“It will be better in time,” he assures me.
I peer up at him, still desperately clutching my chakram. His hand cups my hip, warm against Winter’s perpetual coolness.
“Thank you.”
Theron smiles, but before he can reply, another voice cuts him off.
“My queen!”
The sound of snow crunching under her feet follows Nessa’s cry, which is just as quickly followed by her brothers’ startled shouts. By the time I turn to face her, she’s halfway across the remaining stretch of snow between Gaos and me, her gown flapping around her legs.
She stumbles to a halt, panting between smiles. Monthsof freedom are finally starting to show—there’s a healthy plumpness to her arms and face and a soft glow in her cheeks.
“We’ve been searching everywhere for you! Are you ready?”
My face morphs into something between a wince and a grin. “How angry is Dendera?”
Nessa shrugs. “She’ll be appeased once the mine is open.” She shoots an awkward bow at Theron and grabs my hand. “May I steal her away, Prince Theron?”
He brushes his thumb over the curve of my hip bone in a movement that sends a shiver up my skin. “Of course—”
But Nessa is already hauling me across the snow.
Conall and Garrigan meet us just inside the first street of the city, Conall with a glower, Garrigan with an amused smirk.
“You should have taken us with you,” Conall reprimands. He realizes who he’s reprimanding and clears his throat. “My queen.”
“She’s perfectly capable of taking care of herself,” Garrigan defends me. But at Conall’s glare he tries to hide his smirk behind a rather aggressive cough.
“That’s not the point.” Conall whips to me. “Henn hasn’t been training us for nothing.”
I almost repeat Garrigan’s words, almost lift my chakram for emphasis. But the lines of strain around Conall’s eyes make me tuck my chakram behind my back.
“I’m sorry I worried you,” I say. “I didn’t mean—”
“Where have youbeen?”
A trembling squeak catches in my throat as Dendera comes storming up the road.
“I leave you alone forone minuteand you take off like—” She slams to a stop. I try to hide my chakram even farther behind my back, but it’s too late.
The look she gives me isn’t the furious glare I expected. It’s tired, drained, and as she closes the space between us, her forty-some years hang even heavier from her face.
“Meira,” she chastises.
I haven’t heard her, or Nessa, or anyone but Theron call me that in . . . months. It’s always “my queen” or “my lady.” Hearing it now is a burst of cold air in a stuffy room, and I gulp it in.
“I told you,” Dendera says, easing the chakram from my hand and passing it to Garrigan. “You don’t need this anymore. You are queen. You protect us in other ways.”
“I know.” I keep my jaw tight, my voice level. “But why can’t I be both?”
Dendera sighs the same sad, pitiful sigh she’s given me way too often these past three months. “The war is over,” she tells me, not for the first time, and probably not for the last. “Our people lived under war for too long—they need a serene ruler, not a warrior queen.”
It makes sense in my head. But it doesn’t make sense in my heart.
“You’re right, Duchess,” I lie. If I press too much, I’ll see the same expression I saw on her face a hundred times growing up—fear of failing. Just like with Theron and his scars, and Nessa too—if I catch her when she thinks no one is watching, her eyes become hollow and glassy. And when sleep brings her nightmares, she weeps so hard my heart aches.
As long as no one mentions the past or anything bad, we’re fine.
