“A very dangerous boy,” I agreed.
And then the whole sordid tale came spilling out of me.
“It happened during the battle of Alteria. My mother was a fearsome warrior—that was her glamour. I was seventeen and quite impressed with my own strength and battle skills. I was cocky, overconfident in my training and my recently developed physique. Stellon and I had been forbidden to take part in the battle. Mareth was too young to even consider it, but I wanted to prove myself, to do my part, to be ‘a man.’”
A bitter laugh escaped me as I remembered how confident I’d been that day.
“I didn’t want to be a ‘coddled prince’ and stay behind the palace gates in my ivory tower while the other young men my age went out and had ‘all the fun,’” I said.
Raewyn’s eyes softened, and she nodded, though I didn’t want her sympathy.
I didn’t deserve it—now or back then. By the end of my story, she’d understand that.
“I snuck out, armored up… rode off and right into the thick of things,” I told her. “All the training in the world can’t prepare you for what real battle is like. Very quickly, I got myself into trouble.”
Even now I could vividly recall the confusion and terror that surrounded me, the ungodly noises of suffering and death.
“Everything was moving so fast, I could barely think,” I recalled aloud. “It was only dumb luck that I was on the same part of the battlefield as my mother. Lucky for me… unlucky for her, as it turned out.”
I stopped and swallowed down the enormous lump that had formed in my throat. I might not have continued, but Raewyn took my hands in hers.
She’d moved close to me at some point during my storytelling.
“What happened? Tell me,” she urged.
I took a breath and went on, pouring out the details of the worst day of my life.
“She spotted me about to be killed and came to my defense. She used her glamour to fight off my attackers, but more came. We were outnumbered, and she couldn’t protect her own body and me as well. There were too many vulnerable angles to cover. One of the human soldiers got in a strike through the opening in the side of her armor.”
Tears dripped onto Raewyn’s cheeks, and her hands left mine to stroke my arms.
“I’m so sorry,” she said again and again.
Perhaps I should have stopped there, but once I’d started talking about the horror, it seemed to take on a life of its own, forcing itself out of me like water pouring through a crack in a dam, widening it, tearing it open.
“There might have been a chance for her to make it back to safety and healing if she’d retreated at that point,” I said.
“But she couldn’t. Not unless she wanted to leave me to fend for myself. And of course she didn’t. The enemy sword had hit its mark. The wound was a lethal one, but she kept fighting, trying to shield me as long as she could. When it became apparent her strength was giving out and mine wasn’t enough to save me, she commanded me to—”
I stopped, my chest heaving, my breaths loud and rapid as I struggled to keep from flying apart into a million scattered pieces.
Raewyn leaned forward, nearly draping herself on top of me.
“To what, Pharis?”
“She ordered me… to take her glamour for myself. ‘I’m going to die anyway,’ she said. ‘Do this for me. Make my death mean something. I would gladly die for you a thousand times, my son.’”
Here I had to stop—I couldn't go on.
My voice could no longer make it past the spiked ball in my throat, and my bottled up emotions were on the verge of erupting and coating everything around me with the shameful poison I’d carried inside since that day.
Raewyn embraced me, going up on her knees to wrap her arms around me and bury her face in the juncture of my shoulders and neck. At first I stiffened, resisting the comfort she offered while at the same time, craving it.
When I felt her tears soak through my shirt, my self-control broke. I let my arms wrap around her waist, accepting her compassion.
It felt wrong. It felt weak of me. But it also felt like a soft, soaking rain following a drought, and I was so, so thirsty.
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “It’s not your fault. You were just a boy.”
