She became dizzy with sensation. It was all around her, the touch and smell and taste of him that blurred into something she could not name, became a mere swath of color. Ellina felt as she imagined a bird must feel, catching tendrils, spinning high on air. She felt what it was to soar.
She leaned into the feeling. If she really was a bird, she would stretch out her wings. She would climb into the sky, farther and farther until the whole world was laid out beneath her. Ellina envisioned what she would see: sloped northern hills, the ones near the border where the east became the west. Gentle knolls furred in grass. Spores drifting on a breeze.
The southern forests. Those trees, stoic and still. Among them: a clearing. Damp forest ground. A place where she had killed and elf, and saved a man, and changed.
Ellina could see all the ways she had changed. She understood how this—the way her entire being had become like a soaring, winged creature—was part of that change. The old Ellina would not have been capable of such feelings. She would have been closed to the emotions of this moment, would have locked them behind a door shut so tight as to become seamless. But that door was not closed now. It was wide open. From within, the truth of her heart came pouring out.
Venick moved his hands to her waist. He seemed to want to pull her closer, though she was already flush against him. There was nowhere left for her to go. His fingers dug into her skin, his mouth on hers, hard and insistent. He kissed her earnestly, fearlessly. It made her fearless, too.
Yet were they not forgetting? Ellina seemed to remember her fears as if from a distance. She remembered that this—kissing in a public garden—was so rash as to border on suicidal. What if they were discovered? Even if no one discovered themnow, the mere fact of this kiss was a risk. What if the truth came out in some other way?
And if it did? Ellina could see this, too: the queen’s hard stare. The frosted, barren earth of the whitelands. A sword driven through Venick’s chest.
The thought seemed to shake her. Reality flooded back in.
Ellina broke away.
Venick gazed down at her, his breath a little uneven, his eyes still warm…yet quickly growing concerned, quickly growing confused. “Ellina?”
Her heart was stuttering. In her mind, Ellina saw the cold, empty eyes of Venick’s death. She felt as if it had happened already, as if this kiss had been witnessed and reported, and Venick sentenced, and killed.
Ellina took a step back and Venick’s expression closed. “No,” he said.
“Venick—”
“No,” he repeated. “Just…” His eyes roamed up and around, searching for the right words. “I need to know—if you don’t—if this—” He cut off. Heaved a breath, then spoke clearly. “My heart is yours, Ellina. I know I shouldn’t say that. I know it’s wrong. But I’ve lied for so long that I just—can’tanymore. And I need to know if you feel the same.”
Ellina’s breath caught. It stunned her that he could speak so boldly. Did he not fear the consequences of his words?
“Please,” he said.
Ellina suspected Venick did not care for consequences. She had seen this side of him. She knew he could be reckless. It was recklessness that drove him to hunt for an enemy army rather than return to the safety of the mainlands, that made him run into a swordfight with nothing but a dagger, that had him venturing across the tundra in search of a hidden city in a foreign land. Once Venick set his mind to something he saw it through, no matter the risk. Venick did not care for risks. He was rarely careful. Really, he was a little self-destructive.
He had been lonely. Ellina remembered his story told by the firelight of the healer’s room; how he had known Miria, and loved her, and lost her. How he murdered his father for betraying their secret. Venick had been forced into exile as a consequence of that murder, and the loneliness of exile had shaped him. Ellina could see that after three long years of banishment, Venick was desperate to rediscover his place in the world, to put his loyalty where he thought it belonged. Which was, apparently, withher.
And she had allowed it. She accepted Venick’s loyalty and returned it with her own.
“Please,” Venick said again. “Tell me the truth.”
How was it that the truth could be so two-sided? It tempted. Ellina was tempted to tell Venick what he wanted to hear, because it would be good to finally admit it, and because she now knew it was true. Yet she also understood the consequence of such a confession. The very thought paralyzed her. “Venick,” she started. “I…”
But then, in the distance: a horn’s low wail. It came from far away, somewhere beyond the palace walls. It was a single, baleful cry that seemed to go all the way to her bones.
The sound startled Ellina. She took another step back.
She recognized that horn. But her mind was slow. It was still caught in the grip of Venick’s question. It took her a moment to place that sound, and when she finally did, she slipped quickly down into a dark canyon of fear, because that horn was not merely a horn, but a heralding.
The queen had returned to the city.
“Ellina?” Venick asked again, but Ellina was not listening. She scanned Venick’s flushed cheeks, his dripping hair, clothing soaked. She glanced down at her own thin shift, then at her robes—so different from what she usually wore—heaped in a pile by the pool’s edge. Panic bubbled. How must they look?
As if all the rumors were true?
If the queen did not already know of Venick’s presence in Evov, she would learn of it quickly. She would order an immediate stateroom summons. But Ellina and Venick could not arrive in the stateroom looking as they looked now: drenched, disheveled. And guilty, so guilty.
“You need to leave,” Ellina told Venick. Her voice went higher. “Go back to your suite. Change your clothing—”
“I’m not going anywhere.” His expression tightened. “Not until you answer my question.”
