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But now it just seems pathetic.
“Anyway,” I continue, picking up the thread of my sad little story and carrying it to completion. “That’s when I found out he’s married, with three little ones already.”
I stare down at the fire. The scent of roasting fish carries through the air, trailing the smoke, and some part of me marvels that I can still feel hungry. After Balmyr told me about his wife, I thought I’d never feel anything again.
Phaedron makes a soft little sound with his lips, and I glance up. He’s still staring at the fish as if their preparation requires his undivided attention, but there’s something gentle and sad in his expression.
“I won’t pretend I know what you’re going through,” Phaedron says, in a voice that’s almost a whisper. “But I do know that getting rejected by the woman I loved was the most painful experience of my life.”
He looks up at me, those pale eyes gleaming with reflected fire.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” he says.
My heart does a strange little dance deep inside my chest and my brain melts. Several comments slingshot around the inside of my skull, fromwoman? what woman?tomore painful than losing your arm?Thankfully, I manage to keep my mouth shut.
Phaedron’s lips twist into something like a smile, and he turns back to the fire like he’s talking to the fish he’s roasting.
“Her name was Shenarah,” Phaedron says. “She was high-born, sophisticated, wild.”
His lips curl, and an absurd bolt of jealousy twists deep inside my chest.
“She’d come to the World’s End as a trekker, and she said she wanted to experience everything. The cold, the colors of the void, the depths of the forest. My stories weren’t enough. She wanted to see it for herself.”
Phaedron adjusts the green spit holding the fish, and the smile fades from his lips.
“So, I showed her everything,” he says. “Everything I could. And in the process, I fell in love with her.”
He shakes his head like he’s trying to dislodge the memory.
“It was a crazy, frantic feeling. It consumed my entire life. I spent weeks courting her, begging her. I was so convinced that she was the one thing I needed to make my life complete.”
He falls silent, and the fire murmurs like it understands.
“She finally agreed to make a life with me,” Phaedron continues. “So we went to ask for her family’s blessing. I thought it was just a formality. Low-born, high-born, didn’t those distinctions cease to matter after we were all locked in the Lands Below?”
Oh. My heart feels like a stone as I realize I know exactly where this story is going. Phaedron shrugs, then runs his hand through his pale hair.
“Her father gave her a choice,” he finally says. “He wouldn’t stop her from marrying me, this low-born, feral, nobody from the very edge of the Lands Below. But, if she married me, then all she would have was… me.”
His voice fades, and my breath catches in my throat. I understand the part he hasn’t spoken. Her family would have disowned her, this high-born woman who’d captured Phaedron’s heart. She could marry him, sure, but she would have to give up everything else. She would have to abandon her position in his world.
Stars, his world sounds just like my world. I think of the beautiful ladies of the court, like Lady Arryn Damoira, the favorite to marry Prince Folwynn. With their gowns and their elegant balls, their elaborate jewelry and their summer estates on the ocean, their freedom to travel in and out of the palace like so many delicate, colorful butterflies. Who in either of our worlds would ever give that up?
But the answer comes to me with a jolt. Phaedron pulls the fish off the fire and sets them on a flat stone, then blows on his fingers. I shiver from deep inside his cloak as I watch him fan his hand over the meal he’s just cooked.
Who wouldn’t choose him? Phaedron’s beautiful, but it’s more than that. He’s kind and capable, this stranger from the Lands Below, with a gentleness that’s so at odds with his strength and beauty it still takes me by surprise.
And he listens to me. He clearly has no experience with horses, but he was willing to trust me, to follow my lead, and even to steal for me. My plan to lead him through the anomaly went up in flames at our feet, and I stole the very magic from his body, but still, he treats me with kindness and respect.
What would it feel like to have a man like that love you? To have him pledge his loyalty to you, to offer you everything that he has? I try to swallow the lump growing in the back of my throat. Wouldn’t Phaedron’s love be worth more than anything the Lands Below could offer?
Phaedron turns back to me with a frown.
“Alindra,” he begins. “There’s something you should know.”
Panic sears through my chest, bringing with it the absolute certainty that Phaedron is about to tell me he’s married, that Shenarah changed her mind, or that he met someone else, or—
“You can’t go to the Lands Below,” he says.
