She touched the back of her neck and sure enough, she could feel the faintest pinprick of magic there. She quickly dissolved it with her own magic, erasing it from her flesh. She glared at him, unable to contain her rage—and the hurt. He had tracked her. That was an invasion of privacy; it was wrong. “How could you do something like that?”
“Don’t act like a victim.” A muscle on his jaw feathered. “I didn’t trust you, and I was right to not trust you. You’re a viper.”
She reeled back like he had struck her. Bitterness and pain clenched her chest, and she hoped he couldn’t read it all over her face. “You knew you had marked me with a tracking spell the entire time we were together? How could you do that?”
Nikator canted his head, eyes steely, mouth hard. “You do that a lot, you know. Try to flip things so that you’re the victim, when you’re equally as vicious. Does it make you feel better to think of everyone else as the aggressor?”
“That’s not—that’s not it.”
“Oh, then what is it?” He leaned forward on his knees. The fire rose and fell in rhythms, sizzling and popping, and the shadows in the woods darkened until all she could see were the sharp planes of his face. “You can’t pretend to be hurt when you were planning on backstabbing me the entire fucking time. You’re hurt that I put a tracking spell on you before we knew each other that well, when this whole entire time, you’ve been scheming to fuck me and the emperor over? Is that your argument? Really, princess?”
When he phrased it like that, she did sound terrible. And yet, it angered her that he had placed a tracking spell the entire time, regardless of what she had done to him. Regardless that he was right—she had been scheming the entire time.
“You could have taken the tracking spell out a long time ago! When were you planning on telling me?”
“I just did now.” Another muscle ticked in his jaw. “You should be thanking me. I didn’t have to tell you; I could have kept it a secret so I could track you whenever I want.”
“I’m not thanking you for invading my privacy.”
“I should have guarded you in your room all day long.” His nostrils flared and his hands clenched into fists. A maelstrom of emotions flashed over his face too fast for her to read, until only stark rage stood out. His mouth twisted into a sneer. “For fuck’s sake, I should have kept you locked in that fucking room all day long. At least then you wouldn’t have fucked up everything.”
Her cheeks flushed at the crude language. She had grown accustomed to his rude way of speaking—her prior teachers would have been appalled at the merest mention of a curse—and yet it still stung to hear him talking so rudely, so harshly. “Why didn’t you? Why did you give me those moments of privacy?”
For a long moment he didn’t say anything. Then, finally, he snapped, “We’re not doing this right now. You know exactly why I left you alone.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I’m fairly certain I told you.”
Her eyebrows pulled together. Did he? She vaguely recalled he told her he did it because it was hard to control himself around her. But she wanted to hear him say it again, to explain himself, so she said, “I don’t think so.”
He made a low throaty sound but didn’t elaborate. Biyu shifted from her uncomfortable position and stretched her legs out until she was sitting cross-legged—very inappropriate for aprincess, but she didn’t care at the moment. “You were also supposed to go to battle, weren’t you? Why are you here?”
“Plans changed.”
“Because of me.” It wasn’t a question, and his scowl only confirmed it.
Nikator breathed out heavily, his knuckles white where he clutched the dagger’s hilt. He slid it into its sheath a little too hard, his posture stiff. “Princess, go to sleep.”
“We should talk, Nik?—”
“Stop calling me that,” he snapped.
“I … Okay.” Her shoulders slumped and she stared down at her silk shoes. She had been planning on buying boots but had never gotten the chance to. Now it didn’t even matter anymore, since she would be hauled off to the dungeons soon enough.
“Don’t even think about running.”
“I wasn’t,” she lied.
A terse silence fell between them before Nikator began to unfold his bedroll and settle into it. Biyu watched over the fire and then stared at the ground; she doubted he would actually fall asleep before her. Her best bet would be to pretend to sleep, wait a few hours, and then escape. Maybe she could take the horse, too.
Biyu crawled inside the bedroll and pulled the blanket up to her chin. She hated all of this. The night air was sickly sweet and warm, the tension rippling between them was uncomfortable, and she hated the buzzing of insects, the flicker in the bushes, the rustling of animals. She wanted to be somewhere warm and cozy, not here in the middle of nowhere.
She also hated how confusing her emotions were. She was angry at Nikator, but also hurt by him. She wanted to love him, she wanted to embrace him, she wanted things to go back to how they used to be. She wanted him to comfort her in these stressful times. She wanted to have him.
But she had lost him the moment she had aligned with her brother.
Tears stung her eyes and squeezed them shut.
