“What do I know? What I know is that they’ve killed my people for generations. I know they’ve raided our lands and stolen our home.”
King or not, I won’t be insulted in this way. My father started a war for this.
“Taran, come here.”
Taran does as his king commands. I’ve been too distracted with everything going on to pay much attention to him, but I get a good, long look at him now.
Admittedly, he doesn’t look that threatening. He’s not a tall man, only an inch or so taller than Adria, I’d guess, his body all lean muscle. His hair is a bright, sun-bleached blonde, almost aslight as an infant’s. His eyes are a clear baby blue, and his face is even more freckled than mine.
But I don’t let his boyish appearance fool me. I can tell everything I need to know about him from the dark tattoo on his neck. The shapes of it are geometric, but they follow the curve of his body in an organic way. I might be impressed by the artistry if I wasn’t so repulsed by everything it stands for.
“Tell her about when we found you.”
Taran looks to Ronan in confusion. “Your majesty? I came to tell you Queen Claudia is looking for you—”
“She can wait. Tell her about what happened to your people.”
Taran and I have at least one thing in common: we don’t know where the king is going with this.
But Taran can’t refuse him, so he does as he asks, even though it clearly makes him uncomfortable. “They came into my camp in the night while we were sleeping. I was eleven. We’d been there maybe a month, following the game down into the valley.”
Poaching illegally, more like it. Poaching was punishable by death.
“We had no real fighters among us. They’d been lost in previous raids on our home, leaving only a couple who knew their way around a sword. Our hunting bows were no use in the ambush.”
Those previous raids had likely been in response to their own.
Ronan’s eyes are on me, and he scowls in disapproval at my emotional response.
Let him.
Taran swallows, looking down at his boots as if it can prevent him from having to picture what he’s saying. “I was in the forest when they came. I’d gotten up in the night to relieve myself, and I hid when I heard the screams. It…it wasn’t quick. They kept some of them alive for hours. My parents, my sister—”
He chokes a little on the last word.
And it slaps me awake.
Neither his words nor his response to the memories should come as a surprise to me, but they do. I’ve never spoken to an Orsan before. I’ve never thought of what the stories would sound like from the other side.
I’ve heard about our righteous slaughter of the Orsan raiders who attacked our own people many, many times. Every story felt like vengeance. Every story felt like victory against a savage foe.
But Taran, even now many years later, doesn’t look savage.
I know how he feels, I realize. I know how it feels to lose your family to something that you have no say in. To be powerless to do anything to help them because you’re too young.
“I found their bodies in the morning. They—they had no clothes. They had wounds in places…I couldn’t leave them like that. The Nithyrians had taken everything—our skins, our linens. But I found a shovel, and I dug them a grave.”
“And that’s where we found him,” said Ronan. “My father and I, out on a hunt in Nithyria like we did sometimes before the war. We found him dragging his mother’s naked body into a shallow grave.” His look pierces me. “Eleven years old.”
My stomach twists and lurches upward, a cold, sick wave flooding my chest until I feel like I might retch right here.
I don’t have anything to say to that. I can’t think ofanythingthat could justify what happened to him. What happened to his people. It’s one thing to stop poachers. That’s necessary, especially when people are starving. But what happened to them—if it’s true?
It’s inexcusable. Dishonorable. Vile.
Who had done it? Was it my own father?
My mother?
