“Oh God, you’ve been without a bed for all this time?”
“Yes. It became something of a habit.”
He sounded completely remote. Emotionless.
“Doesn’t it make you angry? Shouldn’t someone have taken you and treated you like family?”
He shook his head. “I already told you. Family doesn’t mean anything to me because I don’t remember mine. How can I miss what I don’t understand? And it was what I needed to make change. I left that situation when I was fifteen. I got work washing dishes in a restaurant. That was when I first heard rumblings of desires for revolution. Those people didn’t know who I was, but I paid attention to every word. Gradually, I realized that the national mood was for a change in leadership. And I realized that I was the person who could bring about change. But I had to. Because a new leader would have to prove himself. It wouldn’t be so simple as taking things over. But for me it would be.”
“It took you seventeen years from that point?”
“Yes. Because you can’t go around announcing that you are the long-lost heir.”
“I don’t suppose you can.”
“No. You have to be very careful about who you talk to. About who you reveal your plans to. I started with the other man I washed dishes with. Soren.”
“And he’s your right-hand man now.”
“Yes. We began to build an army. Using a whisper network. We were like Robin Hood’s band of thieves. Or like Vikings of old. We had a few bases of operation. One deep in the woods, which you have no doubt picked up on. And another in the city. In the capital. Very close to the palace. That was how we began to infiltrate the military. And all during that time I educated myself. On government, on the economy. On leadership. I read about the way that my father ran the country. And I tried to figure out the mistakes that I thought he had made. How he had gone wrong. Because something must’ve been wrong, or those people would not have happily supported a coup.” He lowered his head slightly. “Even then I could not remember him. He was words on the page to me, nothing more.”
She nodded slowly. “So most of your life you’ve devoted to this.”
“Yes. It was much better than being a servant boy with no family and no future.”
“Still. It sounds like a very hard existence.”
“The only kind of existence available to anyone in Asland for the last twenty-five years has been a hard existence. Mine is not unique. That’s why when I meet my people I tell them not to give me deference of any kind. I’m not unique. We have all suffered. And we must all move forward together.”
“But can you heal?”
Her heart was pounding heavily, painfully.
“I’ve never thought about it.”
“Can you sleep in a bed. Can you enjoy cake? Can you let yourself rest? Sleep? You’re in a castle surrounded by guards.”
“This is the same palace that my parents were killed in, Fern. I can no more sleep deeply here than I can anywhere.”
The horror of that truth washed over her. Of course he didn’t feel safe here. It had proven to be unsafe. It was the same palace where his family had been killed, but it was also the same palace he had reclaimed all those years later. He knew every weakness. He had exploited those weaknesses. And he had been the victim of those weaknesses. Why would he ever feel safe?
She hated it. That life had been so appalling to him.
“It is so important to you,” he said softly. “To try to make everything okay. You wish to erase the bad things in your own life as well—that is what you see ahead of you when you think about a life filled with choices, is it not?”
“I guess so.”
“But they have happened. These bad things. We cannot make ourselves unchanged by them.”
It was so like what she had been thinking when she had first seen him down there on the floor. That it didn’t matter if they would have found each other without all the trauma. Because the trauma was real. Because it had shaped them into who they were.
But it was just hard to accept that they might need it. She was sure that wasn’t true. Nobody deserved to be treated the way that he had. And she felt certain that she didn’t deserve what had happened to her—even though in the end she had been safe.
“You’re a warrior,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“You are like me, Fernanda. You are a warrior. A great strategist. I’ve seen it.”
