She ignored the doubt she found there and went on the offensive instead, bringing her hand up to the golden planes of his face. Lux leaned his forehead against hers, but his soul was already retreating.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, pulling back from her.
“Please,” she begged. “For a moment, forget about everything else. Just one minute. I know it can’t last, but please.” She wanted to reach within him and pull the shame and anger and guilt from his muscles. She wanted to pluck them out one by one like needle-tipped feathers and use them to ink a sacred prayer into her hands.
“Don’t do it,” he whispered, his eyes closed against her skin.
“Why?”
“Because the dreams are hard enough to let go of. If you kiss me here, in the real world, where I can taste you, I’ll never recover.”
Even before Lux left her hands she felt everything within him vanish, sucked back into the vortex of his mind, shoved into drawers and baskets.
“What if you don’t need to recover?” she asked, her empty arms falling to her sides.
“I can’t,” he groaned, his face flushed in the moonlight.
“You can’t or you won’t?” She reached for him, but he stepped back, hands digging into the leather across his legs. Ryegrass crept over his ankles, holding him in surrender.
“I won’t,” he sighed, the weight of it settling between them.
“Oh.” She tried to catch her breath, but it caught her first, the air ripping through her lungs like a knife to the heart. She backed off, trying to get out from under the haze of him, the Tether stretching and groaning as she ventured farther.
“We can’t,” he said again, his shoulders falling as he finished fastening the cord around his neck. Everything between them dulled slightly, but not enough to survive. “You know the stories. Even if you weren’t a princess and I wasn’t his commander, his best friend,” he swallowed. A fresh wave of pain rolled over his shoulders. “We were born to hunt one another. I was honest last night when I told you I was terrified of what might happen… of destroying you.”
As she watched him steep in his own self-loathing, she couldn’t help but think it would be a godsdamned privilege to be destroyed by him.
“Why? Why would you torture yourself like this—me like this? You’ve said yourself a million times you have no loyalty toward Solaris, you’ve never hurt me and you’ve had every opportunity! When I had your life in my hands, before I even knew who you were, my bones knew I had to spare you. It was never even a question!”
His eyes remained focused on the ground, a warrior defeated. They closed gently against his bronze cheeks, his lashes wet with all the emotion he’d been burying for weeks. She moved toward him, unable to fight the Tether’s insistence, even muted by the amulet. Her fingertips were cold against his chin as she turned his face toward her.
“You have a king,” he whispered. “You don’t want some warrior with nothing to offer you. Ask your mother how much it cost her.”
Everything in her twisted into a furious supernova, ready to burst and birth an alternative universe where kings and queens didn’t exist.
“I don’t need a king.” She gripped his chin, holding onto him, forcing him to stay in the tension with her. “I don’t want a king! Surely, he would understand. It’s not as if we had anything deeper than a mutually beneficial arrangement. It’s not like this—not like?—”
“There are ways to sever a Tether,” he said, his voice distant, poisoned with something so bitter. He pulled his chin from her grasp. “It would be painful, but not impossible.”
She scoffed, “So that’s it, then? You’ve just decided for both of us? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You’ve been making decisions for me all along,” she said, the Tether between them threatening to snap as he got farther away.
“This isn’t about what we want. This is about entire courts and what they need right now. You have faced this decision before, and you know the pain it’s causing me, but it’s the right thing to do.” Lux turned, glancing up to the top of the ashen treeline.
“You’re a coward.”
“And you’re reckless!” Lux raised his voice, his temper flaring to protect himself from the other feelings dancing below his skin. “For millennia, our ancestors have stumbled over one another and left nothing but devastation in their wake. I come from a long line of men bred to hate you, to hunt you. It may lie dormant now, but I cannot spend the rest of my life wondering when the final thread will snap. When my cursed bloodline will drag you into some horrible danger I can’t protect you from. This godsforsaken bond might make you believe we’re special, but we’re not. No one is above the gods’ sick twists of Fate.”
“What if?—”
“No. No what-ifs! No maybes. We’re not playing some lighthearted game here. The gamble is that we either will or won’t cost one another our lives. That’s why I did what I did to stop it. It’s why I’ll find another way to stop it.” Lux stomped through the meadow, set on a path back to the palace.
“I might be reckless, but at least I’m honest about how I feel,” she spat. “I didn’t need a Tether to force me, either, Lux. It would have happened anyway, and we both know it.”
He spun and she crashed into him, the contact a delicious relief in her chest. He grabbed her by the shoulders, dipping his face so that he was staring directly into her eyes as he ground out the next few words, battling his emotions into submission.
“You will marry him. You must marry him. You two will do good for the courts, please,” he said, his voice shaking with a twist of rage and fear.
“And what of you?”
