Ru studied his face, and as he met her gaze, her breath caught. His eyes were honest and infinitely sad. He was nolonger Lord D’Luc, the regent’s advisor; no longer Lord D’Luc, her jailor. He was Hugon.
“It doesn’t matter?” she repeated, momentarily lost for words, hoping desperately to keep the real Hugon with her.
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t. I wonder, over the course of history, how many men have truly believed the rhetoric they so righteously spout?” He tossed the snowball, which Ru had forgotten he was holding, out into the dreary garden. “Don’t mistake me, Delara. I have made every choice while in full possession of my mind. But it was not in the name of Festra. Like you, I wonder if he isn’t simply a fairy tale.”
Ru stood almost witlessly in the snow. Had Hugon ever spoken like this before? Been so frank with her? She worried that if she asked the wrong question, she would startle him from this transparency, and he would be gone again.
But she couldn’t help herself. Maybe part of him wanted to be asked. “In whose name, then?”
His expression lost its last vestige of ice then. A young man still in his twenties, a man who had lost so much, stared back at Ru. “Dulcie Bellenet.”
Dulcie. The snow was falling thicker now, and the palace had faded to a ghostly-spired behemoth in the distance. Ru waited.
“At first, it was to prove that I loved her,” he said, his gaze drifting past Ru, perhaps to some memory that belonged to him alone. “That I was worthy of her. In the hopes that she might love me back one day. And then I stayed because I had nowhere else to go, no one else to go to. And now…” He turned back to Ru, studying her face as if he had only just begun to see all the facets of her. “For the same reason as you.”
“I stay because I have no choice,” Ru said.
“You could leave at any time,” Hugon replied, almost dismissive. “Taryel could take you. You could don a disguise and sneak past the guards. Run to Mekya, or Rothen, if you canhandle the cold. You could even murder Lady Bellenet, slit her throat, and then mine. There are ways. But that’s not why you stay.”
Ru knew that what he said was true. She did have a choice.
“Fear,” she said quietly. “I’m terrified of everything. Of what she’ll do to my friends, to the world, if I flee. If I fight back and fail. I’m afraid of the artifact and losing control.”
“There,” he said, lips curling. “Now you understand me.”
Ru stared at the lord. “I would never do the things you’ve done.”
He exhaled through his nose in loud impatience, turning away for a moment before facing her again.
“Delara,” he said, holding her gaze, “back at the Tower, I saw something begin to break in you, and it frightened me, what I was doing to you. I stopped the demonstrations then, against my lady’s orders. For you. Here at the palace, I’ve handled you with kid gloves while my lady would have had me flay you alive. I spared your brother. I’ve turned a blind eye to your scheming and defiance whenever I could. I have held back, resisted, done everything in my power to keep you whole when my lady would have seen you fall apart.”
Ru’s mouth fell open. “Wh…”
But he continued, speaking faster now, his blue eyes almost wild with intensity. “I saw your edges fraying. You were crumbling. If I had done the things she wanted me to do, said the cruelest words, pushed you to the physical and emotional limit thatshedesired, you would no longer be Ru Delara. You’d be hers, utterly. A thing of darkness, ruled by fear and rage. We know the artifact responds to you when you’re hurting. She wanted you to be in so much pain, all the time, that there would never be an end to it. So that the artifact would finally awaken. She wants itstill.”
“Iamin pain,” Ru said, almost reflexively. “You haven’t saved me from anything.” She didn’t know how else to respond, what to feel. She thought of the way he’d been since coming to the palace, distracted, afraid. Had he truly been defying Lady Bellenet all that time?
She thought Hugon might argue with her, or that he might disappear forever behind his carefully curated facade. Instead, he closed his eyes for a moment, snowflakes collecting in his hair. “I’m keenly aware of that,” he said. “If I were less of a coward, I would save us both. But I am not that man.”
“You could be,” Ru said, her voice breaking, knowing how delicate this moment was, how liable to shatter, and how badly she needed to keep it intact. “You could stop her if you wanted to.”
“There’s nothing I’d like more,” he said, “but you must know by now that I am not a brave man. I lost myself long ago.”
Something in Ru reached out to Hugon, a tendril of affection, some part of her that wanted to understand him, on a distant and profound level. “Is this why you brought me out here? To tell me I should pity you after all, or be grateful to you?”
Hugon laughed sadly. “No, Ru. You should hate me for what I’ve done. But…” He moved closer to her then, easing past the limits of propriety until she could have stood on tiptoe and pressed her cold lips to his with ease.
He lifted her chin with a gloved hand, and for a second, Ru saw her reflection in the blue of his eyes.
“In another lifetime,” he said softly, “you and I could have built such a kingdom. I see it so clearly. Our minds, our ambition… your goddamned idealism. We would have been the glory of Navenie.”
He paused, closing his eyes. Ru stood frozen, sharing breath with him, and in some distant, bright part of herself, beyond heranger and bitterness and fear, she saw the faded golden vision of a life unlived.
“If not for the manipulative fingers of fate,” he said.
It was as if the ground fell away for a moment, and Ru hung suspended, caught between this life and another. She imagined Hugon D’Luc as a child, laughing under Mekyan cypress trees. Bare feet in summer, reading by firelight in winter. A life free of Dulcie Bellenet, a life of wonder and discovery, of science and understanding. She imagined him as a young man at court, the elegant Lord D’Luc, his lips brushing her knuckles tenderly. In this world, there were no Children. There was no artifact, no Festra. Just a lord and a young academic meeting for the first time.
So easily, she reached for him. Her hand curled around the back of his neck, and she stood up on her toes.
