His gaze hovered above her head, faraway and hazy, seeing the strange cities, the unexplored seas, the endless wonders of the world. “I’d love that very much.” A whisper so soft the silence swallowed it immediately. The sharp yearning written on his face revealed that he wanted it as badly as she wanted him.
Kiss me, she thought,kiss me and we’ll be off. The rest of the world may take care of itself without us.
The rest of the world.
Amron rubbed his eyes as if waking from a dream and raked his fingers through his hair, disturbing its sleek neatness. “What about everybody else?” he asked.
She could never lie to him, and he would never forgive her if she did. “They would remain here.”
“And face the conflict, the bloodshed you warned me about?”
She nodded.
“If you know anything about me, then you know I’d never leave them to face it alone,” he said. “So whatever it is that you’re offering, I first need to know what I would be running from.”
His rebuke wasn’t harsh, but it made it look as if she wanted to turn him into a coward who’d left his family to fight alone and abandoned his duty. She couldn’t tell him that his duty would ride him into the ground, squeeze every last drop of blood fromhim, and get him killed at some insignificant backwater he’d be dragged to on the king’s whim. His duty would never let him turn into the man he wanted to become because it would always demand too much. His duty would crush every dream he had of the peaceful life with her and rob them of years of happiness.
And even if she told him all that, he would still choose his duty over his personal interests because that was written into the very core of his being.
Suddenly feeling the weight of her bruised, exhausted body and her impossible quest, she crashed down on the hard chair and buried her face in her hands. “I’m so tired,” she said. “And I desperately need a drink.”
“I’m sorry, I should have asked you sooner.” He produced a silver flask from some invisible pocket. “Take a sip of this first.”
She took a hearty gulp and liquid fire filled her mouth. It was the fig brandy he always carried with him, the one which could pull you back from death’s door.
While she savored the warmth spreading through her body, he poured two cups of rosehip tea from the silver teapot on his desk and offered her one. “This should help you feel better.”
It was warm and fragrant and it did make her feel better.
“Before we get distracted again, or attacked, or separated, I think you should tell me everything from the beginning, because this feels like putting together a broken plate in the dark—every shard is sharp enough to draw blood, and I can’t see the whole. I wish Darin could be here to hear it all, but our time is running out. The moment my father remembers to look for you, I’d better have a good reason for stealing you.”
Where should she begin? With the things she could remember, the things that were true.
“It begins with my parents, Darin and Lela,” she said. “I’m sure that, being Amris’s heir, you know how rarely the couplings between gods and humans produce children, and howerratic those children’s gifts are. My blood comes with certain advantages: speed, stamina, strength, hunting skills second only to my mother’s. I heal fast and age slowly. I’m good at seeing people for who they really are, and seeing divine touch in the world.” She paused. “I’m telling you this so that you know I’m not some powerful, divine creature, just a very good huntress with some talent for divination.”
He nodded, but didn’t interrupt her.
“Now comes the difficult part, the part where I need you to trust me.” She closed her eyes. “We’ve met before, and when I saybefore, I mean when you were twenty-six and I was twenty-two years old.”
The twenty-three-year-old Amron sitting across from her raised his eyebrows, but instead of claiming it was impossible, he merely asked, “How old are you now?”
“Two days ago, I was thirty-six. Now?” She shrugged. “I can’t tell. I’d be nineteen if I were still in Till, but I’m here instead, so…”
The lack of shock on his face reminded her that he had a mother who was far more versed in dealing with the uncanny than Liana. He must have heard a fair share of the queen’s stories in his childhood.
“Am I right to assume that you knew the forty-year-old me, then?” The incredulity in his voice was not tied to the fractured time, but to his age. No one at twenty-three could imagine themselves at forty. “How was I doing?”
You were dead.
She didn’t say it, for what good would it do? For the first time in her life, she lied to him by omission and glided around his question. “I can’t—and won’t—tell you anything about that future, because it’s not real, it exists only in my mind and nowhere else. The gods cursed me with it, and then left me here.”
“So…the things that happened there won’t necessarily happen here?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. But what I do know is when I met you, the kingdom was at war with the Seragian Empire, and that war started here, in Abia, at your brother’s wedding. When I found myself at this moment in time, I thought there was a reason the gods put me here.”
“To stop the war?”
“To stop it, to make it worse, to save someone, to kill someone, who knows?”The battlefields, the blood, the kiss that would lead into a war-torn future.“But I don’t care what they intended. I want to stop it. They muddled my memory, so I had to piece all this together from the hazy fragments and things I’ve learned here.”
