“I’m tired of you referring to the wisdom of someone who tried to murder me.”
I saw Tesa coming because she allowed me to see. Then she was sitting on the sea wall beside me. She kicked her heels lightly against the wall, the movement so familiar that it jolted me back into the past. I had forgotten her restlessness; she had lost it when she was a Nightwalker.
“This situation is untenable,” she said to me, as if she knew why I’d called her and she wanted to beat me into the conversation. “Riven and I should leave.”
“No,” I disagreed. “That’s dangerous. The queen will hunt you both.”
“Or is the trouble that you want me to serve your rebellion, schemer?” She bumped my shoulder, gently, as if she were the old Tesa. Then she stiffened, as if she had startled herself.
“I do,” I admitted. “You and Riven are formidable assets. You’re also my old friend. I don’t want to see you hunted down by the other Nightwalkers. Both things can be true.”
“Many things can be true on your lips, even when they contradict themselves.” She smiled slightly, affectionate toward my shortcomings. The way Ander had been once too. The thought made something inside me writhe.
Had she truly gathered all her memories back to herself?
“But for me to stay…” Her shoulders braced. “You’re going to tell him.”
“I’d like your permission.”
Her voice turned sharp. “But you don’t need it.”
I’d had every intention of asking for her permission, genuinely, but she spoke as if she were already angry about my decision.
As if she had been wrestling with her choice. As if, perhaps, she didn’t really want to make a choice at all.
I wanted to see whether that was true, so I didn’t answer her directly. I wouldn’t commit to asking or commanding. Not yet. I wasn’t sure what Tesa needed from me.
“You should have the right to decide how to re-enter your old life, or if you even do. But you are not the only one to consider.”
She studied the horizon with an intensity it didn’t seem to deserve, given nothing was visible. Whatever she was thinking, she didn’t want to speak out loud. But she needed to, so I waited.
“What if he’s better off without me, Fear?”
“Do you think you’ve changed so much that he’s better without the person he’s mourned for years?”
Tesa tilted her head, considering. My question was genuine, and she treated it genuinely. “Ander is a good man.”
“Tiresomely so,” I agreed.
Her lips pulled into a smile. My heart sank as I saw her take my insults for Ander as affectionate, the way they had once been. She had no idea what had become of us.
She would be so disappointed.
She would choose Ander, of course, and I would lose her as inevitably as I had lost him. But also, she would be disappointed in both of us, and something hollow and aching and unexpected opened in my stomach.
“He could always be difficult for us to understand, couldn’t he?” she mused, still looking out at the ocean. “Even then. I could be petty and mean—you and I could be quite petty and mean together?—”
“The good old days,” I agreed. “Do you remember what we did to that spy of my mother’s?”
She grinned. “I don’t regret it at all, still. Despite Ander throwing up his hands in exasperation at the two of us.”
“I don’t regret it either.”
Her smile died, and her gaze had gone faraway. “I’ve done far worse things since, Fear. Things that go beyond mean.”
“So have I.”
“You’ve done them for a good cause,” she said, so quickly and confidently that the hollow deepened. “I did them for the queen. Do you want to know?”
