Jahna had never considered herself either temperamental or violent before. She suffered remorse over killing a spider, but somehow that ready guilt refused to surface to plague her when she recalled the image of Evaline’s shock as Jahna’s hand connected with her cheek. “I’m not sorry if I did,” she said. Some small remnant of that white-hot anger flared to life. “In fact I wish I’d hit her harder.”
“Why ever should you be sorry?” Radimar’s eyes held a glint of knowing. “Justice is sometimes ruthless.”
How did he do it? Clarify the chaos of her thoughts without coddling her? Even when he questioned the soundness of her timing, it sprang only from concern for her welfare, never from doubt in her judgment. He had been a well of heuristic wisdom for both her and Sodrin these past three years, and he was leaving. The unwelcome thought made her want to weep.
“Thank you,” she said in a shuddering voice.
His ginger eyebrows crashed down in a scowl. He guided her toward the door of her father’s suite, and slipped inside on silent feet. The tiny antechamber was empty and dark, the only source of illumination slats of moonlight that managed to slice through the sliver-thin gaps between the shutters. Beyond the closed doors leading to a sitting room and two bedrooms, Sodrin snored down the rafters in solitary inebriation.
Radimar loomed in front of her, the shadowy expanse of his shoulders a living wall between her and the entry door, as if he automatically sought to protect her from some future, unknown intruder. “Thank me for what, Jahna?”
His voice wound around her body like a silk ribbon. She wished she could see his face.
“For making me brave. If you hadn’t taught me how to fight, I would have run or hidden again. I don’t think I would have fought back. You did as you said you would, taught me how to save myself.”
He shook his head. “I taught you a few skills. I didn’t teach you courage. You’ve possessed that all along. It just needed to be coaxed out of the shadows. A few years of growing up and lessons from me just brought it to the forefront.” A smile crept into his voice, along with an unmistakable note of satisfaction. “You should be proud of yourself. That was one impressive strike. You remembered everything I taught you.”
The guilt that hadn’t reared its head earlier surfaced now. “It might have been better if I could use what I learned in the arena instead of against another woman.”
He paused for so long before answering, she began to wonder if he heard her. “How long have…”
“Evaline.”
“The whelp and her lickspittles tormented you?”
Sometimes it seemed like forever. “Years,” she said.
“That corridor was its own arena tonight. Sometimes you take your stand in unlikely spots against your adversaries.”
“Could you love me?”she wanted to ask but instead said “Are you proud of me?”
The darkness obscured his expression, but his low sigh caressed the crown of her head. “Does it matter so much to you, Jahna?”
“Yes. Yes it does.”
She leaned into his palm where it cupped her elbow. “How could I not be proud? And if your brother and father knew, they’d be proud as well. Bravery often rises when you’re most frightened.”
The last of her righteous fury over Evaline’s unwarranted persecution burned itself out, and reaction over her response set in fully, along with the melancholy that had threatened to drown her earlier over Radimar’s news. Her throat closed, making it difficult to talk. Radimar’s black silhouette blurred at the edges as tears filled her eyes. “I like being brave,” she warbled. “I just wish I wasn’t ugly.”
The mournful admission shamed her, but she couldn’t help it. Her birthmark had been the source of numerous miseries once she was old enough to understand the ridicule it generated. How different would her life have been had she been born without it or even with it in a less visible spot?
Radimar swooped closer, and his hands rested heavy on her shoulders. This close, and she could make out the angles of his hard face and the glitter of his eyes. “Stop,” he ordered in a soft voice, no less stern for its quietness. “Don’t give that shallow bitch’s words a weight they aren’t worth.”
Jahna scrubbed away her tears and sniffled. They stubbornly trickled down her face. “She isn’t the only one to say it. People can whisper loudly. I wish I could make this go away.” She touched the blemish spread across her cheek. “Evaline is a bitch, but she’s pretty, and she has friends. I don’t have to be pretty, but I would have liked to have friends.”
He shook her gently, as if to snap her out of a bad dream. “Are we not friends, you and I? And Lacramor’s spoiled brat is a friend to no one, nor are they to her. They cling together because they’re too weak to stand alone. Trust me when I tell you they’d stab each other in the back at the smallest provocation and turn on each other like dogs at the first opportunity. That isn’t friendship, Jahna. Far from it.”
He was right. Her reason argued he was right, and she’d seen with her own eyes how those “friends” had done nothing to help Evaline.
Every thought fled her mind when his hands cupped her face, thumbs smearing the tears that still dripped down her cheeks. The fingers resting against her blemish fluttered across her cheekbone like a moth’s wings. “This is part of who you are, Jahna,” he whispered. “What makes you strong and resilient, gives you purpose beyond the arm ornament of some nobleman. You’re beautiful. Let no one make you believe otherwise.”
She leaned into his touch, savoring the feel of his hands on her skin, and closed her eyes. “You’ve always been so kind to me. Never looked at me as if I’m lesser.” More tears seeped under her closed lids. “I think I will mourn forever when you return to Ilinfan.”
“Shhh, Jahna,” he murmured against her temple. “Shhh.”
His mouth drifted from her temple to the corner of her eye, the kiss as ephemeral as a snowflake but not at all cold. Jahna forgot her sorrow, entranced by the touch of his hands and lips on her face. He kissed every curve and angle of her face: forehead and damp eyelids, the bridge of her nose and fullness of her cheeks. She shuddered under his hands when he paused for several moments to map her birthmark, his clasp gentle and reassuring.
At some point during Radimar’s exploration of her features, Jahna’s hands found their way to his torso, her fingers pressing into his heavy winter tunic to grip his sides. She tilted her chin up, instinctively seeking his mouth with hers. Her sigh when his lower lip touched hers unfurled between them, and the kiss transformed.
