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Tait’s voice was low and dark when he spoke again. “Fish is done.”

“Tait?”

He ignored me and held out one palm. “Hand over your leaf.”

“I did not mean offense,” I whispered. “I merely wanted to know more about you.”

“Well, don’t!” he snapped. Tait snatched my waxy leaf and slapped two small fish on top of it, then shoved it back into my hands.

For a moment we ate in silence until the boil of tension felt as though it were peeling my skin from my bones.

“All right, I’m afraid I lied,” I said. “I can’t leave it there. If we’re speaking true, I don’t think it’s fair that you constantly keep me spinning this way. You’re almost tolerable, then you lash out as though I’ve stabbed you in the ribs. You told me to leave you be on the ship. Fine enough, I tried. Then we shipwrecked, hardly my fault. Every day since, you seem concerned for my well-being, you cared enough to soothe my heart after the tree, and just now, I thought we were getting on fine. But whatever I said to upset you about the day Thorvald died, I now cannot avoid it in the future because you will not tell me what it is.”

Tait stared at me for a pause, lips parted. Then, in the next heartbeat, tossed what was left of his fish in the fire and stood. “I’m going to sleep.”

“You’re really just going to storm off?”

His words came with such sharpness that each barb seemed to slash over my skin. “No doubt you’d find it entertaining, but I have no desire to recount the memories of the day my father began hating me. Certainly not to you. Goodnight.”

I watched him recline in a narrow alcove near the mouth of our small sanctuary. He rolled away, barring me out, and I thought the final piece of my heart finally cracked.

We had to survive together, but we did not have to be anything more.

I had to accept that we never would be.

21

The Heartwalker

A rock dug into my shoulder, causing a deep ache to bloom through my arm and neck. I didn’t move, couldn’t find the desire. My pulse still raced; it felt as though I’d spent the whole of the night sprinting along the shoreline. Nightmares of a thousand hands clawing at my skin, suffocating me beneath a cloud of darkness, plagued my sleep. No mistake, talk of the past stirred more haunts from their prisons in my head.

When I turned away from Mira last night, for a horrifying moment, I considered what it might be like to offer something, anything, to explain a bit more of myself. To give more of myself.

But if I gave in, what damage would follow? The stares, the pity, or worse, she might want more, might accept it all, and I might let her. How long would it be before I could not resist the cravings for violence and turn on her the way Harald turned on me?

He be just like his old daj. Boy takes pride in spillin’ blood.

Whispers from the Ever Crew lived in my skull, buried deep in my knowing. Moments when men watched me slaughter those we attacked under the king’s banner. Watched me kill a bit more than others, hurt folk a little longer.

I knew it as much as the men—there was a rotten part of me and one day it would spill out.

The thought of my cruelty falling on Mira sickened me to the point I tasted bile.

If I kept pushing her away, soon enough she would come to detest me, avoid me. She would be better for it.

“Maj?” Mira’s voice broke the silence of the cavern.

Every bone protested when I shifted positions.

“Maj! Gods, Maj!”

Through bleary vision, I caught sight of Mira racing out of the cavern and into the pale dawn.

Maj?

I bolted upright. Did Mira see her mother? Gods, had Erik found us? Had he brought with him the glamour fae king and queen?

I scrambled to my feet, cursing the stiffness in my limbs, and hurried after the princess onto the beach. Mira stood fifteen paces away, practically clawing at a tree. “Maj, please say it’s you.”