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Rowan shook his head. He took the torch from her and set it carefully on the cave’s stone floor, where it flickered and licked at the walls. “And you, Blanchette… you are good. So very good. God, sometimes I look at you…” The words stuck to the roof of his mouth. He swallowed and exhaled a long, shaky breath, then pressed on. “Sometimes I look at you, and I can hardly believe you’re real,” he confessed. “Generations pass without a person like you coming into the world.”
She smiled, then gazed down at the torch. The only sounds were the thundering waterfall, the hiss of the flame, and Rowan’s uneven breaths.
He was making mistakes. Here, in this cave, and back at the castle. It wasn’t like him. Rowan knew he was distracted… but that was okay. He’d been raised on war and bloodshed. For the first time in his life, he was no longer a soldier. He was simply a man, who craved a life free from bloodshed.
A life with Blanchette Winslowe.
“They weren’t supposed to die.” He held his breath again. Filled his lungs with the musky air, yearning for courage.
He felt her eyes on his skin like an actual touch. “Would you have spared them? Had they not escaped and drowned… had my brother not been mutilated by those monsters… would you have allowed my family to live?”
Something told him that everything balanced on his next words. Their weight could either crush them both or be a stepping stone to something better.
She wrapped his chin with her fingers when he looked away. “Please, Rowan… I must know.”
His fingers enveloped her wrist, encircling it completely. “Yes, I would have spared them,” he whispered and stepped closer. They were inches apart—a kiss away. “I would have had them exiled. I wouldn’t have harmed your mother and Willem.”
“And my father?”
Rowan sighed, then knelt on the stone ground. He picked up the torch, feeling the heat wash over his face.
* * *
Suddenly, it seemed very stupid to be alone with Rowan in this cave, in near darkness, where the waterfall would drown out any scream she might make.
He stood. He was impossibly tall. Dressed in only a simple tunic wet from the waterfall, he towered above her. She thought of his Black Wolf armor—the snarling helm, crude plate, and shining pommel. Then another image floated into her mind: Rowan Dietrich and his daughter by the fire, the soft lull of his voice filling the hall, Smoke slumbering beside them. She’d seen another side of Rowan—one she’d only glimpsed at in transient moments.
This was a man she could grow to love.
“My story is not a fairy tale,” Rowan finally said, walking away from Blanchette and around the cave, holding up the torch so it chased away the shadows. “I’d loved your father once like a brother. I followed him into countless battles. My sword helped him keep his crown, and his faith in me kept my loyalty. But every summer cools and becomes winter. Everything has its season. Everything changes, for better or for worse.”
Blanchette swallowed hard. The blood rushed in her ears, and she heard the erratic beat of her heart. It thundered as he spoke, a grim ambience to his words and the cave’s hovering darkness.
Rowan gave a sad smile, the shadows accenting the hollow between his eyes. “A wise man once said, ‘You go no place by accident.’”
“Which wise man was that?”
“Your father.”
It didn’t sound like something he’d have said. Not that man she’d known. And not the man he’d become.
“Does that surprise you?”
“It does,” she admitted. He was holding the torch next to their faces; she felt the heat on her cheeks, and when he spoke, the wafts from his breath made the flame twitch. “The man I knew as my father was… cynical. I think he hated Norland. At times, I thought he hated me.”
Blanchette moved past him, her heart beating like a rabbit’s, and signaled him to follow her. They moved toward the very back of the cave, which, as she already knew, would have no wall. It narrowed into a space they had to navigate single file.
She felt the walls pressing close, felt the heat of the torch as it waved and flickered against the stone. The steady rush of the waterfall surrounded them. The wall curved and turned, and the shadows played a trick on her for a split second. She saw her sister, Isadora, slipping through the secret cavern just before her, her hair tumbling down to the small of her waist. She heard her laughter too—a rich, lively sound that brought light to the shadowed darkness.
Isadora had taken after their mother with an exotic beauty that was all her own. Demrovian descent, Blanchette thought. It was only fitting she’d sit on the throne there. She could imagine Isadora now getting into all kinds of trouble.
Blanchette frowned. She hardly knew her sister anymore. She was a stranger—a foreigner, the ruler of a country she’d never visited.
She remembered the letter she’d sent to Isadora. I shall have to send another right away. But what would she write now?
What is the truth?
Her nerves and the torch’s heat brought sweat to the back of her neck. “Sorry, my thoughts got away with me,” she murmured, then continued forward and through the winding walls. Soon, they opened up, and Blanchette finally took a breath.
