“It doesn’t matter to me what you did when you were a Nightwalker. It matters what you do now. But I’ll hear them if you want to tell me.”
“I tortured people for her.” She pressed her hand over her mouth, but the words still spilled out between her fingers. “It feels like a nightmare now, but it wasn’t just a nightmare. I don’t think it was just a nightmare.”
“You were under an enchantment.”
“Does that matter enough?” Her eyes shone with unshed tears. “I think some of them were our rebels. People who knew me. And she didn’t even want information from them anymore. I didn’t listen to them or carry it back to her…I just…hurt them.”
She rocked slightly on the wall, her heels battering too hard as her kicking went from an absent habit to her hurting herself. I pressed my hand over her knee to still her.
“Tesa.”
Her name seemed to pull her back a little from the memories. “I’m sorry. You didn’t want to know. I’m sorry.”
“You’re my friend. I can carry anything you want to tell me.” I patted her knee and pulled my hand away, watching to make sure she didn’t hurt herself. “And I’ve done horrible things too, Tesa. Quite recently.”
I could still smell the smoke from Obsidian’s pyres.
I had never been enchanted as she had been. I had simply been certain I was right, that my cause was just, which had its own costs and its own kind of trap.
I let the silence hold long enough to tell her I’d heard the full weight of it.
“Will he still want me back?” she whispered. It was the question underneath everything else she’d said tonight.
I didn’t answer immediately. She needed the pause just as much as the answer; she needed to know the answer was going to be true rather than comfortable.
“I cannot tell you what he will feel when he hears your story. But I can tell you that he does not love in half measures.” Or hate in them, either.
Shadowbane scoffed in my mind.“Does it comfort you to believe the two of you just hate each other?”
I did my best to ignore the dragon. “He made a sacrifice tonight. Of his own pride, his respect within the clans. For the sake of our rebellion. A lesser man could not have done what he did.”
“That’s what makes it so hard to face him.”
“That’s what will make him the man with whom you can rebuild. But first, you have to step out to meet him.”
She stared out at the horizon. Frustration was etched into the lines of her face.
She wanted to see Ander, but she couldn’t say yes. Making that choice meant owning what followed, and if it went wrong, she would have chosen her path to unhappiness. She was frustrated by having to choose.
It would be easier for her if I forced her hand. If I commanded rather than asked.
If Ander despised her, she could blame me, and there would be somewhere to focus her anger. There would be anger, and that was more manageable than shame and fear and grief.
“We will tell him tonight,” I told her. “He deserves to know. He shouldn’t even have to wait for morning.”
She would not enjoy the sleepless night before her, knowing she’d face him later. Best to rip off the bandage cleanly.
“You changed your mind. From before when we spoke, when you said you would wait for me to be ready.”
She sounded reproachful. She was already angry with me, even though I was giving her what she needed. That was alright. I could hold her anger when it was what was tying up all her terror and loss into one messy package, containing it enough so she could carry it.
“Someone wiser than me gave me counsel on what we should do,” I told her.
“You should tell your wife just that.”Shadowbane sounded as pleased with himself as if I had complimented him.
“Not a chance.”
Tesa sighed. I slid off the sea wall and offered her hand. She ignored it, jumping down. She had never needed my hand when we were young, either, but she would have taken it once; she had once teased me that she was trying to teach me to be gallant like Ander. Trying to make me fit to be a husband one day.
