“Father, if you—”
“Celedin, I will speak with you in a moment!” said the steward. To her, he said, “To your chambers. I must think on what happens next.”
DATHOR BURST INTOher room not long afterwards. It was broad daylight, and anyone could have seen him, and this startled her badly.
“What are you doing? You cannot simply be here—”
“I’m leaving,” he said. “So, they have nothing to punish me with.”
“Leaving?”
“I’m going across the pass,” he said. “I’m told that I cannot get her out, but if I wish to go along with her, they will allow it.”
“What?” She was horrified.
“Did you think I would stay here, with you, after you sentenced the mother of my child to exile?” He sneered at her.
“You know,” she said.
“Igbar told me, yes,” he said.
“You’re going afterher?” She went to him. “I do not know what my future is now. Elrion has ended our engagement, and the steward is planning something to ‘do’ with me, but he will not say what. He says I am a schemer—”
“Are you not?” Dathor glared at her.
“You would leave me to this?”
“You did this, Aerhril,” he said in disbelief. “This is your fault. You have ruined everything. You…” He shook his head. “Why could you not wait? If I had a few more years to work off my debt here, then maybe I could have—”
“It’s not my fault.”
He stepped back, letting out a high-pitched noise.
“Not all of it,” she said. “It is not all my fault.”
He shook his head at her, seemingly at a loss for words.
She reached for him. “Dathor, I am so very sorry about Nathre.”
He evaded her. “It doesn’t matter if you are sorry, Aerhril.”
“But I know what you mean now,” she said. “When yousaid that immediately after you did it with her that you regretted it? That you did not understand why you did it? That you wished you could undo it? I understand, and I wish I had forgiven you then, for if I knew what it felt like to regret—”
“What I did and what you did are not even close to the same thing.”
“But we did it for the same reason,” she said. “We both wished to hurt the other.”
“I did not do it because I wished to hurt you. It wasn’t actually about you. I was in pain and I wanted something to feel good. You, on the other hand, it was just sheer vindictiveness, punishing poor Nathre—”
“Well, you used her.”
“I did,” he said. “Yes, I did. And I feel responsible for angering you, since you did this to her. I have to go after her. I cannot leave her to raise my child alone in Arzakh. And that is your fault, too. You have done all of this.”
Her face crumpled. Tears spilled out of her eyes.
He closed the distance between them. He took her by the throat, one thick gray-green hand closing around her neck. “You do not get to cry.”
She choked, but she could not stop the tears. She was frightened. His hand was huge. He was so very, very strong.
