“I have it all handled,” Alaryk assured me. “Don’t worry.”
My mind was spinning, but I felt his influence. Calming me down. I dragged in a deep breath…and let myself sink into him. Gently, hesitantly at first, until I just let go.
Alaryk’s arms came around me as he soothed me from the inside out. As Ny’am’s lost heartstone pulsed with life. Somewhere near. Somewhere hidden.
Which made me remember…
“You executed Dresnar,” I whispered. “I’m sorry you had to do that.”
He tensed. In my mind’s eye, the flash came. Of Dresnar’s bowed head, Grymia in attendance, his Elthika circling overhead. The flash of his own blade, black with blood.
My chest squeezed.
“He made his choice,” Alaryk murmured.
So did I,I couldn’t help but think.
His arms tightened. “No, it’s different.”
“Is it?” I wondered. I breathed him in. “I was trying to protect my family. Dresnar was trying to do the same.”
For a heartstone. To protect Grymia. To help the Elthika.
“And he was willing to murder you himself if it meant he could get away with it,” Alaryk finished. I flinched. Because thathadbeen the difference. A pretty stark difference at that.
“You’re right,” I said.
“He’d wanted the mountain searched time and time again. But the heartstone doesn’t want to be found. And our Elthika need it here. He never understood that,” Alaryk said. “Even still…I never expected him to betray us like this.”
It had cut him—and his riders—deep. All of them had been in attendance at Dresnar’s execution, stone-faced. They’d been his friends, his allies.
“But you never really know someone,” he said.
That’s not true,I thought, deep in his mind. Because here, there was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run.
He huffed out a small breath. “You’re right,mariss.”
Would I ever get used to this?
I wasn’t certain.
“This is a lot, Alaryk,” I whispered. “Too much.”
I pulled away, catching the way his lips pulled down. I pressed my hand to my forehead to keep the quiet cavern from spinning.
“You don’t want this,” he murmured. Because he couldfeelit.
“It’s not that,” I said. And because I didn’t knowhowto express all the thoughts fighting and pushing and pulling at each other in my mind, I imagined inviting him inside it so he could decipher it for himself. Letting go so everything could be revealed to him all at once.
It was because he’d told me he loved me. It was because I’d just woken after a guardsman had nearly beaten me to death—Alaryk huffed out a deep breath at that one.
It was because my family was in danger and that they were having to leave their entire lives behind because of me. It was that Dresnar had been executed. It was that I’d been sent here to spyon the Karag, that I’d stolen eggs that I’d only ever wanted to protect, that I’d seen Brune bloodied and slumped against a wall, and that the cavern was whispering to me. It was my raw guilt, the friends I’d hurt, the trust I’d broken.
It wasthat night.
The night Alaryk had used his magic as aweaponagainst me, a choice that he’d known would hurt me when I had been most vulnerable. And he hadn’t cared. He’d compared me to Kamora, one of the most vile people he’d ever known, who’d taken so much from him, who’d cursed Samryn.
“Amaia,” he growled. I felt the rise of his own grief when he discovered that.
