I poked my head out the door. The corridors were empty, most people going about their daily business. Perfect.
I followed the golden light that told me where Griff was, pulling me through the castle like a compass needle finding north. I kept my head down, and luckily, most people ignored me. As I approached a side room off the Great Hall, I heard raised voices.
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” a short, portly man, red in the face, was shouting at Griff, waving something in the air.
Griff stood across from him, stone-faced, arms crossed, staring him down. I watched, a slight smile on my face. No one withstood that particular expression for long, myself excluded.
“Father.” A woman tugged at his arm.
The smile slid off my face. Of course Aine would be involved.
“A marriage contract has been signed!” the short man—her father, apparently—shouted angrily, shaking the document. “You expect us to just stand by while?—”
I refused to hear any more. I turned on my heel and spun away, walking as fast my battered body would allow—which admittedly wasn’t very fast. I made it through the main doors and started down the path that wound its way down to the village. I was nearly to the gates that denoted the end of the castle grounds when he caught up with me. I ignored him and kept hobbling along.
He easily kept pace with my faltering gait. “How much did you hear?”
“Are congratulations in order?” I asked bitterly, refusing to look at him, just focusing on taking the next painful step, then another.
He ran a hand through his hair, a sure sign of agitation. “Why are our fights always about Aine?”
“Probably because she keeps shoving herself between us. And you slept with her. And apparently you’re engaged to her.”
“It was years ago! I was a different person then!” he roared.
The volume of his voice made me flinch, and I realized just how much of a knife’s edge he was on. I stumbled slightly, my legs weakening as exhaustion caught up with me, but when he instinctively reached out to steady me, I jerked away from his touch.
“Are you telling me you have no exes in your closet?” he continued, in a marginally calmer tone.
“Fat chance you’ll ever have them paraded in front of you!”
“I met Tanner!” He was shouting again, his whole body radiating fury. “That boy might as well have tattooed on his face that he’d seen you naked and couldn’t wait to do so again.”
The crude reference to my past made me wrap my arms defensively around myself. “That’s different and you know it!”
People around us began backing away, torn between wanting to witness the drama of the princess and her Champion publicly fighting and fear of getting caught in the crossfire.
“How is it different?” he demanded, scrubbingboth hands through his hair roughly. “And I’m not engaged to her! If you had stayed and listened to the rest of the conversation, you would have heard me tell her and her father that I didnotsign a marriage contract, I would never sign a marriage contract with her, and I never wanted to see it again. And then I ripped it up and shoved it in his face, before coming to find you—where once again, you weren’t where I left you!”
“I’m not some object that you can abandon somewhere and expect to find exactly where you left it!” My hands were shaking, either from exhaustion or anger, and I shoved them in my armpits.
“No, sometimes you travel through time and then enter stasis! And don’t tell me what your plan is!” His voice broke slightly. “Do you have any idea what that was like? Feeling you slip away into nothing? I couldn’t find you! Couldn’t follow you! Couldn’t do anything but sit there for twelve hours, praying you would return to me!”
The raw pain in his voice almost broke my resolve. Almost. “You would have stopped me!”
“Damn right I would have! The risk was reckless beyond measure?—”
“It was my risk to take! We needed the information. Can you travel through time? No? Then fuck off!”
He continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “And then, when you returned, you fell straight into stasis. And I sat there at your bedside for two days, holding tight to your hand, hoping against hope that you’d again come back to me!”
We both stared at each other, breathing heavily. He looked to be a second away from kissing me or shouting at me.
“And what godsdamn information did you get?”
Shouting it was.
“I don’t know yet,” I snapped at him. Violet had transferred her memories to me, but what exactly was I going to find there? I added that, and this conversation, to the list of things I couldn’t process right now.
