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“What did he do?” she said again. “What did you do? What do you know?” She pushed on his chest. “What have you done?”
He took hold of her wrists and held them in the air. “Your father is a traitor, Cassia.”
She tore her hands free. “No.”
“Aye.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“I delivered messages between him and the rebels.”
She shook her head harder. “No. Whatever else my father is, he is loyal. Utterly loyal. He has always been loyal—”
“To you?”
She jerked away as if struck.
Sounds of revelry poured through the window. Laughter and happy shouts, lutes and fiddles, the cries of wine sellers.
Máel drew a letter from a pouch on his belt and held it up. Her father’s seal dangled off it.
She turned her face away.
“Read it, if you wish,” he said. “But you do not need to, do you? You need only use your clever mind. Follow the contours of the thing.” He stepped closer. “Think what you know, Cassia. Not with your head, with your heart. Ask yourself: who is my father, when all his bets have been called in, and he does not have what is required?”
She took a great, gasping breath and spun away, limping unsteadily to the wall. Staring out the window, she wrapped an arm around her waist, sucking air into her lungs.
Her father’s words came rushing back to her. I will get out of this.
“I,” not “we.”
Máel was right. For her father, the threat Máel posed, the danger of his knowledge, had been stronger than concern for his daughter.
In some corner of her mind, she presumed her father planned to return, perhaps with overwhelming force. Mayhap believed that he had enough time to plot such a thing and rescue her.
An unwarranted assumption, but she had to believe in that at least.
Nonetheless, he had not taken the simplest route to rescue. He had not called the hue and cry. He had not handed over the sword. And he had very much ridden away, leaving her behind. It had been more important to safeguard the sword and protect his treachery than to protect his daughter.
Fear over love.
On those scales, she had not weighed heavily at all.
Máel wrapped his arms low around her waist. He kissed her head, then her ear, her cheek, her neck.
She leaned into his body, the only solid thing in her tumbling world.
“It is over, Cassia,” he said. “You do not have to do anything more. Stay here, where you are safe.” His arms fell away and he strode to the door.
She turned. “What are you doing?”
He looked back, his blue eyes cold and resolute. “I’m going to hunt your father down.”
She pressed the heels of her hands to her forehead, breathing so fast the room whirled. Then she flung her hands down.
“Stop.”
Máel stilled, a hand on the door.
