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“I learned it in my training.” Something in his voice was distant and sad, and it brought back to mind what he had said in the woods when we were being attacked, what he had shown them.
“As a Huntsman?” I asked, cautiously.
His features were like solid granite now, and he barely got out a small dip of his head in confirmation.
“Why is that such a bad thing that you felt like you couldn’t even tell me?” My voice was quiet. I didn’t want him to shut me out again, but I also didn’t understand why he would keep his job a secret from me. “Aren’t they pretty elite?” I pushed when he didn’t respond. “Isn’t that something to be proud of?”
His shoulders tensed while he dug around in his bag for something before finally pulling out the medallion he had shown the wraiths. Shaking his head, he met my probing gaze with his own somber one.
“There was a time I thought so.”
24
Edrich
Igrasped the symbol of my pledge to the Huntsmen, my fingers running mechanically over the sword and shield that were meant to symbolize the balance between the protection and power we had to offer, while I considered her question.
“How much do you know about the Huntsman?” I asked.
“Not much,” she admitted. “Just that it’s a band of highly trained soldiers.”
“Mercenaries,” I corrected, in a dark tone.
“Isn’t that… basically the same thing?” Her brow furrowed.
It would have been bad enough if she had understood what I was, but having to explain it to her was a thousand times worse. She looked up at me, her eyes wary but questioning, and her skin still flashing between muted and shimmering colors with every breath.
I pinched the bridge of my nose between two fingers.
“Sometimes, it feels that way. And then sometimes, mercenaries take the jobs no one wants to talk about—the ones the soldiers are too honorable to take.” This was already creeping into territories I had no intention of telling anyone about, let alone her.It’s bad enough that I have to live with the things I’ve done without parading them around.
“But… you’re honorable.” She said it like she was confused, because clearly I fit in that former category. Like it would never even occur to her that a person can be more than one thing, or that maybe I wasn’t everything she thought I was.
For some reason, it made me unreasonably angry. At her. At myself.At life.
“You asked why I didn’t want to tell you, Lina. This is why!” I threw my hands up, my temper overpowering the sense I had to stay quiet in these woods. “You’ve been alive just as long as I have, but you let yourself be blind to what other people have no choice but to see.”
She sat up straighter, her eyes boring into me with accusation. “Or maybe that’s just a convenient excuse for you to keep me in the dark whenever you feel like it. How can you expect me to know something I’ve never been told?”
“Maybe I would have told you if I felt like you could handle it,” I snapped.
I wanted to take the words back as soon as they left my lips, even before she turned a deep, glittering red, nearly as dark as she had been when the wraiths attacked.Rage.
“Oh, you were worried about my handling of it?” Her voice was harsher than I’d ever heard it. “Like you were worried about how Ihandledyou up and leaving without a word? Like you were worried about how Ihandledmy mother’s death? I’ve seen the letters you send your family, Edrich. I know you’re perfectly capable of stringing more than five words together on a sheet of paper, but that’s all I warranted on either of those occasions?”
I fought to keep my face from coloring with a mixture of anger and shame, because there was so much she didn’t know or understand… but then, she wasn’t wrong, either.
“I had to leave.” She parroted back the words on the first note I ever left her.“Four words that explained exactly nothing.I’m sorry for your loss.” She sounded even more enraged at the note I had sent to her mother’s funeral.“Five words you would say to a stranger, about a stranger, not to your best friend about her mother, the woman who made you pastries and adored you like her own son!” Tears pooled in her eyes, a few escaping down her cheeks.
And for some reason, that made the anger win out over shame. Maybe I resented her for being able to ignore her feelings when I felt everything in such stark, unrelenting clarity, or maybe I just wanted to see her for a change when the barriers were down, to know I wasn’t the only one suffering.
“Well, at least you finally said something real,” I said. “How long have you been holding that in, Lina, shoving it down and pretending it didn’t exist?”
Somehow, it felt like that last question meant more than my brain was willing to admit it did.
“You want to hear something real?” Her teal eyes pierced mine with intensity. “You. Left. Me.”
And some part of me had thought it hadn’t really bothered her until she hurled it at me now.
