“Thank you,” I said dryly. “Generous as always.”
He nodded with what appeared to be complete sincerity. Perhaps that was what passed for encouragement among the orcs.
Once we had left the city and settled into a rhythm, I had questions for Fear.
The city was far behind us. The road had narrowed into something that moved through open country, the kind of landscape that made the world feel large and our party small in it. Kiegan was riding ahead by about twenty paces, close enough to matter but far enough to give us privacy. I had the feeling heknew exactly what was happening behind him and was not going to look back unless there was screaming.
Fear was hard against my ass, so at least I was not the only one who found this proximity both pleasant and punishing. I tried to push it away and focus on my many questions.
“Who is Tesa?”
His arms didn’t shift, his hands stayed easy on the reins. There was no tension, and yet I had seen his face for one unguarded second when Ander named Tesa. He was back to being Fear now, too skilled at deceit to be a comfortable husband.
“Tesa was my friend and Ander’s…” He paused, searching for words, and ended on, “Everything. A childhood friend. His tether to the past when his parents were alive. His hope for the future.”
“Ander implied you got her killed.”
“It’s not that simple.” Something worked in his throat, some emotion even Fear could not hold off.
Nothing was simple for Fear.
“Was she someone you were involved with?”
“No.” No hesitation there. “She was Ander’s. She suffered when Ander and I tried to cast the queen off her throne.” He paused, a note of grief entering his voice when he amended, “She sufferedbecausewe tried to cast the queen off her throne.”
I let that sit for a moment. I wanted the story, but Fear’s voice dipping with emotion made me question pressing him about the past. Instead, I returned us to the present, which overbrimmed with troubles of its own.
“It’s the first time I’ve heard her name.”
“That cost him.”
I looked at the road ahead, at Kiegan’s broad back moving with his horse’s easy walk, at the country shifting on either side into something wilder. There were deeper stretches of forest,green and inviting and glimmering with dangers. There was a reason the patches of villages and farms were grouped together, as Stonehaven had been; the world around us was slowly turning strange.
“He’s a better person than you give him credit for,” I said.
“He’s a better person than I am,” Fear said, and something in the way he said it, flat and without self-pity, as if it were a fact he had made his peace with, unsettled me.
I didn’t answer that. I wasn’t sure there was an answer.
He must have read my reaction; he always did. “I’ve told you before that I will be seen as a monster if I fail. But if I change the world for mortals and shifters, then I’ll be what this world needed. More than it needed a good man like Ander.”
Gods, he was dramatic. And arrogant. “You’ll never be a monster, Fear.”
His breath was a sigh against my cheek. “Anyone can be a monster with enough reason.”
“The reason makes or unmakes the monster,” I disagreed.
His arm tightened around me slightly, maybe involuntarily, as if he could hold me closer. “I think that is an innocent perspective.”
The horse leapt slightly over a puddle in the road. Briefly, my ass lifted from his lap, then came down again. Not just down, but sliding, a fraction of an inch of friction that I felt in two places at once: the back of my hips and somewhere lower. His hand at my waist tightened. He had felt it too.
Fantasies of Fear tried to invade my mind, and I shook them off. We were racing Obsidian to get the knife to heal my brother; there was no time. We were not going to slip off into the forest to test the limits ofnot completing the marriage bondwith those deft hands between my thighs or that unbearably handsome face between my thighs.
“Will you tell me the story?”
The wind came off the open country smelling of sweet grass. His jaw grazed the top of my head as he looked to the side, checking the countryside for threats.
When there were none, he had to answer. “I made decisions that I believed were correct that cost Tesa her life. That’s the truth, and it’s not the only truth, but it’s all that matters to Ander.”
