4
When we return to my quarters, Elise is more agitated than I’ve ever seen her. She draws me to the meeting room at the end of the living rooms on the second floor and seals the room tight against listening ears.
“Princess, forgive me, but I need to know what I don’t know.”
Every bone in my body wants to pace the floor, but I draw a chair across the floor to face the glass paneling looking out over the forest and the river beyond it.
I sit. “I knew Baelen Rath when we were teenagers.”
She nods. “I know the story. You used to climb the cliffs together behind Rath land. Your mother was a servant in their House. Apparently there was a dare about who could climb highest.”
That was the story I told everyone. A child’s account that they would accept. Close enough to the truth to be believed.
I push away the images in my memory as I say, “The Storm found me there. It knocked Baelen down and he hit his head on the rocks. It was my fault because I dared him to climb in the first place.”
The beautiful green forest slips from view as I drop my head into my hands, scrubbing at my eyes. “I don’t want him to be a champion.”
“Because you don’t like him?”
“Because I don’t want him to get hurt again because of me.”
There’s silence beside me. When I look up, a ghost of a smile plays around Elise’s mouth. “That sounds a bit like the opposite of not liking him.”
I swallow my embarrassment and try to cover what I just said. “Actually, it’s more like not wanting him to get killed. He’s the last Rath. I can’t have that on my head.”
“I see.” She peers at me and, for a moment, I’m afraid she’ll see through me to what lies beneath: a feeling that I’ve never forgotten, snatched moments that I’ve kept wrapped up inside my heart.
She says, “I’m afraid there’s nothing you can do to stop him.”
“I know. But… he doesn’t seem to know the rules. I don’t know what he’ll do next.”
Given the fact that he wasn’t aware of the rule about touching me, I wonder if he knowsanyof the rules. Even if he deliberately avoided me all these years, he had to have heard other elves gossiping about the marriage protocols at some stage. Even the order of events on my wedding night is public knowledge.
Elise leans forward. This is the moment when, in another life, she would have taken my hands in hers—an act of comfort I can’t experience.
“I’ve been doing some research on the potential champions. The identity of the final males is kept under strict secrecy so it’s guesswork. Some I believe are obvious: Simon from the House of Splendor and Eli from the House of Elder. The others are hard to guess, but it was easy with Commander Rath because he’s the only possible champion from his House.”
“What did you find out?”
“After the storm, it took him a year to recover. He didn’t just suffer a head wound. His spine was damaged too.”
I gasp. I knew about the wound to his head because it was visible, but nobody ever told me about his spine. I clench my hands in my lap as sadness washes over me.
She continues, “The spellcasters did what they could but they were worried he might not walk again. He proved them all wrong.”
I blink away the tears in my eyes but they keep coming.
Elise reaches for me but drops her hand. She keeps speaking as if she knows that what I really need right now is for her to distract me from my thoughts.
“He spent three years at military training. For the first year, the males in the other Houses saw him as a target: an injured Rath, vulnerable for the first time. It was their chance to assert dominance. But Baelen Rath had a surprising ally.”
She’s smiling at me and I don’t know why. “Who?”
“Your brother.”
“My brother made it into military training?” For as long as I could remember, my brother, Macsen, had wanted to join military training but males from minor Houses had to work twice as hard to make it in.
“Apparently they became quite a formidable team and over time, they gathered other males from minor Houses to join them. Baelen Rath is said to have created his own loyal army there, many of whom now serve under him in the elven army.”
