Page 94 of His Realm

“I’m afraid if we try and leave, the barrier might come down. I’ve never moved and had it stay with me, and normally it only works when I’m at home, or with Varic,” I said, thinking of me and Nerilla the night we were fighting for our lives. “I didn’t know if it would work now.”

“And it may not ever again,” Keres replied shakily, exhaling sharply. “I suspect you will not be in this same predicament a second time—at least that is my hope for you.”

“Yeah,” I agreed under my breath.

“I think your barrier responded to you being threatened with a horrific violation that would forever alter who you are,” she whispered.

Looking at her, really studying her face, I realized what was rolling off her was not sexual energy. I was not at all catching a siren, a femme-fatale vibe, but instead something far more nurturing, far more mothering.

“You’ve been in the place I was, where someone was going to take from you without permission,” I stated.

She nodded quickly.

“I’m so sorry.”

I watched as she swallowed hard, wiped away tears before they even reached her cheeks, then lifted her chin. “It was long ago, my consort, but I remember the fear and the fury, and I saw both on your face before your barrier was unleashed.”

I had wondered a thousand times why I hadn’t been able to use my barrier when Nerilla and I were in Gideon’s home. Why it wouldn’t rise and protect us both.

“You blame yourself for that, but you shouldn’t,” Varic told me late one night when we’d been sitting together on the thick stone railing on the roof of the palace. We were whispering because it felt right in the dark. A storm was coming in, and we could see it, the lightning, out over the sea in the distance. “You were fighting with a weapon, she was at your side, and without being at home, in a place you call your own, without me…there was no barrier to raise.”

I was about to argue.

“Plus, you were terrified for her, never yourself.”

“I don’t understand what that⁠—”

“Your barrier rises to keep you safe…or me. It’s not an offensive power, but a defensive one,” he explained.

I was quiet, wanting only to listen.

“Unlike my power,” he said, taking my hand and kissing my palm, “yours is not something that can be trained or honed. It happens on instinct, nothing more.”

I nodded, looking at him in the faint moonlight, at the chiseled lines of his face. He was telling me something important, and I wanted to remember the moment, engrain it in my memory.

“You were so focused on Nerilla, on protecting her, and in that chaos, with your own safety not paramount, only hers, and not having me with you…what were you supposed to do?”

I had no idea.

“You blame yourself for things you have no control over. That way lies madness.”

It did. He wasn’t wrong.

He laced his fingers with mine and held on. “I’m so fast,” he said, more to himself than to me. “But the day Cassius fell, I couldn’t reach him in time. I’m always there, I’ve saved so many, and yet…not then. Not that day.”

“It haunts you.”

“It’s a lesson that sometimes, no matter what, you can’t save everyone because…because it’s not your story.”

I nodded.

“Let’s both work on celebrating life and not forever mourning death. Because isn’t life the more important piece?”

It was. Without question, it was.

“My consort?” Keres said, which returned my attention to her.

“I’m sorry, I was thinking about⁠—”