“You have no right,” she cut him off.
“Excuse me?”
“You have no right to tell me what to do,” she said. “You’ve never been a father to me. I’m sorry I accidentally wandered into your territory and caused you trouble, it was never my intention. But I’m here on my own business, which has nothing to do with you.”
He looked as if she’d struck him. “I just want to help you.”
Liana knew he was telling the truth. She knew he was trying to do his best in a complicated and possibly dangerous situation. But once she’d opened the old wound, she couldn’t prevent it from bleeding.
“Do you?” she asked. “Well, you’ve had nineteen years to help me, and you did nothing.”
“That’s not true,” he retorted. “My father wrote to me as soon as he found you, I received monthly reports from Till. I never let you out of my sight. And I sent money.”
“Did you?” she snarled. “How kind. Did you know my mother banished me when I was six, fed up with those precious few motherly duties she was willing to perform, and barred me from finding her in the forest? A rusalka led me to the first village we came across and just left me there. I was lucky the people who found me were kind, I was lucky my grandfather recognized me.I could have starved, for all she cared. She’s never been fit to raise a child. Why did you abandon me?”
The old fury was still there, and it still burned hot.
“I didn’t know you existed,” he said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Do you think your mother shared her plans with me? I was sixteen, dammit, a stupid boy who lost his way in the forest and got waylaid by a goddess. I could hardly understand what was going on, let alone predict she would bear a child. I was shocked, Liana. Your mother is terrifying. I couldn’t stay in Till after that, so I ran to Abia and worked my way up the ranks. When my father let me know he found you, I was already so tied up I couldn’t leave. I worked from dawn till midnight. I had no wife, no family. I was in no position to raise a child. So I left you in Till, because it was the best thing I could do for you.”
Once again, his face was the perfect reflection of hers, pain mirroring pain. It had never occurred to Liana that Lela had hurt him just as much as she’d hurt her, but now it made perfect sense. Humans were little more than pretty pets to her mother. She inflicted pain with a flick of her wrist and walked away without turning back.
“I was a coward, but I was only twenty-one when they found you. I was living alone in a small room not unlike this one. What would I do with a little girl? And your grandfather did a great job. Look how beautiful and clever you are. I hear Lord Echton holds you in high esteem and the other hunters love you.”
Liana turned back to the window, hiding her tear-filled eyes. She would have traded every achievement and every praise in her life for a father who was there for her.
“Look,” he said, “if you don’t want to stay in Till, come back here when things settle down a bit. I’ll help you, you have my word. Just leave now, because I can’t protect you.”
She wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “I’ll leave whenmy job here is done,” she said, catching his worried gaze and holding it. “You’re a man of duty. You know how sometimes there’s no time for explanations and everything seems illogical, but still you know exactly what you must do? I know what I must do, and you have to let me do it.”
“And that thing you have to do, it includes Prince Amron?” he asked with a mild note of disbelief in his voice.
She tried and failed to imagine her father’s expression if she told him she’d lived with Amron for thirteen years in this very palace. Such a future would seem impossible from this angle.
“It’s not what you think,” she said. “You know the prince well, you know what kind of man he is. He hasn’t tried to do anything improper, even when he thought I was one of Celandina’s girls—which I am definitely not, I hope that’s clear.”
Her father cleared his throat to hide his embarrassment.
“I just needed a way to approach him, and that was the fastest. I’d almost succeeded in what I needed to do when those Seragians attacked us. Now I need to talk to him one more time.”
He was quiet for a little while, studying her.
“I must ask you this, I’m sorry,” he said. “This business you have with him, you need to tell me what it is. It’s my job to protect him and I need to know if your plans are dangerous. Will he get hurt? Because one attack can be a coincidence, but if something else goes wrong—”
“You don’t think I would hurt him, do you?”
“The royal wedding is tonight, Liana. Even one bad coincidence is one too many. If the king has to choose between protecting his sons and believing his captain’s daughter, he’ll throw you to the wolves.”
“The king won’t even know I exist, I promise,” she said with more confidence than she felt.
“Can you at least wait until the wedding is over?”
“No, it must be now.”
He stood before the door, blocking her way out, shaking his head in silence.
