For the first time I realized how deeply he saw through me, to all that was ugly. I served and protected and tried to please other people, and in return, no one saw my secrets.
But his gaze was still steady on mine. His chest expanded with a breath that was more ragged than I would have expected. My own breathing was rough, loud and ragged in the charged silence between us.
I pictured Ander, hurt and angry and hating me, thinking I was just like Fear. And then I pictured Tesa, the way she had looked lost, the dread that flashed across her face at the thought of seeing Ander.He mourned someone who deserved to be mourned.
To my surprise, my face had grown damp. Fear did not brush the tears away as he once would have. I should not have missed the gesture.
I raised my sleeve to wipe my face. “I will not tell Ander.”
My voice sounded dull to my ears, as if it had been hollowed out.
“Good.” He straightened. “That is the best decision available out of choices that are all distinctly unfortunate.”
He began walking back toward camp, heading into the trees. The shadows of the canopy seemed to try to swallow him immediately. He turned his head over his shoulder to call back to me, “Welcome to the war, mortal.”
Thirty-Seven
Cara
We barely had time to make our promises to Tesa—and did not have time to convince her, from the way she looked at me, before dinner. Fear and I talked and laughed and touched each other easily as we ate at a long table with my father’s rebels.
That was the real war for me. Fear’s hand on my back, his smile dipping toward my face, the adoration of the crowd reflected back on us both.
Every time he lavished praise on me, I heard his harsh, whispered accusation.Selfish.
He wasn’t wrong.
I was always trying to help my family and do the right thing. That was true. And yet I was still, underneath it all, just sort of a stupid asshole sometimes.
But I still lifted my wine glass on cue and laughed at everyone’s jokes. Tay beamed at me from down the table, andLidi could barely be persuaded to sit and eat. All she wanted to do was run with her new best friends.
My mother was eager to be done with the meal and was full of feigned cheer. For her, that cheer always came across as slightly drunken, though she never touched her glass and barely touched her plate. Whenever there was pain in the future, she rushed toward it instead of dawdling like most of us.
She kept checking on Tay. She didn’t look at him with wonder in her gaze, as if she saw the miracle: her son, pink-cheeked and strong and laughing again.
This was the way she’d watched Tay when the illness was at its worst, and she hadn’t wanted him to see her worry. She cast furtive, sideways glances, like a bird launching from the brush when it knows it is being hunted.
She caught me watching and looked away.
Across the table, Tay was laughing at something Corbyn had said, easy and unguarded, the laugh I had heard my whole life, and the sight of it was so ordinary and so welcome that for a moment I almost let it be only that.
Then I saw what my mother had seen.
The way he laughed, yes. But the way he’d looked at Corbyn first, the flicker before the warmth arrived, was so brief I would have missed it any other night. Tay had never in his life calculated before he smiled.
Was that a part of the queen’s enchantment? Was he capturing details to bring back to her like a cat carrying mice?
My mother rose from the table before the meal was fully finished.
I rose too.
She didn’t look at me. I followed her away from the noise and the firelight; the sounds of the dinner growing muffled and then distant behind us as we moved toward the smaller tent.The night air was cooler here, away from the fire. Neither of us spoke.
She had her hands folded in front of her and her chin up, and her step was brisk. It was the cadence of a woman not allowing herself to hesitate.
We reached the tent. She didn’t go in.
I wanted to comfort her, and I had no idea how. “Did you tell Tay how everything will work?”
