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“Have I ever?”

“Once or twice, a very long time ago.”

I snorted my unwanted amusement at his parry. I didn’t want to be amused. I didn’t want anything but to catch my breath and return to the blood-spattered training ring to fight off the sultry croon of the bottles steeping in the afternoon sun, waiting for me.

The length of the Ard Rí’s robe swept the ground clean as he slowly made his way to the other side of the bench I sat upon, under an arch that would lead into the outer bailey. I could almost make out the behemoths of the gate from here.

He did not wait for me to ask him to join me. Did not wait for my permission. It was his bench after all. His bench. His bailey. His soldiers. His throne. His palace.

The strain in his groan that he tried to hide was not as stealthy as he thought it would be. I couldn’t help but slide my gaze over to him as he settled his back against the cool stonework with an appreciative sigh.

“So, which is it?”

I grunted again.

“Ah my Raven, still the eloquent wordsmith I remember so fondly.” The tenderness in his eyes had once been the only thing I had yearned for in moments like this, paired with the velvet smile he was now giving me. At one time, the pair would have laid waste to all my fortifications. “What ails you so, Raven? The last I saw you in this state was after the war.”

“What is it you need, Majesty?”

“Just your time.” He turned his head away from me and stared off into the distance as if we both were floating in the same small boat of remembrances. “Just your time, old friend.”

“My time is and has been at your disposal for a very long time, Your Royal Highness.” I kept my tone flat, giving him nothing to attach nor slither into.

“It is. As the Captain of my Guard, you are as dutiful as one could ever imagine. But I seek not the time of the Captain of my Guard. I seek the time of The Wings of Hope.”

I snorted derisively and let my eyes close against the bitter memories that name conjured, lest the ghosts haunting it grew too hungry. “That name has not been mine for a very long time, my Liege. As you well know. Your hand was the one that stripped me of it.”

He adjusted the panels of his long tunic-style robe and grew silent for so long I had to turn my head to see if he still sat with me.

Eventually he took a deep breath and exhaled it, the remorse thick on his breath. “That’s very true. I did.”

We fell silent again and he watched not the gates before us but the hem of his robe and the expertly carved cane in his hand. “We two share what others do not. We two share a volume—nay, a library—of horrors between us. Do we not?”

“Both of us, co-authors of atrocity.”

“What a lovely way to express the stench of burnt bones and crushed dreams.” His gaze slid to my battered face. “Is that all we are? Co-authors?”

“Do you expect us to be more than that, Majesty?” My brow twitched, fighting the urge to carve upwards at his audacity.

“Were we not once . . . more than that?”

“Once. A very long time ago.” My mouth turned down into a stern scowl. “But no more.”

“Do you think we could ever . . .” Cowardice swallowed the last of his overture.

“No.”

I watched him deflate like a broken doll and caved myself. I had never been good at denying him anything. Even as babes, if he cried, I would give him my own bottle to soothe him. “There is too much hate, too much bitterness, too much between us and the naive boys we were once before, Daróg. You are the Ard Rí now. I am a lowly Captain of the Guard whose only station is granted by your magnanimousness. When we were more, we were equals. I, Ard Tiarna of Arus Láigh, you Ard Tiarna of Bláth an Earraigh. Why do you ask this of me?”

A wry shard of a smile pierced his lips and left its blood stain to seep into his eyes. “I spent so much time in that single room in the Temple, I thought I would go mad. There was nothing to do but think. At first, I railed against it. I grew bitter and hateful under the weight of my own company. There was no hiding from my own thoughts. They were all I had for hours and hours on end. All I could do was think and wait the insufferable length between one visit to the next.”

He turned away from me, unwilling to share whatever emotion crept on silent claws into his face. “The longer I was there, alone with nothing but the bitterness of my deeds and the entertainment of my own accomplishments, I grew to see what I had never faced before.”

My brows furrowed, digging deep into the flesh of my forehead. I had known this man since the very moment he drew breath—my mother had me strapped to her back as she helped his mother bring him across the well of her body into the world. I had never known him to be a pensive man. I would let him talk himself to tears though, as long as it kept me distracted. As long as it kept the slight shake in my fingers from pushing me back to my room, and to the solace of the dark sister’s arms.

Every time I told myself it was just until the pain of her loss went away, it was just to chase the specter of ocean-kissed eyes from my mind. And in the amethyst embrace of the dark sister, they were gone for a short while. But they never fled for too long and when I woke in the morning, my body sapped of strength and my magic revolting within me, I added another stone to the cairn of my self-respect.

I hated that I needed it. I hated that I wanted it. I hated that the dark sister was the only thing that made the vicious knife within me stop twisting. The only thing that silenced the voice that reminded me whatever fate she had befallen, my little bug’s circumstances were the product of my own cowardice.