Chapter Two
“It all looksso peaceful,” she said, gazing out, still skirting the heart of the topic. “So… normal. Like I recall it being back in the day, in Uorsin’s early years.” She waved a hand to disperse the shades of all that had happened later in the tyrant’s rule.
We didn’t talk much about her father, the late High King Uorsin, and for good reasons. In fact, it said something that she’dmentioned him voluntarily at all. Just speaking his name put unhappy lines around her mouth, signs that the emotional wounds he’d given her had cracked open to seep pus and old blood. She liked to see herself as whole and healed. I knew her better than that.
I set a hand on the small of her back. Through the flexible silver bodice, Ursula’s lean and strong muscles were as tight as I’d anticipated.My Essla is built like a racehorse, all slender speed and alert readiness—and she’s equally as high strung. She tried to hide the strain of rule from me, the anxiety she felt for her sisters and her realm, pretending she didn’t need me or anyone. Still, she leaned in to my touch. Gratifying, given how long and patiently I’d worked to earn her trust.
“Things were good then, in the early days?”I asked leadingly, willing to accept this conversation instead of the one that clearly weighed on her.
She frowned slightly, watching something on the road. I followed the line of her attention and found nothing salient, so she must have been seeing images play out in her memories, frowning as she always did when she remembered her father.
“Maybe I just have the idea things were good becausehe said so all the time,” Ursula said slowly. “Uorsin was a great one for singing his own praises. But that’s how I remember things, back when Salena was alive, when Andi was still little, and before Ami was born. Abundant and peaceful.”
“Those were the years right after the Great War ended,” I noted.
She huffed a sigh of acknowledgment. “Exactly, which would play in. If nothing else, Uorsinput a stop to the bloodshed and conflict. He built the roads and mandated that everyone use Common Tongue. In those early years, he accomplished a great deal, and most of the kingdoms prospered. People were relatively happy.”
“People think that war stimulates trade,” I reflected, “when the underlying truth is that theendof war allows trade to rebound.”
She nodded, her gaze unfocused, attentionstill on the past. “I’d come up here to the walls sometimes, just to watch the road and all the people living their lives.”
Their normal lives, she meant and didn’t have to articulate. “You wouldn’t have been ten years old yet,” I observed as neutrally as possible. She so rarely spoke of her childhood that I treaded carefully when she did, even when I wasn’t certain—as I was now—that she wasbuilding up to something else entirely.
“True,” she replied, then fell silent, brooding, so I moved fully behind her, working my fingers into the gaps of her bodice to loosen the knots I could reach. She rolled her shoulders with a murmur of relief, and continued. “Truly, back then I came up here mostly to figure out what Andi saw in it. Even at barely four, she had a knack for slipping awayfrom her nurses. We’d always find her up here or on one of the towers, staring out like she’d lost something.”
“Was that before she had her bedroom in the tower?”
Ursula flicked me a wry glance over her shoulder. “Yes. The tower bedroom was a solution to the problem of her forever running off. With the views from the windows, she was at least content to stay in her room and look out from there.That changed, of course, once she discovered horses—and proved remarkably good at evading notice to ride off for hours in unpredictable directions. If we’d known then that we were dealing with a budding sorceress, we might’ve done things differently, but Salena would’ve been the one to know that and…” she shrugged.
“I might point out that you were but a girl yourself and bore no responsibilityfor what your mother and father should’ve handled, as parents and as king and queen.”
“There you would be wrong. Taking care of Andi and Ami was always my responsibility, whether they liked it or not. And the Thirteen are my responsibility.” Her face hardened, and she turned to face me. “You’re worried about something. That’s why you keep coming up here. But not about war. What aren’t you tellingme?”
I shouldn’t have been surprised at what she noticed. Even apparently and thoroughly preoccupied with matters of court and defense, Ursula missed very little. “This is simply a good place to think,” I hedged, hoping that might be enough to deflect her.
She leaned back against the parapet, facing me with crossed arms. “You think and think, yet you never tell me what plagues your thoughts.Don’t you think it’s about time you changed that?”
“You don’t need to worry about me,” I told her, a weak defense, but I didn’t have a better one.
She laughed, short and without humor. “First, that’s not true. Second, I do worry because I love you, and I’m reliably informed that it’s not only natural to worry about the people we love, it’s usually expected. Third, that reply was an evasion.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. I might’ve left the Imperial Palace of Dasnaria far behind in my misbegotten past, but I’d been around plenty of rulers in a variety of lands and I knew how to handle an irritated monarch. More, I knew Ursula. Better than I knew my own heart. “You have plenty on your mind and I can handle myself.”
“Another evasion,” she shot back. Debating with Ursula often felt thesame as sparring with her, though it was rarely as enjoyable since the odds of getting my hands on her were much lower in a debate.
My own irritation rising to meet hers, I gave her a long, very calm look. “I appreciate that you love me enough to worry about me, but it’s simply old memories plaguing me, like a bad joint that aches when the weather changes.”
“Tell me anyway.” She raised her browsin challenge, but her voice held an almost pleading note.
Uncertain of my footing, I wondered where this was going. She didn’t usually press like this. “Essla, there are things my vows prohibit me from speaking of. I can’t tell you.”
Her winged eyebrows lowered, forking into a dark frown. “Those vows again.” She spat the words as if they were distasteful.
“Those vows again,” I agreed. I foundI’d folded my own arms in a mirror of hers, unconsciously harmonizing with her even when she pissed me off. Too late to undo it without tipping her off. “They are nothing important, especially compared to your other concerns. My secrets have nothing to do with the security of your realm. You needn’t be concerned that I would keep something from you that you need to know.”
Her frown cleared, leavingher expression carefully blank, though her lips parted slightly to draw in a quick breath before she firmed her mouth and her gaze went steely. “I see,” she replied in a neutral tone. “I suppose I’d foolishly believed I could listen to your worries as you’ve so often listened to mine. I apologize for my presumption.” She stood to go.
I cursed myself. I’d hurt her, thoughtlessly and clumsily.Putting a hand on her arm, I stopped her. “Essla, I’m sorry.”
