“I’m not,” said Dathor. “I am only saying that neither of us have ever been on our own.”
“If you won’t help me, then I’ll find someone who will. I can’tmarryhim.”
Dathor looked into her eyes for a long time before he looked away. “No, of course not. You can’t marry him. We’ll go. I’ll work hard, get to the point where I am making a wage, and then we’ll have money and we’ll find a way.”
She realized he did not mean it. That something had happened to him, that something had broken in him, that he was now content to stay here and be a prisoner above thestables, to labor for nothing, and she did not know why. “What did they do to you?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing that they haven’t done before.” He licked his lips. “You are not healed, not fully, so we must wait, anyway, and you say we have years, so there is time.”
She regarded him.
He twisted his mouth into a semblance of a smile. “We’ll find a way.”
“I can’t marry him,” she said again.
“Of course not,” he said, nodding, but he wasn’t looking at her now.
And then it was quiet.
She watched him. He scuffed a toe against the grass as he looked thoughtfully out over the field in need of weeding. “Well?” she said finally.
His head jerked up. “What?”
“What is the reason you asked me to come and see me, then?”
He ran a hand through his long dark hair. “Just to apologize. For all of it, for everything. I should have never touched you.” He wasn’t looking at her again.
She wasn’t sure what to say. “They’ve beaten you somehow,” she murmured.
He bowed his head, rubbing the back of his neck, strands of his hair falling down, obscuring anything she could see of his face. “No, it wasn’t them.”
“Then who?”
He didn’t answer.
She stepped closer to him. “Me?”
He lifted his gaze, still clutching the back of his neck. He rubbed it, thoughtful. “We just had it wrong, Aerhril. We had everything wrong.”
She drew back. She did not like this new and subdued Dathor, all the fire in him extinguished. She didn’t like him at all.
SHE GOT TOgo home to see her family for her seventeenth birthday, and it was all very grim. The house was practically empty, and there were only two servants who remained. She gathered that they stayed primarily because they had nowhere else to go. They weren’t getting paid anymore.
Her father and mother were so glad that she was going to marry Celedin. They went on and on about how it was a blessing in disguise when she’d been taken as a ward, that it had been the salvation of everyone.
They hinted that perhaps she could convince the steward to let them come there, and she was horrified at the thought of that, because she could not imagine what the steward and Celedin might do to her entire family if they had them all there to torment.
Raclahad was eight years old, the same age Aerhril had been when she had been sent to the north. Raclahad seemed so young and such a weakling. She sobbed often, and maybe Aerhril should have been more sympathetic, but she wasn’t.
She was angry.
She felt as if everyone she had ever depended upon had let her down.
When she got off the train back in the north, Celedin was waiting for her along with her companion, an elf woman named Flaihir. She was a spinster, aged eight and twenty, who was the daughter of a barlin from further north. She had been with them for only about four months.
“Oh, your train was late,” she said. “Mine was early, and I sat here thinking no one had come to fetch me after all. Then finally, someone arrived and I was so relieved.”
“But we’ve been waiting nearly forty minutes for your train,” said Celedin, looking her over. “I have to say I started to wonder if perhaps we’d have to leave and I wondered what you would do if you arrived in the midst of the night, all alone.”
