“That night we met at the solstice celebration,” he continued, “I came to see if you were worthy of your destiny. If the girl everyone whispered about could actually be what the prophecies claimed.”
“And?” I prompted, anger heating my face. “What changed?”
“At first, nothing.” His grey eyes met mine, unflinching. “You were a spoiled princess marrying a spoiled prince.”
“As I recall, you seemed to have already made up your mind by the time you opened your mouth.” I turned toward the door, done with this conversation.
“You asked me what changed.”
I stopped but didn’t turn around.
“I did,” he said quietly. “Meeting you…what I felt… it has made me question everything I thought I knew about worthiness. About destiny. About what I was willing to sacrifice for duty.”
“And yet you still lied.”
“I couldn’t have told you these truths if I wanted to. And gods, I wanted to.”
The desperation in his tone made me study him.
“Koraz asked if I knew the truth,” I said, remembering the way Duron’s advisor had taunted Rydian that night in the garden. “He called Duron your master. What did he mean?”
I watched the shadows play across Rydian’s face as he leaned against the war table, his fingers gripping the edge hard enough to turn his knuckles white.
“A blood oath,” he said finally, each word dragged from somewhere deep. “To Duron.”
“Like the one your people made with the Furiosities?”
He barked out a laugh, humorless and bleak. “No, this was nothing like that.” His jaw tightened, but he went on quietly, and I waited, giving him space, “I made it when I was seventeen. An oath of loyalty, he called it. It prevented me from lying to him or raising a hand against him, no matter what he commanded.”
“Sounds like enslavement.”
“I did it willingly.” The desolation in those words hollowed me out.
The air between us felt too thin. “Why would you?—?”
“My mother.” His jaw tightened. “Duron discovered her lineage. What she was. He would have used her, kept her locked away in Autumn as leverage against me forever.” His eyes met mine, dark and raw to their depths. “The blood vow was the only way to keep her beyond his reach.”
Rydian might have saved his mother from that abuse, but in doing so, he’d subjected himself. My heart broke for the seventeen-year-old who’d had to make that awful choice.
“Where is she now?” I asked.
Something shuttered in his expression, that familiar wall sliding back into place. He straightened, putting distance between us with nothing more than a shift in his posture. “She’s safe.”
“Rydian—”
“That’s all you need to know.” Not cruel but absolute.
The silence stretched between us like spider silk—fragile, nearly invisible, but there nonetheless. I could have pressed. Could have demanded more after everything he’d kept from me. But I recognized the fortress he’d built around this one thing, this one person he’d sacrificed everything to protect.
He'd wanted to protect me too. And the only way he knew how was to take the entire burden on his own shoulders. Even though I understood it now, I still couldn’t let him think it was okay.
“I’m not her,” I said as gently as I could.
His gaze whipped to mine.
“I am going to put myself in danger,” I went on before he could argue. “And I’m asking you to stand beside me while I do it. To fight with me. Not fight in my place. And not send me away or arrange things behind my back.”
He swallowed hard. “All right.”
