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Something in the fire pops, then hisses. I clear my throat and try to steer the conversation into safer waters.
“I also got your, uh, little knitting project,” I say.
A strange look crosses Alindra’s face, and for a moment she seems almost embarrassed.
“The little white thing,” I continue, waving my fingers in the air between us like I’m tracing its outline. “What is that anyway?”
She turns to stare at the fire, and it occurs to me that my question might have been rude. I open my mouth to apologize, to tell Alindra it’s none of my business, but she speaks first.
“It’s a sweater,” she replies. “For a baby.”
She swallows hard as the fire spits sparks between us.
“My baby,” she says. “I’m pregnant.”
Chapter13
Alindra
RUNNING
The words fall like stones from my lips, and suddenly the forest is very, very quiet. The sound of water crashing over rocks flows into the empty spaces between us until I feel like I’m drowning in the silence.
Phaedron’s expression is hard and cold, impossible to read. His eyes move over the gutted fish on the fire, then across the flames licking their way up the dead wood I’d stacked. My heart hammers in the back of my throat and, stars help me, this was a bad idea. Why in all the many kingdoms did I decide I had to tell him?
Phaedron pulls his ice-blue eyes from the flames and meets my gaze.
“Are you running from the father?” he finally asks.
The father? Balmyr’s face flashes through my memory, the expression he gave me after I told him about the pregnancy and just before he asked me how I could be so certain the baby was his, and suddenly the idea that Balmyr would care at all about what happens to me, or to the child I might bear, is so absurd that I laugh.
And then, before I even realize what’s happening, I’m crying. Sobs choke out the words I might have said in my own defense and my vision blurs, until I’m a miserable wreck of angry tears breaking down in front of two gutted trout on the fire and a man I’ve only just met.
I clench my hands into fists and grit my teeth together. I said I was done crying over Balmyr, damn it. I swore he wasn’t worth the salt of my tears.
Something warm wraps around my shoulders. Phaedron’s cloak. I stop myself before I wipe my face across the soft, thick fabric.
“Here,” Phaedron says.
His voice is as soft as his cloak. I glance up and see he’s offering me his handkerchief. When I take it, he stands and wanders toward the river as if he’s got some pressing business with the water and the stones. I gulp for breath and wipe my eyes, trying to think of how to put the story into words.
But in the end, it’s a simple story.
“He’s married,” I say when Phaedron returns to poke at the fire beneath the fish with a long willow branch. “Balmyr. The father, I mean.”
I swallow hard. Phaedron’s face is carefully neutral, like he’s not going to risk a reaction to my words. Probably because I have enough emotion for both of us.
“I didn’t know it at the time,” I say. A sound comes out of my lips that’s almost a laugh. “I didn’t know much about him at all. He’s the royal archery instructor, and, well.”
I fall silent again. The fire hisses and spits as it licks the trout, filling in the unspoken parts of my story.
“They say it takes a thousand nights to kindle a new life,” I continue, in a softer voice. “We had seven. When I told him, he—” I swallow hard. Start again. “He said I couldn’t be certain it was his.”
My voice sounds like it’s being choked. I clear my throat.
“But, it has to be his,” I finally say. “Because that’s all I ever had, those seven—”
I close my mouth. I can’t even say seven nights. Balmyr never spent the night with me. We had an afternoon in the storage room, a frantic hour behind the bushes on the far end of the archery range, a few minutes of gasping and panting in an empty closet off the ballroom. It had all seemed unbearably exciting at the time, like the prelude to what was destined to become a symphony of pleasure.
