When I heard Fear move, I didn’t look up. I was staring at my knuckles against the chest lid, trying to get ahead of my own face, and I did not want to see his expression again. The quick glance I’d had through the blur of my tears was too much for me. He was watching me with something he had no name for that looked uncomfortably like anguish, was the one I had the least defense against.
He put his arms around me.
I should pull away. I was furious at him for excellent reasons that had not stopped being excellent, and turning into him was the wrong thing.
But I turned into him.
His arms came around me, and I pressed my face into his shirt and sobbed. His hand came to the back of my head, holding me tenderly.
“What if the queen raises him to be Fae?”
“She won’t until—if—she has a reason. Your family is leverage to her. Once she takes Tay off the board, the leverage is gone.” His hand shifted at the back of my head, fingers moving once through my hair. “Cara, please. Please trust me. I won’t let you lose Tay. My strategy will never go that far again—I’ve learned my lesson.”
It was a version of Fear I had never seen before. He rocked me against his body, trying to comfort me.
“I lost Ander’s friendship over strategy. I made the right choice for our rebellion—it would have been if he had struck at the queen, if he had not betrayed me trying to save Tesa, but we both lost everything.”
He sounded as gutted as I felt. “I will not leave Tay there a day longer than I have to. And I will lose the rebellion rather than lose him. I promise. If we have to…we’ll leave the kingdom. We’ll leave it all behind.”
His face was blurry through my tears, but his golden eyes were bright even through the haze.
“I won’t lose you too, Cara,” he said. “Not even over this.”
I should say something. There were still things unresolved between us, things that hadn’t gone anywhere; the fury was still there, exactly where I’d left it. It had just moved aside to make room for something larger and worse and considerably harder to defend against.
I turned my face back into his shirt.
His arms tightened.
Outside the window, the sea slammed itself against the rocks as it always did.
“Let’s get out of here for a little while before the Hunt.” His hands were gentle as he wiped away my tears with his thumbs. “Walk the city. Get some breakfast. Do some shopping.”
“You give me enough gifts,” I told his now-damp shoulder.
“Never,” he disagreed. “I owe you so much. Surely you agree.”
I couldn’t help but laugh, even though it had the desperate catch in it that one’s laughter has after weeping. “You and I have so much work to do, figuring out Lightbringer…”
“I don’t think she can be figured out. Shadowbane has loved her for a thousand years, and he is lost.”
Something tightened in my chest that wasn’t mine.
“But she’ll emerge when she is ready.”
I thought of Dair teasing me about the window. “Or when she must?”
He was careful, hesitating. He followed my gaze to the window, where the curtains fluttered with the wind.
“When she’s ready,” he said again.
Twenty
Fear
Itook Cara to the day market. She looked around the many stalls, then clung to my hand in the crowd—I enjoyed that more than I should, now that there was no reason except that she did not want to lose me—and I cut through the crowd for her sake, wherever she wished to go, as if I were her shield.
The two of us bought pastries and ate them standing up in a gap between two stalls. The sun caught her hair, illuminating the fine golden strands.
