Page 206 of A Courage of the Chosen

The last time I trod this path, I clung to him, unable to see my surroundings. Now, my Seelie eyesight adapts perfectly to the dim light, and the next ivy curtain at the other end.

The meadow is exactly as I remember.

The seasonal trees bare of leaves, their naked branches entwined with the evergreens like gnarled fingers. The long grass curled against the winter cold, and the stream cutting a path through the space. Heat lazily curls off its gently rolling surface, thanks to the naturally occurring thermal pool at the far side.

And on the log we once shared, as our relationship stepped into new territory, is the man who tried to break me, only to witness me rise into something that even he couldn’t defeat.

Tavish lifts his head as I approach. Half of his usually tanned face is patchy with blackened, scaly skin, and one of his eyes is the obsidian pool I became intimately familiar with, while the other remains the warm hazel that once ensnared me.

Seeing his beast form hunched over Callahan as I rode onto the field wasn’t as terrifying as I imagined. I knew a monstrous thing lay beneath his skin, I’d felt the barbarity of it in what he did to me, but finally witnessing that side of Tavish didn’t elicit the fear I thought it would.

This was what his life had been reduced to, and I pitied him for it.

He leans a large hand on the log to face me fully, and the other arm hanging between his legs ends in the paw of the creature he kept hidden for so long.

It’s like he’s caught between the man he was—who he could’ve been—and the beast he became. Two sides of the same coin.

Defeat frames his shoulders, a tangible entity that bears down on him. “It’s not how I wanted it to go.”

He turns to the pool we swam in, and nearly kissed in, while I keep my distance from him, hand close to the dagger he can’t see at my waist.

“What did you think would happen?”

I’m not sure why I’m entertaining a conversation with him. Tavish’s guard is down, his back toward me. It would be so easy to plunge the blade into his ribs and through his heart. Maybe there’s a part of me that’s desperate to understand.

“Honestly, I’m not even sure anymore. I’d committed to a path and saw it through.”

“Went real good for you, didn’t it,” I deadpan.

He huffs a solitary, humorless laugh. “There’s that bite. I’ve missed it.”

“Why?”

“Why what, my queen?”

“All of it. Why didn’t you push back against your father? Why did you let thousands of innocents fall to him? Why hunt my family down?”

Tavish sighs deeply. “I hunted your grandmother down because I believed she was the last light wielder, and I needed her power to control the darkness inside me. The mist wasn’t enough. I was always going to be a better ruler than him.”

“So, when she wouldn’t give it to you, you went searching for something else.”

Tavish agrees. “I thought she might have more family, but knew they’d be well hidden. Màiri was smart.”

I bristle at the casual way he speaks about her, like he didn’t hold her captive for nearly two years. I had a preview of what she endured, and I was almost shattered beyond repair by six weeks at his hand, never mind the length of time she was chained and beaten.

“So I kept searching, unaware of what I might find. I fooled my father into thinking it was to make sure Màiri truly was the last. It was easy to convince him of my loyalty.”

The barb stings. Raghnall wasn’t the only one who Tavish fooled, and had I been smarter, seen the signs earlier, Granny would still be alive.

Her death is on my conscience, and always will be.

“It was all going to plan until Claver. Until Broderic took you from me.”

“Until I learned who you truly were,” I retort.

“You knew who I was, Elsie. You just didn’t know all of me. Everything I shared with you still exists.” He places a fist over his chest. “In here. I wasn’t lying when I said I love you.”

It makes no difference to me now. Whatever I felt for Tavish is long since dead. He made sure whatever twisted version of us he held onto couldn’t survive long before we even knew each other.