He pinched the bridge of his nose. “So, Amril’s party, everything you said there, and the fight afterwards, you were trying to warn me?”
“Yes.”
“Why me, though?”
It was her turn to raise her eyebrows.
“Oh.” He blushed again. “How well do we know each other, exactly?”
“Fairly well.” Despite the grief, the bad news, the complexity, she paused to enjoy the sweetness of the moment, his eyes resting on her, the questions he dared not say aloud.
His soft laughter broke the tension. “I’ve had my share of strange encounters with women, but this one beats them all. I almost wish this was a prank by Amril to set me up with a girl.”
“Your brother is not that imaginative.”
“No, he isn’t.” His laughter fizzed out. “Something else bothers me, though. If you were still in Till when Amril got married, how do you know the war started here?”
“Because it’s common knowledge. I don’t know the details,you’re right about that. That’s why I ran around like a madwoman, whispering strange warnings to anyone who crossed my path.”
“But the things you said to my father this morning, they were precise.” He frowned.
There it was: the moment for the hard truth.
“Yes.” She hesitated. “Things have changed in the meantime.”
He’d never talked about his wife when they were together. Liana had asked a few tentative questions in the beginning to see where they stood, to assess the risk of falling head over heels for someone who was, technically, still married. But Amron had refused to discuss Melia.It’s over, she’s gone and she’s never coming back, was all he’d said.
“At dawn, after talking to my father, I went looking for you,” she said. “I saw your wife in the corridor and something felt off, so I followed her. She met with a woman in the garden, a woman wearing a Seragian uniform.”
“Melia met with a Seragian woman in the garden at dawn?” Incredulity rang in his voice.
“No, I said the woman was in a Seragian uniform. She was Elmarran, though. And she was one of the attackers from last night. Their leader, actually. I recognized her voice.”
He sat very still, looking at her.
“The woman’s name is Ferisa, I found out. Perhaps you’ve met her?”
A brief, barely visible nod.
“I followed her out of the palace, through the streets of Abia, and into the house that belongs to Roderi of Elmar. I found the yatagan there, and got these cuts and bruises. She knows I know about her now, and she’s after me. I ran to the palace, I didn’t know I’d encounter your father. I was stupid enough to let the guards catch me with a weapon in my hand. I tried to warn the king, but Roderi of Elmar was there, and I looked likea madwoman and spoke like a raving prophet… I should have been more subtle. I think no one believed me.”
“My mother did,” he said softly.
“And you?” she asked. “Do you believe me?”
He stood up and walked to the window, his figure sharply outlined against the darkness behind him.
“It’s bothered me for months, the Elmarran reaction to the peace treaty. Their contempt, their quiet displeasure, their failure to acknowledge it. I was confused at first. I saw so much death at the border that I thought they would surely welcome peace. They deserved it more than anyone else in the kingdom.” His voice trailed off, swallowed by the night outside. He shook his head. “I was wrong, and my father was wrong too, misjudging human nature. Roderi of Elmar doesn’t know how to stop fighting, how to forgive and forget. What he wants after all those years of fighting is not peace, but revenge.”
She’d heard this reasoning a long time ago, in a battlefield tent, but she didn’t interrupt him. He had to figure it out by himself.
“Revenge against the Seragians, yes,” he continued, “but even more than that, revenge against the people who forced him to make peace with the Seragians.” He turned away from the window. “Against us.”
“Your wife is a traitor,” Liana said.
“I know.”
Commotion in the corridor disrupted his quiet words. Voices, shouting. Fists banging on the door.
