She studied the Wistwood tree again, the markings that were just as stark as the day Levon had carved them there. “I still blame myself for what happened to Hannelore. She was waiting for me at our usual haunt near the mortal border. I’d told her I would be there, but I wasn’t. I was too busy in the Outlands, picking flowers and wrestling Levon.” The last words were said with disgust. Hunter listened as intently and patiently as the first time she’d told him this story—in broken sobs, with her face buried in the snow and her sword discarded nearby. She’d expected him to decline training her after that humiliating breakdown, to tell Balthazar she was too much to handle. Much to her surprise, he’d woken her up at the crack of dawn the very next day. And he’d trained her again—hard. Harder than before.
“Even if you were there,” Hunter said, “they still would’ve killed her.”
“Then I would’ve died with her.” The words were fierce, yet so quiet the wind nearly carried them off. “Instead, a friendship ended that day, and a new one began. Pity the new one ended, too. Such a waste.”Shewas a waste. She wasnothing.
“Nothing is a waste, Sable.”
“Says the boy who knows nothing of loss,” she muttered.
“Oh, I know plenty,” Hunter said. He pushed away from the tree and strode back to the center of the clearing. “I’ve suffered my fair share.”
She looked over her shoulder at him. The hilt of the impressive sword strapped to his muscled back glinted in the sunlight, the owl pommel limned with gold. “These losses you speak of—I wouldn’t know them. You say I’m terrible for never opening up, yet you’re just as bad as I am. Sometimes I feel I may as well be talking to a wall.”
“Ouch.” Hunter laughed. “I’d tell you, but you never ask. You’re so absorbed by your own pain that it never occurs to you that someone else might be suffering just as much as you.”
She raised an eyebrow. “And that ‘someone else’is you?”
He shrugged and began to walk away.
Sable started after him. “The men say you carry a book of prayers. That you sometimes travel to the temples to seek the advice of the old gods. Is it true?”
“It could be.”
“Tell me,” Sable persisted. “Tell me of your book of prayers.” She skipped after him, tearing through a field of dandelion fluffs; the pieces spun around her in tiny hurricanes. “Tell me of the scar on the inside of your left wrist. Tell me why you can’t look me in the eye for very long.” She stepped in front of him, cutting off his path, and pinned him with her gaze. “Tell me why you look at me as if…as if something you see in me haunts you.”
Hunter studied her for an eternity beneath that blazing sun, and Sable studied him back. Until she could count the freckles on his nose, could see the story behind that faint pink scar that ran down the right side of his mouth. Until she’d memorized the sharp curve of his jaw, and that peculiar look in his eyes that grew more intent with each passing second.
Finally, he spoke. “My book of prayers was nothing but a blank notebook when I first got it. The real ones don’t exist anymore; they were all burned. I travel from temple to temple, finding what’s left of the prayers etched into the walls and ceilings, carved there by long-dead passersby, and I copy them into the pages so that…” He paused to take a ragged breath. “So that one day, they might decide to come back.”
“Who?” she pressed. “The gods?”
He began to shake his head but stopped. “The scar on the inside of my left wrist is an Elven letter I put there myself with a nail. It’s the first letter of a name—Arabella, my half-sister. When we were young, we lived alone in a village near the border of Midra. Our parents had died several years after we were born. There weren’t many of us left at the village anymore; after the war, most people fled as far from the Elven realm as they could, but my sister didn’t want to leave, so I stayed with her. To offer her some form of protection in a world that was growing more dangerous every day. One afternoon, I was hunting for our supper, and a group of men passing through sniffed her out. They didn’t care that she was only half-Elven; they had vowed to kill anyone with even a fraction of what they calledsoiled blood.”
Sable wasn’t breathing.
“She was already dead by the time I returned,” Hunter concluded. “And the men were long gone. They’d nailed her body above the front door. I had to pluck my own sister’s mangled corpse off the wall so that I could bury her. And the entire time that I was searching for something tall enough to reach her, and a hammer so I could pry the nails out of her wrists and ankles, I had time to think. Time to become so blinded by rage and guilt that I could hardly make sense of anything.”
Sable’s eyes burned with tears. She dropped her gaze to the ground, feeling horrible for having asked. She liked to tell herself that the reason she suddenly couldn’t look at him was because she was offering him some shred of privacy, of respect. The truth was that she couldn’t bear to look at him; to take in the expression of the person whose every breath had suddenly turned ragged. She could barely handle her own pain. Perhaps she was a coward.
Hunter tilted her chin up, his strong hand trembling. She forced herself to meet his gaze, and she didn’t try to stop them this time as the tears began to fall to the grass at their feet.
“I can’t look you in the eyes for long,” Hunter said, “because you remind me of her. You remind me of Arabella. And because—” He clenched his jaw.
“Because what?” she pressed. Her own breaths were ragged now, too.
“I see her when I look at you,” he admitted. “And I get scared because…because I can’t lose another person I love.”
Sable’s heart skipped a beat. “You— What?”
“I know,” he said, dropping his still-trembling hand. “I’m sorry.”
Her mind was a mess of color and sound, her face heating until it felt like she’d lit on fire. “Why in the world would you apologize for such a thing?”
“Because it doesn’t make sense,” he whispered, his eyes filled with pain. “It doesn’t make sense for you to love me back.”
She was shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Hunter,” she began. He looked at her as though she’d slapped him, as though he’d expected nothing more than rejection. And it broke her heart. “But you are wrong. You are so wrong.”
They were both sorry—because she loved him, too. She’d loved him for a long time. He was the person who’d healed the wounds Levon had left behind; the only one who had ever managed to calm the storm raging in her heart.
