I waited, feeling as if I was on the edge of being shown something secret, but she said nothing more. Instead, she picked up her cup of tea, swirling a cinnamon stick through it. “What’s keeping you up?” she asked.
“Everything,” I muttered, gripping the edge of the bench. “Res. The meeting. My apparently horrible habit of trusting people.”
She raised an eyebrow. “That sounds like a very good habit.”
I thought of Ericen, alone in his cell. “Even when those people are supposed to be my enemy?”
“You mean the prince.” I hesitated, and she smiled. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”
I had too. Like he was one wrong move away from losing control of himself. Like he couldn’t bear to be around me, but leaving would be worse.
She ran a finger along the rim of her teacup. “It is difficult to walk against the wind.”
A shiver brushed my skin. I’d once said that very proverb to Ericen.
Auma continued. “You can only do what you think is right.”
Somehow, it didn’t feel like she was talking about me. Still, her words resonated. No matter what the others said, I believed Ericen was on my side. I understood why they felt the way they did, but they weren’t there when he defended me against the cruel Illucian soldiers, or when I caught him with his face pressed peacefully against his horse’s in the moonlight, or the day he’d given me the gloves.
They didn’t know the troubled prince I knew.
There was a fire that lived inside him, and it lived inside me too.
“Sometimes—” I hesitated, biting my lip. “Sometimes I think he might be more than a friend.”
Auma’s dark eyes flickered to me. There was no judgment in them.
“I don’t know what I feel for the prince,” I continued quietly. “But I feel too much of it.”
“You cannot be afraid to see what you see,” Auma replied. “If you are, you only end up lying to yourself.”
Her words prickled at me. What did I see? Did I see the girl I’d been, wounded and crushed? Did I see the girl Ericen had fallen in love with, brave and strong? Or did I see the warrior I was becoming, the leader?
You have every bit the potential to become a monster as I do.
Ericen’s words sent a chill quivering down the back of my neck. He wasn’t wrong. I did want revenge. I wanted it so badly, I felt as if it would burn me up from the inside out, and that scared me. But I also wanted my people safe.
“You’re right,” I said. The words settled inside me, a quiet resolution. I let it lie there, not quite ready to face what it meant, and turned my gaze on Auma. There was something about talking to her. It was like emptying your secrets into a peaceful void. I felt as if she would hold them for me so I didn’t have to bear the burden alone. I wanted to do the same for her.
“You said the reading silences your thoughts,” I began. “Are they that loud?”
Her fingers tightened about her cup. She held it close to her chest as if protecting it—or herself.
“Advice is more easily given than taken,” she said. Her normally impassive expression had faltered slightly, and she looked out over the garden as though it’d become suddenly unfamiliar. “Decisions take courage. It’s so much easier to just let things happen.”
The vagueness of her response wasn’t lost on me. Like she was afraid of what might happen if she were to put her thoughts into words. As if speaking them might make them real.
“From what I saw in Illucia, you’re one of the bravest people I know,” I said. Her grip on the cup loosened, and I added, “The bravest is Kiva, and the fact that she cares for you tells me she thinks so too.”
She closed her eyes as if letting my words wash over her, and a small smile tugged at her lips. When she opened them again, the unease in them had settled.
“Are you nervous about the alliance meeting?” she asked.
I stiffened but forced a nod. “If the other kingdoms won’t ally with us, Rhodaire will fall.”
Illucia’s army was too much for one crow.
One of Auma’s hands fell from her cup to brush the book again as if seeking its comfort. The gold title glittered in the lamplight:Stories of Jindae.
