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I realize he mistook my meaning. For some reason, I feel the need to correct him. “Our parents enjoyed a friendship that saw Kipp and I raised akin to brother and sister.”

“You meet with me to protect him?” he correctly guesses, and I add shrewd to the ever-growing list of Vanni’s traits.

He speaks into the silence that follows his question. “You know of his father?”

“I do.”

“Not the mercenary.”

“Nay, not the mercenary.” I pause. “But the very man you serve.”

His shoulders rise and fall, and for a horrifying moment, I wonder if I’ve misjudged the situation entirely. If he didn’t know. If he was sent out here unwittingly, like the others, to check on Kipp. How could I blurt out one of my most precious secrets as if it were nothing?

“Aldwine has never told anyone before. Rumor of it would have spread far and wide.”

I could weep with relief. “And he’s told no one now, except my family. Kipp does not recognize the king as his father.”

To clear up his confusion, I condemn myself even further. “As I said, his mother and my family were quite close. In town, none other than my grandmother, my father, and me know of Kipp’s true origin.”

He allowed me two questions, but I need only one.

“What do you want of him?”

Vanni considers what to tell me. So I share another secret.

“I have been taught not to trust those in power, and you, the king’s Curia Commander, are such a man.”

The slight lift of his lips on one side shows Vanni’s amusement at my words. They are not meant to be amusing.

“And yet,” I continue, “I told you a most treasured secret, one I have little right to tell.”

“Because you realized I knew it already.”

I shift on the hard rock, bothered less by the discomfort—I’ve sat on this very stone for hours and hours—than by Vanni’s ever-present gaze. Desire, I know, is both natural and necessary. Even so, I’ve never felt more than a twinge of it before.

Yet now, without herbs or stones or words of encouragement or any of the other enticements we use, my body screams for his touch. The longer he looks at me so, the more I wish for it.

“Perhaps.”

“Very well.” He looks out at the increasingly turbulent sea. “You’ll learn soon enough of the events unfolding in the south. Your honesty for my own.”

He sits up and leans slightly toward me. We aren’t touching, but it wouldn’t take much to change that—he need only move slightly forward.

“You know of the fighting along the borders?”

I nod. “Of course.”

Though the Terese River has separated Edingham from Meria since the Treaty of Loigh, formed nearly thirty years after the two kingdoms split, it does little to quell the unrest that has plagued the borders.

“And of the attack on Saitford?”

News of the border town’s trouble has reached us. Although violence along the Meria-Edingham border is not a new occurrence. “Aye.”

Murwood might lie on the north side of the Loigh Mountains, apart from either kingdom, but ships bring not only cargo but news. We know much of what happens in both Meria and Edingham.

“They say a Highlander set fire to it,” I say, “killing a mother and her children in the blaze.”

Vanni is no longer smiling. “More than one mother and her child. The fire, set in the dead of night, claimed nearly half of those who lived in Saitford.”