“I could feel the way you felt standing there with your family. With them, but apart from them. The way you were trying so desperately hard to be something that you’re just not. The fear of them finding out. And the deep, heartbreaking knowledge that no one will ever truly understand you or love you for who you are. I recognized the feeling because I’ve felt it every single day since your father died.”
Since he killed him. I freeze, my breathing shallow. We’ve never spoken about that day, about what happened out there on that cliff.
I realize I want to know. Ineedto know. I can’t be with him without knowing. “Would you tell me about it? The duel?”
He turns to me but doesn’t reach for me. “Are you sure? I’ve been wanting to tell you the truth, but…it’s going to be hard to hear.”
My mouth runs dry. My vision narrows to his face. “What truth?”
He rubs his hand through his wind-blown hair, trying to find the right words.
“What truth, Ronan?” I ask, my body so tense I feel lightheaded.
“I’m sure you heard what led up to it. The duel. Our armies had been at a stalemate for a week. We’d lost so many already—we were down to the dregs after more than four years of war. Half of my legion were green. The horses were gone. The city had been under siege for two years, and it looked like my campaign to end it all in the field was going to be a ‘success’: everyone would be dead by the end of it. Everyone on both sides. Your father sent a message that if I faced him in single combat, he’d honor the result.”
I nod, slowly. This I knew.
“It was…” Ronan stands and turns around towards the setting sun. “Just over there somewhere.” He points to the west, near where we’d been ambushed on our way to Faros. “We’d kept your soldiers to the sand—the desert. I could have starved him out, eventually. We had supplies coming in from the Mara, although not many of them, and he had nothing but blighted fields and desert behind him. But I was arrogant, and I was tired, and I thought it could all be over if I could just beat someonethree decades my senior. I thought it was a joke. I thought he was a fool to ask.”
“My father was an excellent swordsman,” I say. “And an honorable man.”
“Both of those things I knew, but I thought I was better.”
“And you were.” Clearly, that must have been the case. I want to listen to him, but I’m anxious to know what truth he’s been concealing.
“Barely,” he says. “But yes, I had him. A fight to the death isn’t like the tournament. It’s a quick and bloody thing. Every strike may be your last. You don’t make a single move unless you’re certain it’s safe. Your father knew this. We clashed a dozen times before he made contact.” He lifts his shirt to show me the long scar at his side I’d noticed when he practiced with me. “I didn’t let the healers near it. I wanted the reminder.”
“Why?”
“Because the next moment, everything changed for me. It’s the line between what I was and what I am.”
He sits back down on the boulder, keeping a bit of distance between us. “I spent my entire life believing my father was a god, and that I would be a god once he was gone. But when he died—”
“When my father killed him.” On the battlefield, in a bloody, brutal defeat with a spear just a few months earlier.
“When your father killed him, I didn’t feel any different. I didn’t feel like a god. I felt like a boy, a broken little boy that wanted his dad back. And then, just like with my mother, I got angry. But this time, it wasn’t the world I was angry at.”
“It was my father.”
He nods. “I spent days and nights fantasizing about revenge. I thought of one thousand different ways to kill him. It was sick. I could think of almost nothing else. Every time I ran my sword through someone, it was his face I saw. Every time my light hit its mark, I imagined the life fading from his eyes. It consumedme. And when he hit my side, I saw it all fading away from me. But there was an opening in his attack. A chance to take out his legs, and I took it. It brought him to his knees.”
I nearly vomit thinking of it. I want to hit Ronan for telling me, to pound my fist into his chest and tell him to stop.
But there’s a part of me that wants to hear this. To know what happened, even if it kills me.
“He knelt there on the ground in front of me, and it was over. I’d won. I was bleeding but not dying. He was unable to stand. All I had to do was raise my sword and end his life, and it would all be over.”
He turns and looks me in the eye. “But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it.”
“What?” I can barely hear him over the pounding of my heart.
“Your father died that day, Sylvie, but not at my hand. I stood there in front of him, thinking of my righteous victory, thinking of the satisfaction I would finally have to see him dead on the ground, the end of the war, the triumph of my revenge, and what I felt was…nothing. It’s like a lever flipped. All that fury, that need for justice, it just vanished. There was something about him there on the ground, something about the way his grey hair fell from his helmet, something painfully human about him. I saw the real man and not the version I had created in my mind. And I knew that killing the man wouldn’t give me what I wanted. It wouldn’t give me my father back. It wouldn’t ease my pain. I wish I could say I thought of you in that moment, but I didn’t. I didn’t even consider what it would have done to you. I didn’t consider what my people needed from me either, how much they’d suffered and how much they deserved an end to the fighting. I’d killed hundreds by then, thousands maybe, but this one man I couldn’t kill.”
There are tears in my eyes. The real man, not the version in his head. The man, not the monster. It was what I thought ofRonan when we first met. I wonder if he could feel it then. If it was part of what drew him to me. “What happened to him?” I ask, my voice trembling.
Ronan shakes his head slowly, sighing. “He told me to finish it. To finish it, or he would. That he’d never stop fighting for Nithyria. That if I wanted an end to this, I had to kill him. I argued with him. I told him to surrender, to lay down his sword, and we’d end the war together. We could negotiate. He laughed at me. He didn’t believe me, and I couldn’t blame him for it. He kept telling me to fight him. I could smell the smoke on his breath, feel the heat rising off of him. He was too honorable to use magic to end our duel, but he was so angry with me for denying him his warrior’s death that I thought it might rise out of him on his own like a child. When I refused again, he picked up his sword.”
His voice chokes on the words. “And still I couldn’t do it. I was so lost, so broken in that moment without my vengeance to guide me. I was such an empty shell of a person that I wanted him to end me instead. It was Taran, in the end, that saved me.”
