did helped, if it didn’t. If the people he tried to save lived or died. In truth, sometimes he thought it better when they died. Better that they no longer had to deal with all this. All the mess and pain and futility that was living. But he hadn’t felt that way when he’d watched her disappear beneath the lake’s surface and been unsure if he would reach her in time. He hadn’t thought to himself, At least she’ll be free of all this. All he’d known was a stark, insistent terror. The sense that she had to live, because if she didn’t…he’d been half-convinced the world would end with her.
He hadn’t been such a blithering, romantic fool about anything since his adolescent years, when he’d been lost and dumb enough to think himself in love. Well, that wasn’t quite accurate. He had been in love—but it had been with an idea of the person, rather than the actual person, and he frequently had cause to be grateful they would never know of the brief infatuation. He was already laughed out of the court with regularity. He didn’t want to be laughed off the continent as well.
He didn’t want her, riding up the path on Kialla, her back straight and her face set, to laugh at him someday too. Experience told him she would. She wasn’t the first person to be convinced there had to be something of substance beneath the second prince of Faelhorn’s drunken lunacy. She was the first to actually find it. A spark of it, a crumb. All that he could give her.
It wouldn’t be enough. It couldn’t be enough. People wanted. It was in their nature, in their biology. They wanted connection, stability, companionship. Some were better at attaining and keeping it than others, but everyone wanted it at least a little. She would too, and when she did, she would realize he was an obstacle to ever having it.
She stopped at the Inner Gate and turned Kialla back toward the palace, watching the road. Watching for him. It was empty here, this time of evening. Most who would venture out had already done so, and there was no one to see her except him, no one to notice the way she sat astride her horse as if readying herself for disappointment.
It took him a moment—longer than it should have, probably—to recognize that the riding coat buttoned up her front was the very same one he’d wrapped around her that afternoon. What drove her to wear it—sentimentality or practicality? The latter, most likely. She didn’t seem like the type of person prone to actions of a sentimental nature, and it was a damn fine coat.
Was, in fact, his favorite coat. Not that he had any intention of asking for it back. It looked better on her.
He watched as she waited. She didn’t fidget or sweep her gaze across the landscape like most people would if they were waiting for someone and hoping they would come. She simply sat, turning stillness into an art, her gaze fixed on the path. She waited longer than he would have, in her place. A little more than a quarter went past the bell before her fingers tightened on the reins, her eyes hardening, and she offered the night a single word in condemnation of him. “Coward.”
Kialla pivoted, took two steps at a trot and then leapt into a canter at the squeeze of Clare’s legs, disappearing down the path. Hellack nickered after the mare, muscles tensing in eager anticipation of a chase.
Coward, her musical voice rang in his mind. Coward, coward, coward.
Fool, yes. But not a coward.
Not tonight.
He stroked his hand down Hellack’s neck and gave the horse his head. “Go get her then, boy.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Storybook Fantasy
Clare was lost in the rhythm of Kialla’s gait, her irritation and disappointment thundering along with each hoofbeat when she heard another, faster set of hooves pounding behind her. Kialla stretched her nose out, lengthening her stride, determined to keep her lead. Clare almost let her, but found her fingers tightening instead, applying a gentle pressure to the reins that had Kialla slowing to her previous speed as Hellack and Numair drew even with them.
Man and stallion slowed from gallop to easy canter, keeping pace in a silence Clare didn’t break. They slowed as they approached the Outer Gate, though when the guards recognized Numair, they simply waved the pair of them through. Walking now—Kialla bit at Hellack’s face when he did so too closely and the stallion, rather than bite back, simply shifted aside, putting another foot of space between them—Clare finally acknowledged Numair.
“You’re late.”
He didn’t answer for a few strides. “Is my invitation rescinded, then?”
“That depends.”
“On?”
“On whether I have to worry if you’ll accept others in the future.” She held up a hand, forestalling him from answering directly. “And before you give me yet another brooding speech about how you aren’t a good person to associate with, please remember that I don’t give a damn. If you don’t want to associate with me, then fine. But don’t act like you can’t for my supposed benefit.”
He let out a short, sharp laugh. “All right then. Consider me yours. When you regret it, don’t come crying to me.”
She snorted. “I don’t cry. And I don’t regret.”
He eyed her dubiously. “Never?”
