“It’s not so different from what I did before,” he said, “when you were afraid.”
Her anger abated. He was right. It really hadn’t been different, except then the anxiety he’d taken from her had been directed elsewhere, not at him. But she supposed that it didn’t do her any good to be anxious around him, especially since she couldn’t pinpoint the source of the tension.
“You seem tired,” he said. “I could help you sleep, if you wanted.”
She chafed again. “You could put me to sleep?”
“I don’t know that I could put you to sleep, but I could make it easier for you to fall asleep.”
“No, thank you,” she said, though the mention of sleep brought a sudden heaviness to her eyes. “Tell me more about this book.”
“Aside from the historical biographies, it spoke to the varying abilities of different Princes. It even spoke of traveling like I do, but not through the Shadow Realms.”
“That’s because you’re an Elf,” she muttered.
“It talked about a Realm of Light that apparently some Princes and a few Raes could pass through.”
“Huh.”
“It also spoke about the Shine, about claiming. It struck me that claiming is not dissimilar to what my kind do with the heart-place. You said an Elf Prince gives away pieces of his heart to make himself stronger, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“When a Rae calls upon her inner light and joins it with that of a Prince, making them one whole... it sounds very similar.”
“Maybe,” she said, shaking away the fatigue. The warmth radiating off of him and the rocking motion of Gur’s flying weren’t helping. “Except a Rae doesn’t go mad or kill herself if her Prince dies.”
“Maybe not, but the histories all ended very similarly. One died and then the other died soon after. Some of them killed themselves in grief.”
“I’m sure those were the more interesting stories,” she said. “The ones worth repeating. But I’ve known plenty of Princes and Raes who’ve gone on to live quite long, healthy lives after the other dies.”
Her mother for one.
Of course, she suspected her mother was guilty of having her Prince murdered. Perhaps in doing so, she had severed whatever connection they’d shared.
Vaguely, Magda wondered if she could free herself from Kaelan by murdering him. Not that she had any desire to do so. In fact, she deeply wished that she could repair whatever had gone wrong between them. She wasn’t sure if her desire to reconnect with him stemmed from the heart-place he’dmistakenlygiven her, or if she simply missed the ease of the friendship they’d had. Or maybe she just missed feeling him, the ever-present surf of his emotions breaking upon her. No longer knowing what he felt at any given moment left an emptiness inside of her. A distant cousin to the feeling she’d experienced when he’d died.
“Kaelan—”
“Cae.”
“Do you still love Honey?”
He was quiet for a breath.
“No.”
“Does that make you less sure that you know what love is?”
“I know what it is, Magda. I may not understand it, but I know it.”
“You sound very certain.”
“I am.”
“I’m sorry about what happened to her.”
“It’s not your fault.”
