“Yes.”
“And then you camehere.”
“Yes.”
“Fool.” Ellina heard the tremor in her voice, which meant others would hear it too. It was a weakness she could not afford. She inhaled deeply, fighting for calm. “Elves will call for your death. A quick execution is the best you can hope for. That is what happens to humans who enter our lands.” Another deep breath, another attempt to calm herself. Her heart was stammering in her ears. She could scarcely speak. “Trespassing in the forest was one thing, but this? Truly, Venick. What were you thinking?”
The way he looked at her then, how his eyes became winter frost. It cracked Ellina open. She had the sudden sense that she knew what Venick would say next, that he would tell her he did not care about his own life, that he could not, not given everythingelse. And she saw it. She saw how something in him had become blown and tattered, a torn sail unable to catch the wind. It frightened her all the more.
But there was something else. The cast of his gaze. How he looked at her like he was seeing her for the first time. He was altered, she could sense it, yet she had the feeling that it was not just the journey across the tundra that had changed him, not just his imprisonment. She did not know what it was.
“Venick?”
He hesitated. Ellina heard the steady drip of water down rock. The light ping of droplets into an unseen puddle, the silence in between, the anticipation for the next drop to fall. She felt like that. Suspended.
“I know who Lorana was.”
Ellina felt the words more than she heard them. A flash of shock. Hand dug into sword’s pommel.
Venick said, “She was your sister, Miria.”
The world chilled. Impossible. It was not possible for him to know that.
“I know you recognized her necklace,” Venick went on. His voice had quieted, the words hovering between them, but she felt his intensity, the way it grew and morphed into something fierce and final. “I know that’s why you chose to save me. I didn’t always know. But I wondered. And then I learned the truth and I understood. Farah recognized the chain. She told me the necklace belonged to Miria. And Miria disappeared eight years ago, the same year Lorana appeared in Irek. A coincidence, I thought, maybe. But it wasn’t.”
Ellina wanted to deny it but could not, because he spoke elvish and could demand the truth, and she could not anyway, because she was unable to speak at all. Her throat constricted. She felt suddenly, brutally choked.
“You could have told me,” Venick said. His expression firmed, became glacial as he pushed himself to standing. The chain around his wrist clanked. “Why didn’t youtell me?”
Ellina’s hand fell from her sword. “I could not.”
“Yes, you could have. At any point, you could have—”
“No, Venick, Icould not. I promised Miria that I would keep her secret. I promised her in elvish.”
Venick seemed to understand. Elves rarely made promises of secrecy in elvish, but when they did, those promises could never be broken, inanylanguage. The power of elvish forced the speaker to tell the truth, but in the case of oaths, it bound those truths forward into the future. Ellina had sworn to Miria that she would tell no one of her escape, and she was beholden by the rules of their language to keep her word.
“You could have found a way,” Venick said. “Youcould have.”
Maybe. But Ellina had not wanted Venick to know. Not before, when she loathed him, and loathed herself for saving him. Not after, when she had started to know him, and began to question if she had been wrong about him. If she had been wrong about everything.
Venick seemed to sag, tipping his head back against the stone wall. He cast his gaze upward. “Shecould have told me. I don’t—” A hard swallow. “All those years. I can’t believe she never did.”
“She wanted a new life,” Ellina replied, knowing it was not enough, it was nothing, yet needing to explain anyway. “The throne was never meant for her. She would have hated it. So she left. If anyone knew about her escape, they would have come for her. Keeping that secret…it was the only way for her to be free.”
“Iloved her.”
Ellina swallowed. “I know.”
“And then you…” He met her gaze. “You saved me for her. In her honor.” His eyes became clear pools. “But you should not have. It was my fault, what happened to her. I blame myself.”
Ellina had too, once. She remembered it: the hot spark of hatred. The way hatred made herself less herself. But Venick did not kill Miria. The southerners did that.Theywere the reason she was dead. And Ellina understood now, did she not? She understood how it was possible to forget yourself, to forget about their laws and the border. She remembered how it had been traveling with Venick, talking with him, sleeping side by side. The vulnerability. The inability to hide her thoughts. But also the strange realization that she did notwantto hide. That she would not mind if he cracked into her very core.
It had hurt her to feel that way. Hurt more when Venick fled, andthathurt her too, because she was a fool, because she should have known better than to care what he did or where he went. Ellina had rejected those feelings. She railed against them. She convinced herself that Venick’s abrupt departure was for the best. He would return to the mainlands where he belonged. No final words, no apologies or farewells. No question of whether or not to acknowledge everything that had happened between them. It was better this way.
But Venick had not returned to the mainlands. Had instead gone south to investigate the vanished cities and the southerner’s growing power, and had uncovered their enemy’s secret, and had comehere. To warn her.
“Venick…” She took an unsteady step forward, searching for the right words to explain that yes, shehadblamed him. But that was before she knew him. Before she understood.
