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Lin felt herself going red. She always did when the Prince of Castellane was mentioned; it was very inconvenient.
Has he been hurt? IS HE HURT? Is the Prince all right?
The Prince had given it to her personally, and she could not help but see his face every time she opened the pages.)
“Silla, don’t you see, that is what makes it strange for me. These things are private to Conor. He would not want me to know them.” “He called me by a name that wasn’t mine,” Silla said.
“You pretend to foolishness,” he said. “It is your armor.” She raised her head at that and looked at him, her blue eyes so dark they seemed black in the low light. “We all have armor,” she said. “As if you do not have yours, Kel Anjuman.” He choked on the words he could not say. I am the Prince’s armor. I cannot have my own.
“Mayesh represents what we are,” said Mariam. “You represent what we can be. Our strength.”
And Mariam’s faith did not weigh Lin down; it was not something for her to carry. Rather, it had always carried her.
Lin could not imagine the Prince seeming sheepish or unsure of himself. Two boys, raised in the same room, side by side, so close in looks, and yet so entirely different.
She would not show that she was anxious, she told herself as he came closer. She would not let him intimidate her. She had experience of princes. They were just men, like any other men.
His voice. She had forgotten his voice. How it was rough and soft at the same time, like the lap of a cat’s tongue.
Without a word, he reached out, took the empty glass from her hand, and set it down on a small table nearby.
🥵
“Relax,” he murmured. “I know you can dance.”
He hates me, Lin thought dismally, and nearly stumbled, the next step of the dance catching her off guard. But Conor steadied her, setting his free hand at her waist, his long fingers curling around so they touched the bare skin at her back. She heard him catch his breath. His fingers were wands of fire against her skin. She thought she had never felt anything so intensely. Save when he kissed you. When you ached for him. When you would have let him do anything he wanted.
I do not have the luxury of introspection. What matters is what the Charter Council thinks of me, what the people of Castellane think of me, and what our foes abroad think of me. What you will soon discover about being a leader, Goddess, is that you are only a vessel for your people’s hopes and fears, their dreams and desperations. What you want does not matter.”
But what could drive him to this? In her bewilderment, she forgot to look at him covertly, staring at him openly. At the silver circlet binding his brow, at the shadows beneath his eyes, the hollows below his cheekbones. The feathers at his collar brushed his jaw like a lover’s kisses.
“Surely you are not concerned for me?” At that, he did smile—a savage wolf’s smile. “For you, no. For him, perhaps. Has anyone warned him you tear princes into little pieces?”
He drew her a little nearer, his lips close to her ear. She breathed in the scent of him. Skin, leather, musk. “You know,” he whispered, “I do not have to ask.”
His skin looked as if it would be soft to touch, fine-grained as silk, but his body was hard and lean, doubtless made so by years of riding and hunting. And sword-training.
“The Exilarch—” “Ah, yes,” he said. “Your preferred Prince.”
He grinned. It was a hard flash, like a knife in the dark. “You’re angry at me,” he said. “Good.”
“And you think I would tell you, if he did?” said Kel, his voice carefully neutral. Conor winked at him.
‘They are trying to prevent me from becoming what I am.’ ”
“Gasquet is a doctor, and he’s drunk all the time,” Prince Conor pointed out. “Yes,” said Lin. “But he is a very, very bad doctor.
She heard him suck in his breath and jerked her hand back. “Did I hurt you?” she asked, worried. “No.” There was a strangled something in his voice that made her look up at him. He was staring at her, his eyes hot and silver, his white teeth sunk into his lower lip. His hair was a riot of dark softness around his face, and she wanted to brush it back so badly, she felt it as an ache. A hard ache deep in her belly.
When he spoke at last, his voice sounded as if it had been dragged over gravel. “How serious is it, then, Goddess?” She felt dizzy. “How serious—?” “My burn.” “It will heal.” She touched it again, lightly; saw the color darken around his pupils. “But…how odd for a spill of candle wax that it should be in the shape of a hand. Look, here is the palm, and here the fingers—”
“I would rather stay here.”
Inside, the Prince is watching a red-haired girl read a book with the expression of a starving man staring at a plate of food.
Did you truly never realize that the magic you stole runs in your blood now, and that you would pass it on to him? Your boy, your pretty Prince? Perhaps you understood, a little. Perhaps that is why you insisted he have a Királar. A Sword Catcher.”
“I don’t want Artal to be my first. I want it to be you.”
A sense of pleasure in her pleasure, he thought, or a pride that he could please her;
“Perhaps this is why the Ashkar of Castellane need a Goddess to lead them. Perhaps you were born for such a time as this.”
His hand brushed back hair from her face. “Look at me, sweetheart,” he said. “Can you do that?”
She had never seen him look like that before. Not—afraid.
“I need to know, Lin. Did he hurt you?”
“I should never have let you come here alone,” he said. “I wanted you in the square. I wanted you to see me with Anjelica. I wanted you to be—”
He closed the few steps between them, caught her face between his hands. His thumb brushed along her cheekbone, unraveling something inside her, like Mariam unpicking a row of stitches. “When I found you on the floor, I thought you were dead,” he said roughly. “And I realized what that would mean. If you were hurt, even a scratch, because of something I’d demanded you do—” He closed his eyes as if against the vision of something he could not bear.
“Conor.” She laid her hands on his chest, felt his muscles jump under her touch. He looked at her almost in disbelief. “Not everything has to be orders, demands. I am asking you to trust me.” “I already trust you,” he said. “Then trust yourself.”
“I have never trusted myself,” he said. “But I think, if you did—I could.”
she brushed her lips against his cheek—a quick kiss that was barely a kiss at all. She drew back to see that his eyes had darkened, the gray almost swallowed up by the blackness of his pupils. His hand curled in her hair, catching at the strands, letting them slide through his fingers. “Lin…” he breathed. “Don’t do that.”
“You,” he said,
“I asked you because when I am not with you, Lin Caster, I feel as if some part of me has been torn away. I feel as if I am bleeding, insensible with the pain of a wound no one can see save myself. When you are with me…It is the only time I feel whole.”
“Ah—Gods—Lin,” he gasped, and she felt a momentary triumph, that she had stolen his words, reduced him to incoherence.
“It’s all right,” she whispered. “Love me. I want you to.”
and she could understand why people fought and died and wrote poetry about this.
“Don’t.” She stepped away from him; he was gazing at her incredulously, arrested mid-motion, as if he had meant to reach for her, to draw her with him, back to the Armory where he would have no problem whatsoever pretending that he did not know her, because nothing about what had just happened was unusual for him.
Conor opened his eyes. Tell me, Kel thought. Tell me. I will fix it for you. Like I fixed it with Prosper Beck. Like I’m trying to fix it now. Tell me, just tell me, so I can understand you again.
“I want a different life than the one I have.”
“You could tell them I am to be your husband and insist on following you wherever you go.”
Why am I not happy?”
To strip someone of their faith and their people, of the very fabric of who they are, solely because of who they love, seems to Lin a great injustice in itself. How can a people who have been forced into exile inflict exile on their own?
