A muscle worked in Draven’s jaw, and he took a breath, looking out at the mountains.
“I paid a high price for the additional power I wield, and even then, it was only ever Winter mana. When you learn to control your powers, you will have two at your disposal.”
When, he had said. Notif. Notin the incredibly unlikely event that it doesn’t kill you first.
“You believe I can get my mana under control?”
He turned back to face me. “You have survived torture time and time again, Morta Mea. If anyone is stubborn or resilient enough to do the impossible, yes, I believe that it’s you.”
His tone was darker than his words, a small note of bitterness underneath, like he hated those things about me as much as he appreciated them.
Or just hated the reminder of the things I had endured?
I held his gaze, feeling the frustration across the bond as clearly as I read it in the churning shades of teal blue and emerald. As guarded as he was, sometimes I thought I was almost starting to understand him.
“It isn’t torture every time,” I said quietly. “Honestly, it’s better now than it was in the cave.”
Rage replaced the bitterness clouding the air around him. He scoffed, shaking his head. “Which cave?”
The one with the Dragon or the one I had been chained in, he meant. The question was rhetorical, but I felt the answer tumbling from my lips anyway.
“Both of them.”
Frost coated both of his fists, and he broke our gaze, dropping my arm in the process.
“You said you paid a high price for your mana, Draven. Can you honestly not understand why I would do the same?”
“I had no choice?—”
“Neither did I,” I interrupted.
“—but to act alone,” he finished in a thundering tone. “I was alone by circumstance. Youchoseto be alone. Youkeep choosingit. Even now, if I couldn’t feel your mana out of control, couldn’t get it under control, would you have told me about the toll it was taking?”
I swallowed, a lump forming in my throat at the accusation I couldn’t quite deny.
You were my wife.
I still felt the hollow ache in my bones at the way he had used the past tense all those months ago. I knew what he meant when he said I kept choosing to be alone… had known all along that I would set us back. Still, I couldn’t see another way.
Draven protected what belonged to him; he had made that clear. But protecting someone was not the same thing as having a partnership, and we did not exist on equal ground.
Would I have told him that I was struggling if I thought he might lock me further into a cage? Would I have admitted to another weakness when it was all I ever managed to show him?
“I don’t know,” I finally said. “Talking about things isn’t exactly what we do.”
The truth of the Frostgrave Battle hung between us, the story he refused to tell. For that matter, he never offered anything I didn’t pry out of him.
Even with the villagers, he had taken care of every repercussion of the monster attacks without so much as a discussion.
Like so often before, the words were stuck in the air between us. Talking wasn’t what we did; it wasn’t a skill we had. I had built my life on secrets, and he had built his on power, and right now those things felt nearly as insurmountable as the monsters that wouldn’t stop coming for us.
Wasn’t that always the way of things, though? There were no demons quite as hard to defeat as the ones that ravaged your own soul.
“We should get to training before darkness falls,” he said after several stilted heartbeats.
I nodded, even as something in my chest sank just a little more. He was right, though.
We needed to focus on getting my mana under control, not the widening gaps between all the fractured pieces of our souls.
