“I think you’ll find that you can. And you will. And you will alsolower your voice. There are always ears listening around here, and though most of them know that my brother is sick, they…”
The space seemed to quiet and contract around them as he trailed off. Even the bird chatter stopped.
“…They don’t knowhowsick?” Sephia guessed.
His silence made the answer clear enough.
They stood in that silence for several long, uncomfortable moments, until another thought occurred to Sephia, and she cautiously voiced it: “Is that the real reason you wanted that doctor to examine me? Because you believed that it might give you more answers? You believe we might be suffering the same illness?”
He averted his eyes. “Yes.”
Sephia had a biting response already prepared, but something in his tone made her pause. It had sounded almost… vulnerable.
Vulnerable? That couldn’t be right. And yet she had never gone from furious to simply frustrated to almost…sadquite so fast. Why was she sad for him?
It was disorienting.
And also rather annoying.
“You could have justtoldme that was the reason behind it,” she muttered. “I would have helped you. We could have had an actual conversation about the matter like two civilized beings.”
He glanced back at her, his expression unreadable.
“But if you were doing it out of concern for your brother, then I…” She hesitated, hardly believing the words she was about to say. “I’ll forgive you. This time.”
“I don’t need your forgiveness,” he informed her. “And I don’t need your help, either. Not for this.”
Of course.
Sephia folded her arms over her chest, irritated that he’d swatted away her peace offering.
Why had she been foolish enough to extend it in the first place?
“All I need is for you to swear to me that you will ignore what you saw,” said the prince, kneeling beside the stream and trailing his fingers through the water, “and again: that you will not speakof it.”
“I could ignore the shaking and such, perhaps. But before you arrived, there were…”
He tilted his head back toward her.
She froze.
She wanted to claw her own voice box out. Howstupidcould she possibly be, to come so close to mentioning those shadows out loud?
Tarron pulled his hand from the water. Water slid from his fingertips,drip drip drippedagainst the rocky ground, as his eyes narrowed on her. “What happened before I arrived?” he asked.
“N-nothing.”
He straightened to his full, impressive height. “Leanora.”
“Yes?”
“What exactly did you see?”
She couldn’t think of a safe answer—one that didn’t reveal that she could see those shadows that she was starting to suspect no one else in this realm could—so she kept her mouth shut.
The prince stepped toward her. “Do you want to have acivilizedconversation about things or not?”
“I…”
