We look out together at the sea for a long moment, listening to the waves crash beneath us, the shoreline invisible beneath the cliffs.
“I missed the ocean,” I say.
“From when you lived in Pyka?”
“Yes. But it was different there. There are cliffs like these, but they’re covered in grass and moss. And the sand is dark.”
He looks wistfully out at the water, not meeting my gaze. “I remember. We visited a few times before the war. You were never there. I remember thinking they made you up.” He gives me a slight smile.
“They sent me away a lot.” While they were planning the war, although I don’t say that part out loud. “To my aunt’s in Kalla, mostly. It was like a second home to me. It wasn’t that hard for me to leave Pyka. All the memories…most of them of empty rooms. Of closed doors and waiting. Of training. I think what I miss the most isn’t what happened there, but what didn’t. What could’ve, if things had been different. Does that make sense?”
He looks at me with deep affection. “Yes. Yes, it does.”
“I wish I had met you then,” I admit. “It would have saved me a lot of grief.”
“How so?”
I weigh what to tell him. I know I want to stop the plan Adria and Seth have put in motion, but if I tell Ronan about it, he’ll have no choice but to arrest them. They’ll likely be executed for what they’ve done, and Larus and Felix and everyone else involved as well.
But there’s a chance I can stop it from happening. They need the Third Navy’s ships to blockade the harbor, and Larus has control of some of those. There will still be time when he returns to stop them from coming. From Seth’s latest message, his forces won’t be ready until after the end of the Great Festival, which is still weeks away. All I need to do is get Larus on my side.
And he’s always been on my side.
“I’ve spent the past few years blaming you for everything,” I say. That’s true enough. “If I’d met you before, maybe things would have been different.”
“I doubt it,” he says with a humorless laugh. “Iwas different then.”
“In what way?”
“I was arrogant. Angry. I felt like the world belonged to me, that it owed me something.”
“Angry? At what?”
“The world. My father. The last time we came to Pyka, it was shortly after my mother died. I was sixteen. You would’ve been—what, nine? Ten? It was a year before the war started.”
“Ten. Your mother died of cancer?” Ronan has never spoken about Queen Calia to me before. I think of what Stella told me about how he tried to keep her memory alive after her death.
“Yes,” he says, his voice strained. “The visit was tense. It was easy to see why, later. But at the time, I thought I’d made it that way. I was so angry. My magic had settled, but it wasn’t enough to save her. There are some things beyond even light magic to heal.”
I can see the anger in him still, in the tension of his shoulders. I touch one of them, and he twitches reflexively. “Sorry,” he says, his hand brushing mine.
My heart aches for him. Ronan, just sixteen, blaming himself for not being able to save his mother. “You know it wasn’t your fault, right? You know that now.”
“Yes, I know that now. But I didn’t then. I had so much rage in me.”
“I did, too,” I admit. “Even then, when I was a child. And much more later.”
“At my father? At me?”
“Among other things. At my parents for abandoning me, for choosing war over their child. At my siblings for going with them.”
He nods and looks into the distance again. The sun is lowering in the sky behind us, bringing a golden tinge to the light as it meets the water. We should be heading back soon. But there’s something else I’ve been wanting to ask him.
“What drew you to me in the beginning?” I ask. He’d said he’d felt me before he even came into the room the first time. That he’d known me even then. What did he feel?
“Loneliness. Not mine, yours.”
I turn to look at him. He meets my eye this time, and it’s like he sees right through me. Right through whatever walls I’ve tried to build, right down to the core of who I am.
