When he entered her tent, Ghisla was awake, and when he crouched down beside her, she sat up, silently greeting him. Her heart quickened, but it did not race, and her scent prickled his skin. She was warm and close, and he felt her eyes on his face.
“Alba sleeps deeply,” she murmured, “but you must listen and leave if she begins to stir.”
He nodded, his throat aching, his hands on his thighs. This was not what he wanted, this hushed conversation after all these years, but he would take it.
“You are hurt,” she whispered.
“I am fine.”
She raised her hands slowly, communicating her intentions, but when she rested her palms against his cheeks, he had to grit his teeth. It was not pain that made him harsh when she touched him. It was impatience. He had wanted to be near her for so long that he didn’t trust himself to be still. To be sane. To maintain the separation.
“Do not pull away. Please. I can help you.” She misinterpreted his discomfort.
“I will not pull away,” he ground out. It was the last thing he wanted to do.
She began to sing, the words so soft she barely said them, and his eyes began to stream.
Cry, cry, dear one, cry,
Let the pain out through your eyes.
Tears will wash it all away,
Cry until the bruises fade.
He groaned in relief, embarrassed by his tears, but she continued, her hands cool, her song tender, and he thought she might be crying too. He raised his hands and found her face, mirroring her position.
She was crying too, but she kept singing, softly coaxing his pain away.
Her face was small between his palms, the line of her jaw, the point of her chin, the tips of her brows, the lobes of her ears, all within his grasp. His thumbs rested at the corners of her mouth, feeling her words until her song ended. She did not move her hands. He did not move his.
“My rune is gone, Hod,” she whispered.
He nodded, a sob in his throat.
“Banruud burned his amulet into my hand.”
He nodded again.
“I tried to re-create the rune, but I could not. I sang and I sang . . . but you weren’t there.”
May the gods smite him now. He could not bear it.
“You thought I didn’t want you,” she moaned, and he knew she’d plucked the thoughts from his head as she’d leached the pain from his face.
He pulled away from her and dropped his hands, forcing her to drop hers.
He felt too much. He felt too much.
He couldn’t hear. He couldn’t smell. He couldn’t sense anything but her.
He rose and staggered from her tent, pulling air into his lungs and order to his thoughts as he walked deeper into the trees until he found a little clearing. For several long minutes he stood with his back to a big oak until his senses returned.
The camp was quiet, the night peaceful, the creatures stirring. He sensed no danger, no listening ears, no lurking strangers, but Ghisla had followed him.
“Hody,” Ghisla mourned, so softly. So sweetly. “Please don’t leave.”
He moved back toward her, wanting his staff, needing his shield, and knowing neither would help him now. He stopped several feet away, close enough to speak softly, far enough to not lose his mind.
“I thought you had . . . given up hope. That you had . . . given up . . . on me,” he whispered, trying not to scald her with the truth. “Arwin told me you would be queen of Saylok. He said you wore the king’s mark. Now I know what he meant. But I spent the last six years believing you were Banruud’s queen.”
“They call me Banruud’s harlot. His guards. They know I sing . . . but they are convinced, after all these years, that I do more.”
He did not want to hear it. It turned his belly into a gaping wound, and his rage into a mindless swarm. He could not afford to be senseless. He wanted to back away from her again, not in repudiation, but in self-preservation. He stepped forward instead, knowing that if he distanced himself now, she would think she’d repulsed him.
“I do not do more. I sing. I try not to be alone with him or to get too close to him. But there are times when I am . . . and . . . I do. I have navigated both as best I can.”
He dare not touch her, not in comfort or in support. He didn’t know if she would welcome it. She was rigid in front of him, her voice low, her breaths shallow. He let her speak, let her tell him what she wanted to say, and he kept his hands to his sides.
“The first time he kissed me, I told Master Ivo that it happened, and I swore I would never go near him again. Ivo agreed, but a week later, the king had a terrible headache and he kept sending for me. I held out strong until I found out he was giving ten lashes to every sentry who came back without me. Master Ivo scolded and stomped his feet, but the next week it became twenty lashes, then thirty, and one guard, not much more than a boy, died.
“I stopped threatening to quit singing and told him that if he forced himself on me, I would kill myself. You cannot coerce the dead. He must have believed me, for he has spared me that. But he is also afraid.”
“Afraid of what?” Hod asked, his voice barely above a whisper. He was trying to simply listen, to not react, to not lose his mind. Banruud would die. If it was the last thing he did, Banruud would die.
“He is afraid of lying with me and making me with child,” Ghisla said, so tremulously her words didn’t leave her lips. “Queen Alannah had one dead son after another until it killed her. If Banruud takes another queen and the same thing happens again . . .”
“It begins to look as though he is the problem,” Hod finished for her.
“Yes. And calls into question Alba’s parentage. He fears, more than anything else, losing the power her birth gave him. He took her from Ghost. I’ve seen it time and time again in his thoughts. He stole a daughter and rejected a son. Two sons, though he didn’t know about you . . . No one knew about you.”
He wasn’t sure how or how long she’d known . . . but Ghisla knew most things. She carried Saylok’s secrets on her small shoulders.
“Did you know, Hod?” she asked softly.
“It is what my mother told Arwin. It is what Arwin told me the day he died.”
She swallowed her sympathy. He heard it in her throat and in the tightness of her jaw, but she forged ahead, setting Arwin aside.
“And you feel nothing for him?” Ghisla asked.
“For my father?”
He heard her curt nod.
“I feel curiosity. And I feel disgust. For him . . . and for myself. I do not like the similarities between us. I do not like that we both love the same woman.”
He heard Ghisla’s heart leap and wondered if it was horror or hope . . . or both.
“He does not love me,” she said.
“I think he does. In his way.”
“And you do not love me.” She sounded so sure, so adamant, and he wondered how she could know so much and not know that.
“You are the only thing on this earth that I love.”
Her hands fluttered to her lips and then slid to her throat. But she did not profess her love in return.
“I don’t know where your allegiance lies,” she said, and the words were a quiet sob that she tried desperately to suppress.
“I have none. I have no allegiance to Saylok. I have no allegiance to Banruud, or the temple, or a clan.”