“You don’t understand.”
I’m beginning to think I actuallydounderstand, but the explanation forming in my mind is so horrible that I can’t bring myself to say it out loud, and so the silence between us just grows and grows until I can’t take it anymore.
Gripping my wrist, I whisper, “What don’t I understand?”
He hands me the crumpled letter.
I don’t want to take it. But I do. I don’t even read it; my gaze only makes it as far as the broken seal. I recognize it even before I fold it back together, lining up the edges of the wax stamp—a golden circle with six tapered points bursting outward.
I could never forget that symbol.
Because it’s the same one Malachi burned into my skin on the night he proposed.
Chapter Forty-One
“Do you understand now?” Reave's voice sounds oddly far away. “You've already been bound to another.”
I back away from him, searching for something solid to brace against. I end up colliding with his desk, my shaking hand slipping several times before I finally manage to grab the edge of it.
“H-He's…dead,” I stammer, tucking my chin toward my chest and closing my eyes to combat the spinning room and my growing urge to vomit. “So it doesn't matter.”
“I don't think so, Arowyn.”
When my stomach finally stops churning, I lift my head and stare at him. He hasn't moved from his place by the wardrobe. His expression is conflicted as he starts to take a step forward only to stop—like he isn't sure if closing the distance between us would make things better or worse.
I'm not sure, either.
I turn my attention to the letter, unfolding it and skimming the first few lines:
You have my thanks for keeping my bonded one safe. I will consider it a remittance toward all that Mouren owes me and my kingdom.
Unfortunately, there's still a great deal left for you to pay.
And unlike my predecessor, I prefer to settle debts much more personally.
The words themselves don't truly register, but the pen they're written in, the perfectly neat, small, and slightly slanted letters…
It looks like Mal's handwriting.
Gods, it looks like his fucking handwriting.
The same handwriting I used to obsess over when I was younger and stupider, when he would write letters every single day and leave them in the flower box outside my bedroom window even though we only lived across the street from one another. Because letters were more romantic, he said, and he was always doing silly little things like that. Pressing dried flowers between the folded pages, dousing the parchment in my favorite scents of vanilla and cinnamon. All the care and tenderness and promises he put into those letters…
Was all of it a lie?
A trick?
I trace the mark on my left wrist, falling into the memory of him pressing it into my skin. We did it in secret, in a candlelit room above a tavern at the edge of Halvgate, theonly witness a traveling cleric who claimed to have authority in such things.
I still vividly remember the way Mal held so tightly to my hand while he drew the mark with a strange, slender instrument—something between a pen and a blade with a tip that burned as it glided over me.
Even now, I remember the astonishment I felt as I stared at the soft glow blooming beneath my skin, warming away any pain I felt. The excitement that trembled through me as the same glow lit up his skin, his mark, as he spoke beautiful words over both of us. Words I didn’t understand, but which I assumed were simply vows in the Dralsk tongue.
This was all part of an old tradition in his kingdom, he told me. His mother and father allegedly had the same proof of their devotion to one another—and I believed him when he told me this, too, because I never actuallymetany of his family. They were all killed by Meira's soldiers when they fled the north kingdom.
Did they flee for political reasons?
Did Malachi truly have a claim to the Dralsk throne?
