There was a sadness for him that I did not expect, building behind my ribs. “I think the you that fought back against me yesterday was real. I have been petulant and stubborn and frustrating.”
He raised a brow in my direction.
“I’m self aware.” I shrugged. “I think you have spent these last weeks trying to become something you’re not in order to win my trust, but that isn’t how this works. I don’t want a mask. I want something real.”
Harkin’s expression held more pain in that moment than when I had stabbed him—the ache stronger than when I had drowned him. I tried not to focus too closely on the emotion radiating from him. He was finally listening, and I could not stop now.
“I used to love the idea of mágik. My mother and father taught me all about the days when our kingdoms were united.” The words tumbled off my tongue. Slow then fast like the sucking of a river current. “They told me stories of the Goddesses and the different kinds of mágik and the way it could be used to heal the world. You asked me what I believed in—who I had faith in. It was the Goddesses. Againsteverythingmy people believed, I prayed to Lunanya, Soliana, and Stellány because my parents raised me to be naive and hopeful, but it was all ripped away when a band of Rázuri murdered my little brother in front of me. I have spent every day since hating mágik, or trying my hardest to. I have been unwilling to try because I am scared to become something I hate. Someone that could use mágik for evil and violence."
Harkin honed in on my every word as I spoke to him plainly and honestly for the very first time. He moved closer, and I didn’t retreat.
“Yesterday, I could not control myself, and I almost did the very thing I swore not to do. I amterrifiedof what will happen if I train this mágik inside me, but I also fear what may happen if I do not.” I closed my eyes and let out a slow breath of relief. The words were a burden lifted after keeping them locked away for so long. “I will try. Starting now, I will participate in your lessons, but I need you to be real with me. Stop trying to be someone you’re not. Help me. Talk to me. Fight with me when I am being obtuse! Take off the mask.”
Harkin mustered a small smile at my words.Fight with me.
“I don't know if I am capable of being what you need. Beingreal,” he corrected. “But I promise to try if you do. I want us to be able to work together. That is what I have always wanted.”
“Of course, you still have a job to do.”
“Yes.” Harkin moved to the chest at the corner of the room, pulling out two clean tunics. He handed one to me and pulled the other over his head, careful not to tug at his bandages. “And maybe I am realizing that I cannot expect you to trust me if I do not earn it.”
“Very astute,” I mumbled dryly.
He huffed a laugh, sinking into the settee before the dregs of the dwindling fire. It was hardly more than ash, and his breath spooled into the cold air. “I have never had such a hard time with a job before. I am not used to people seeing through the masks you so aptly identified. I have done this for… a long time. Too long. The prince has high expectations of me, and I cannot afford to let him down.”
“You won’t. As frightened of this as I might be, I will not try to run again. There is too much risk in leaving my power unchecked.” I began untangling my short, dark hair with my fingers as I thought aloud. “We might have to work slowly. It won’t be easy for me.”
My voice grew quieter and quieter as the sentence wore on. It was like stretching an unused muscle—to be vulnerable with the man I had seen as my enemy mere hours ago, but I knew I needed to do this. We only had each other in this cottage, surrounded by the vastness of the Varázis Erva, and trust had to go both ways.
For the briefest moment, I wondered if I truly believed that. Could I trust Harkin? Or was he only invading my mind once more, changing the truth of my emotions and willing my compliance. I studied his eyes for an answer but found within them only quiet, contented peace.
“Thank you. We have time yet, before we must return to Acsilla. For now, we can move at your pace.” He paused with a slow grin, turning so his cheek rested upon the back of the settee. “But expect me to push you along once our deadline approaches. If I do not deliver you to Prince Claudian before the solstice… Well, it must be done.”
I tossed wood into the fireplace, prodding at the embers as I attempted to revive the flames. “Then it will be.”
Chapter twenty-one
Harkin
Dry, brittle cracks ran along the knotted wood of the ceiling above me. They were one and the same with the fissures in my heart. I could not rid myself of her words. They washed over me—the memories an ocean blue cascade over my entire being. A pang squeezed at my chest, painful in its conviction.
Every word that Seren had spoken pried at the gaps in my armor. She had seen through my facade as if it were nothing more than gossamer on the wind. It drifted on the current, and she tugged, unraveling the laces of my masks with nimble fingers.
The feeling of being seen by someone else so intimately was far worse than the slice of her blade as it slipped between my ribs. It was the kind of raw, aching pain that burrowed deep beneath my skin, into the tissues that held my very bones together.
I had spent the past eight years hiding, minimizing, cutting away the realest parts of myself so that I might become someone else. A mercenary, a warrior, a monster who could betray and hurt and kill without a second thought.
It had taken only one touch of her warm hands on my flesh, one glance of those mismatched, soulsearching eyes, to send me stumbling through the mistakes of my past. To unearth the ache I had locked away and buried so many years past.
She ruined me with those words.Has no one ever tried to know the real you?
“I have been running from myself for a very long time,” I told her, on one quiet night.
“What do you have to run from?” She blew softly over the steaming bowl cupped in her hands. She dipped a spoon within and tasted the soup with eye-fluttering reverence. The meal that I had made for her.
“There was a time before all this…” I trailed off, unable to tell her the truth of it. Unable to reveal the truth of Claudian’s rotten treachery and the stained remnants of blood and ash on my heart. “I made a choice a long time ago, and the trajectory it set me on…” I laughed, the taste of it bitter on my tongue. “I have had to lie and betray and steal until I became an unrecognizable husk of who I had once been, but there was no choice at all.”
“Tell me.”
