“Clouds rolled in while you slept, and the wind is blowing south. Besides, soon we will be followed in earnest no matter what we do, and it might be several more days before we can risk a fire. I thought it best to have a small one while we could.”
The Prince sat for a moment, wrapped in his blanket, and then with a sudden deliberateness managed to stand. Tomaz looked at him quizzically. Determinedly, the Prince walked forward and sat down at the fire across from the big man. He heard Tomaz sigh.
“So much hardness,” he rumbled sadly. “So much effort to cover up your pain instead of letting it flow as it is meant to.”
“I’m not in pain,” the Prince said firmly. He was proud his voice didn’t shake.
“You are in pain,” Tomaz contradicted with the same indescribable sadness in his voice, “and that makes me frightened for you.”
“You do not need to be frightened for me,” the Prince said, his voice formal and stiff. “But your concern is noted, and I thank you.”
Tomaz stood and rounded the fire. The Prince watched him out of his peripheral vision as he was trained to do. Watch without giving the impression of watching, his sister Dysuna had always told him. The big man stopped next to the Prince and lowered himself to the ground to sit next to him. The Prince tensed as if expecting a blow, and the move did not go unnoticed.
“Too much hardness can kill you, princeling,” the Exile said.
“Hardness does not kill you,” the Prince responded, reciting by rote what he had been told since birth. “Weakness is death, feeling is death. Life happens to you, and you cannot change what has happened. You harden yourself, and eventually you feel nothing—and then you cannot be challenged. You cannot be defeated. You cannot—”
His throat seized up and he broke off.
“You don’t think it is hard to be weak?” Tomaz asked quietly.
The Prince opened his mouth to respond but shut it again with a snap.
“You do not agree that it is difficult to be weak? It was difficult for me to learn to be weak, that much I can tell you.”
The man was a small mountain. He—weak? The idea waslaughable.
“You are not weak,” the Prince scoffed, “don’t think that I can be caught off guard by simple lies.”
He recognized that he was being surly and curt for no reason, that his good humor of barely an hour ago had disappeared. Why was he acting this way?
“What need have I to lie to you?” Tomaz asked.
“Because you’re an Exile,” the Prince snapped back, rising to his feet. “You’ve rebelled against your true rulers, you’ve sworn to overthrow the very Empire that provides safety and stability to the common man. You’re a criminal! Criminals lie.”
The Prince moved swiftly to the opposite side of the fire, and looked out into the thicket of trees, not wanting to see the Exile.
“A criminal who has saved your life,” Tomaz said.
A chill ran up the Prince’s back. What was he trying to say? Was he trying to blackmail the Prince? With a surge of adrenaline, he spun and looked down at the big man, still seated by the fire, and drew himself up to his full height, expecting Tomaz to be sitting there with a sinister smile, waiting to capitalize on his debt.
But what the Prince saw was a bluff, honest, kind man, and it completely deflated his anger and righteousness. Suddenly, his vision was hazy, and he had to look down at the ground.
His siblings would never have come to his rescue even once. Tomaz had saved him three times now, once even nursed him back to health in the middle of the Empire where he was a wanted man.
Help is a sign of weakness, weakness a sign of unworthiness. Mother would never have….
His mind blanked out before he could finish the treasonous thought. He began to count the leaves under his feet and narrowed his hearing in on the cracking and popping sounds of the fire, unable to face his thoughts and so seeking mercy in thesimplicity of sensation.
“You are not weak because you need help. You are not weak because you are grateful,” Tomaz said. The Prince shrugged as if he could throw off the voice like it were an irritating fly.
“I know I am not weak,” he said.
“You are not listening to me,” the big voice said. “You are not weak because you need help. You are not weak because you are grateful.”
“You already said that. I know this. I’ve already acknowledged my debt.”
But the Prince couldn’t look Tomaz in the face. He continued to stare at the ground, trying to count leaves, trying to calm his mind, trying to stop himself from thinking. Thinking and feeling.
