Only I know how to love someone like you.If she’d told me once, she’d told me a thousand times.And no one will ever love you more than I do.
For twelve years, those words had been a balm. But now they were a blade. A blade cutting me from her.
A knife appeared in Rogan’s hand, echoing my thoughts. I reeled back in confusion, but Rogan ripped his mantle open at the neck and bent the blade to his own bare chest. The point cut a divot into the skin above his heart, just beside the cracked river-stone brooch.
“I swear it.” A tiny droplet of blood squeezed around the blade. “If I’ve ever lied to you before, Fia, I’m sorry. But I swear it on myheart—I never chose Eala. Amergin help me, but I still can’t. I still want you. I still—”
I broke away. I couldn’t hear him say it, not after all these years. I flung myself toward the stairs, even as the room tipped around me, the floor twisting toward the ceiling and the walls closing in. And as I fled to my room, all the things I believed realigned themselves in grotesque new angles, until every facet of my life glared sharp and unfamiliar as a broken gem.
I shuddered and writhed in the embrace of my clammy sheets. Tears trailed cold down my cheeks and soaked the pillowcase, tasting of desire and resentment and wasted time.
I longed to go to Rogan. To tell him I still wanted him—stilllovedhim. To savor the warmth of his skin on my fingertips. To linger on the taste of his lips—sweet as honey mead. To take him onto me and into me and pretend like the last four and a half years had never happened.
But the words Mother had said to Rogan beat against my skull, drowning out all else.
Not something to be loved, but something to be wielded. A weapon, not a girl.
My hand dropped to my wrist, tracing the puckered scar where my bracelet had been. Maybe Mother had said those words to Rogan. Maybe she had even wanted a warrior, a spy—an assassin—with my particular set of skills. But it was Cathair who had trained me in the ways of violence and venom. Mother could not have known about every sick lesson that man taught me, every torment and tribulation he used to forge me into something hard and strong and wicked. Mother knew I was more than steel sharpened to a killing edge. Motherlovedme.
Only I know how to love you. And nothing and no one will ever love you more than I.
For the first time, I perceived a shadow lurking beneath those words—a tacit assumption that I was so difficult to love that only she was capable of the effort.
All these years, could that truly have been what she meant?
I refused to look at the notion head-on. Still, the ache of it bore steadily deeper—a creeping rot at the taproot of a tree I thought would never topple but was nevertheless beginning to decay.
Sleet and ice gave way to the soft, slow patter of late winter showers.
A witch-bird arrived from Cathair, and though I glanced at the letter—war brewing between under-kings, a query for news, an exhortation for Rogan to write his father—I was too unsettled to respond to it. I crumpled it, threw it on the fire, and didn’t bother telling Rogan about it. If he was avoiding his family, it was none of my business. He, like me, certainly had his reasons.
A few days before the next full moon, I awoke to a hooded mantle lying across the foot of my bed. Woven from a russet fabric pricked through with green, it was lovely and soft, with a velvety nap that caught on my calloused fingers. When I tried it on, it glided in rich folds to my knees. It whispered secrets of warm earth and sunlight on broad leaves and smoothed over a few of my jagged, creeping hurts.
“Corra!” I hid my smile.
“Chiardhubh?” Corra yelled back from somewhere in the rafters.
“I didn’t ask for this!”
“Then throw it on the fire,” a feral cat hissed from the wall, back arched. “We wouldn’t want you to feel obligated to us for our many, many, many—”
“Corra.”
“Manykindnesses.”
I decided to keep the cloak, just to spite them. “We did make a deal for those supposed kindnesses.”
“And the mistress has held up her end.” The cat casually licked one sharp-clawed paw. “So far.”
My smile widened. Ihadkept up my end of the bargain—the greenhouse was no longer just a gap-toothed collection of metal and glass. Bulbs had begun to peek green shoots from dark earth, promising spring blooms. And I was beginning to enjoy the work—in a way I hadn’t since those long-ago days in the royal greenhouses.Work is love, the gardeners used to say.We do the work to show nature we care.
And I did care. I cared in a way that made me think perhaps I could be more than venom and death. More than a weapon.
A weapon could only destroy. A weapon could not grow. A weapon could not care. And a weapon certainly couldn’t love.
Chapter Nineteen
You really don’t have anything to say to me?”
