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Loren righted his lapels and made no reply.
Korwahk was very hot.
And very brown.
Thus, no reply was necessary.
Lahn didn’t look at him when he went on, “He does not come because he’s angry with you. When Cora was torn from him, he had no control.”
Only then did Lahn turn his attention to Loren.
“When I lost my Circe, it was my doing.”
This was interesting, of course.
Loren didn’t wish to hear it, however.
“Have you been there?” he asked instead.
Lahn shook his head.
“You should go,” Loren stated shortly. “It’s most illuminating.”
“Circe has told me much. It sounds hideous.”
Loren thought about the turn around Satrine’s…
No, Maxine’s world that Valentine had treated him to the night before.
And Lahn was right, even if he’d never experienced it.
It was hideous.
“She was cursed if she told you,” Lahn reminded him. “And you saw today how that would have come about.”
“In all we’ve recently learned, that didn’t escape me,” Loren returned.
“It is a marvel she did so well in this world.”
“Maxine is cunning.”
“Clever,” Lahn corrected.
She was both, and he admired her for it.
“We’ll agree to disagree.”
Lahn shook his head and shared, “I will warn you, Valentine is not happy with you. And she is not a woman to cross, especially when she is one of the only beings on two worlds who can get the woman you love back. If you let her go, she could be lost to you. Forever.”
It felt like his neck was gripped in a vise.
To alleviate the pain, Loren let out a breath.
And then he said, “I appreciate your counsel—”
“Circe was carrying our twins when she spirited herself from me. While she was gone, every day waking was a new death that she was not at my side,” Lahn told him. And with impeccable timing, he changed course. “She isn’t going to die like them.”
Loren felt his innards twist.
“You don’t have to shield yourself from your father’s fate,” Lahn continued. “That fate has been played. Yours is your own.”
He held the king’s eyes.
And he told him the truth.
“I bring death.”
Lahn shook his head. “You have killed for your country. The loss of your mother and sister were the whim of the gods. It is not the same thing.”
Loren turned his gaze out the window.
Lahn started to the door, saying, “You can remain in this shadowland for the whole of your life, it is your choice.” He stopped at the door. “But you know shadows are just a play of the light. No matter what you do, you will have to live, experience loss, pain, disappointment. There is no way to protect yourself from it.” Lahn lifted a hand and stabbed a long finger his way. “But it is up to you if you experience love and laughter.” He dropped his hand and finished, “The man I saw sparring with her was alive. Alive in a life filled with fire and challenge and amusement and love. This man is a shell. Remain a shell or let her banish your shadows. It is your choice. And you make that choice now. She could not wait for you to come to her. She is downstairs.”
And with that, he disappeared out the door.
Loren stared at the empty doorway, thinking of the heartrending despair Satrine…no Maxine had poured into his neck whilst they were in his window seat in the next room, undone because she could never tell him who she was and how she came to him.
This took him to thoughts of how she was brought to his world, not of her choice. A world so different from her own, she could never have imagined it in her wildest dreams. Yet she found a way to navigate it even having been ripped from all she knew. Her mother imprisoned. Her father forcing her to woo and win and sleep with a man…
He could think no further on that, for it had, since he’d learned all of this, frequently occurred to him a number of disastrous scenarios of what might have befallen her if it was not he she was set to woo.
And then there was confronting the image of herself.
Her twin.
Valentine had shown Loren the him of the other world.
It had shaken him.
What shook him more was Valentine telling him something he knew.
“He is not to find his other half. She isn’t his to have. He’ll never know why. But mark this, my stubborn soldier, he’ll feel her loss. He won’t know what’s missing, but he’ll feel it in every breath until the last he takes in his life.”
Rattled, Loren had watched himself drinking an ale in a pub with the twins of Marlow and Middy, Holt and Croft around him, all while they talked, and jested and intermittently glanced at a strange box with moving images on it.
“Unless she comes home and misses you and finds that the other you lives close. Then she’ll discover the truth. The you of this world is not you, but he is rather amazing,” the green witch had finished.
