“First, I need to apologize to you for the other morning, changeling. I have no right to command you. I have no right to do many things.” He slid a forefinger over the rim of his cup. “These past few months have… not brought out the best in me.”
“Apology accepted.” His candor cooled the heat building behind my eyes. “And second?”
This time, his silence lasted even longer. He sat upright, grasped the jug of mead, and rolled it restively between his palms. “She was angry with me the other night.”
“Who?” My thoughts churned slow. “Eala?”
He nodded.
“Why? What did you do to offend her?”
“You,” he said.
My hand jerked, sloshing golden liquid over my fingers. The mead suddenly tasted sour in my mouth.
That wasn’t right. Eala had explicitly encouraged my dalliance with Rogan.
“But she—” I stopped myself a breath too late. I couldn’t tell Rogan that Eala had practically commanded me to bed him. He was already skeptical of her motivations—if I told him this, it would destroy what little faith he had left in their betrothal. But what if I’d already betrayed his confidence by keeping the information to myself? I took a deep pull from my glass, then held it out to be refilled. I didn’t know what else to do.
“How did she find out?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He scrubbed golden curls off his face. “She said she couldn’t trust me. She said my love for her was dishonest. But… can any love really be honest?”
The smoky wind stole the breath from my mouth. I licked my lips, but that only made them drier. “What does that mean?”
“Three months ago, you told me that if love demanded change in order to exist, it wasn’t love at all.” Rogan unclasped the cracked river-stone brooch from his shoulder and passed it from palm to palm. “But I have never known a love so unconditional. My father’s love demands I perform the role of golden heir. Eala’s love demands I tolerate her fickle games, her schemes and manipulations. And—” He looked abruptly away, swallowing words that nevertheless made a battlefield of his face.
I’d never heard Rogan talk like this. Unsteadily, I set down my glass and wished I’d had the forethought to remain sober. “Whatishonest, then? If not love?”
He looked at me. “Death.”
“Rogan.” Shock spiked blood to my already flushed cheeks. “Rogan, that’s—”
“Bleak? Miserable? Grim?” His eyes on mine looked more blue than green. “Do you disagree, changeling? I’ve seen what your Greenmark can do.”
He wasn’t wrong. If there was anything my Greenmark had taught me, it was that death was nothing more than life’s backward glance. A glimpse of golden light down a dimming pathway ringed with trees. But it hurt to hearhimsay it—as if he, too, sawme as nothing more than a weapon in the dark, a poisoned blade designed only to cut.
“That’s not death, princeling.” I fastened the certainty to my heart with soft braids of flax and curling fronds of blossoming clematis. “It’s transformation. A different kind of life, maybe. But not death.”
“Fine—lifeanddeath are simple,” he rasped. “Love is not. I have never known a love that did not twist, did not curdle, did not poison. Life hurts. Death levels. But love—love destroys.”
It was the most cynical thing I’d ever heard him say. My heart thundered hollow between my ribs. “Isn’t that a little dramatic?”
“Maybe.” He stood. The wind caught his golden hair and flung it against the sky. “What do I know? According to you, I don’t even deserve a happy ending.”
Pain writhed through me. Had I said that? “Rogan—”
“Never mind.” His eyes went flat. “I’m going to stoke the fire.”
My head felt heavy. I lay back. Closed my eyes against rising tears.
I must have drowsed. I hallucinated hands like flowers and silver deer and falling stars.
When I woke up, afternoon had trundled into evening. The heat and the haze and the smoke had transformed into great glowering clouds hanging low over the moor. And I—I was alone.
Chapter Thirty-Five
If I expected respite from the heat in Tír na nÓg, I was sorely disappointed. After a sticky hike through Roslea, I was a sweaty mess. I loitered at the edge of the forest, trying to decide whether a swift plunge into the flat, still lough would improve things… or make everything worse.
