He looked skeptical. My oaths meant little to him. “And you know something I don’t.”
“I know several things you don’t. Most of them are not relevant to what you’re deciding tonight.”
He looked at me thoroughly, disinterested in the barb, before he said, “I understand that you’re using her and convincing yourself she’ll thank you for it.”
I frowned in response.
“AndI understand you’ve convinced yourself you can have both a true relationship with her and the control you always seek.” His voice was level. “I’ve been on the receiving end of that control, and I can tell you this is your greatest stupidity.”
The words found their target, but I did not let it show. “She has made her choices and now you have yours. You can refuse to bring her back. You can decide not to participate in the ceremony, not to manage your clan’s cooperation, not to provide what her protection during the Claiming requires. Those are your choices to make.”
I let the silence sit for a beat. Ander responded with the same. Little showed on his face, which was different from when we were young. Either he had learned more control, or I no longer knew him or both.
“You cannot decide for her,” I said. “You know that. You know it better than you want to, or you would not have asked for terms.”
Past the windows, the sea moved with the same dreadful patience my mother always displayed.
“If she dies,” Ander said, “it will not be the queen I blame.”
I heard it for what it was: a truth, a warning, and something more personal than either of those things. A man well aware of the potential costs because he’d felt his heart ripped out.
I wondered for the first time, idly, if he had actually begun to love her. I had assumed that he merely wanted to steal her from me as repayment for what I took.
“I know what this costs.”
He held my gaze for a moment. Something shifted, barely.
“I’ll bring her back to Amber. I’ll ensure the Claiming isn’t obstructed.” His voice had the dry, unpleasant quality of a man agreeing to a plan he knows is foolish. “Not because I believe you. Not because you’ve given me any reason to.”
“I know.”
“Because she has decided and because I would rather be in the room than out of it when she needs me.” He turned toward the passage but stopped at the door.
“You should know that you don’t deserve her,” he said. I started to say something, but he cut me off. “Don’t make a joke of it. Just know it. And consider making yourself worthy…if you are capable.”
Then he left.
He had been relieved. When he thought she was coming into Bismyth, that singular, unguarded exhale, the drop of his shoulder, had been too immediate for acting.
He had been afraid of what he would find. And he had been glad she was safe with me and with Bismyth, even if it meant I won.
Ander always chose Amber. That was the anchor of every prediction I had ever made about what he would do in a given set of circumstances. His clan was his loyalty, his identity, the family he carried in every room.
They were all he had left.
I could not quite make sense of Ander, my oldest friend, my oldest enemy. Not since Cara had stepped onto the board.
It left me unsettled.
Seven
Fieran
The Nightwalker met me at the edge of the lower city, in the narrow street behind the spice merchant’s warehouse, where the cobblestones were old enough to be uneven and the lamplight didn’t quite reach all the shadows, even when it should have. A deliberate location on both our parts. One didn’t meet a Nightwalker in a well-lit room if one could avoid it. Darkness was where they were comfortable, and a comfortable Nightwalker was less likely to turn lethal.
He stepped out of a shadow that shouldn’t have held anyone.
“You look well,” he said by way of greeting. “Slaying monsters and causing problems for the queen seems to agree with you.”
