“Would you like to see?” I said. “What it can do?”
He nodded and made to stand, but I waved him back. I’d never shown this to anyone before. Then again, no one had ever saved me from a nightmare, either. Now this would have to serve as my tit for tat, since Kyven wasn’t getting his hands on any other kind.
I went to work, smoothing away a cut.
He sucked in a soft gasp. “That’s...astonishing.”
“Just tell me your story. While I work.”
Eventually, he must’ve come to grips with seeing my wounds knit into fresh, unblemished skin, because he said, “Last night, do you remember me saying I wanted to go everywhere? Do everything?Beeverything?”
I quelled a shiver. Given the circumstances in which he’d delivered those words, I couldn’t have forgotten if I’d tried. “Yep.” I concentrated on a particularly nasty scrape, one that required me to pick out a chunk of gravel, first.
“Well, that wasn’t always true. At its root, my story isn’t all that different from yours.”
I frowned. Whatever growing up as royalty involved, I doubted being dumped in a swamp ranked among the perks.
But I’d listen. I owed him that much.
“I wasn’t...wanted, you see,” he said.
I paused. I didn’t detect any hint of resentment, just a bare laying of facts.
His gaze turned distant in the mirror. “My parents...well, they had me by accident, and they never missed an opportunity to let me know. I was the last of my siblings, and my mother and father were tired by then. Enough to consider me a burden. The lesser of all my brothers and sisters. And you’d hardly know it now, but I felt that judgment so keenly. I was a quiet child. Sullen. After all, my parents thought of me as a mistake, so why shouldn’t that be true?”
A lump formed in my throat. “That’s hard for me to imagine. You being...”Unwanted, I almost said, then veered. “Sullen.”
He laughed. “Oh, but I was. Enough that I resolved to leave home as soon as I could. Which I did, when I was still young. Probably too young to be finding my way in the world, but I can’t say I have any regrets about it now.”
I made a sound even I didn’t know the meaning of. I had difficulty imagining a prince being permitted to just...go forth, but hewasthe youngest. So far down the line of succession as to be practically ineligible for the throne. And an early launch would explain some of his more surprising tendencies—chiefly, his willingness to spend his days lathered in a dirt-soaked sweat.
I guessed hehadn’tgrown up in opulence, after all.
“Anyhow,” he said, “after I left, I traveled all over. I think I was trying to find a better family than the one that hadn’t wanted me. But it turns out no matter where you go, people are much the same. Mainly interested in themselves.Loyalonly to themselves. In short, not like you.”
My shoulders curved as if to deflect his words. I wasn’t special. I didn’t know why he insisted on seeing me as such.
“But one night, I made peace with all that, in a dingy little theatre in Gray’s Reach.”
My hand slipped from the cut I was mending. Gray’s Reach? That was as far north as one could go in Elara—the frosty terrain of the patron goddess Gelidra, a territory renowned for its icymountains and cruel winters. I could barely conceive of traveling that far. The journey would take weeks. Months. “You’ve been to Gray’s Reach?”
“I’ve been to ninety-eight territories, if you can believe it. Only one remains. But Gray’s Reach was ten years ago, now. At the time, I was nineteen, and had never seen a play before. I’d also never drunk that much ale, but the show grabbed hold of me, anyway.”
“And that...changed your life? Aplay?”
He fought a smile. “Mmm-hmm. It was like a whole new world opened up, one I’d never known existed. Those people on stage, they were whatever they wanted to be. Whatever they said they were. And I thought...why shouldn’t the same be true for me? Maybe my parents hadn’t wanted me, but so what? What prevented me from wanting myself? What if the only person who could define me was...me? And in doing so, I could become whatever I wished?”
My breathing did something funny. It couldn’t be that easy, could it?
“When I sobered up, the first thing I did was join that theatre troupe. Which turned out to be everything I’d hoped for. We traveled all over Elara together, and each night, I tried on a new face. Figured out which ones felt like mine, be they the hero’s or the villain’s. I’ve been a pirate in my time, and a horseman. A warrior and a poet. I’ve even been a woman. I’ve also died a shocking number of times.”
Something tickled at the back of my mind. “And...you often fell in love in the evening, and out of it again by sunrise?”
He laughed. “You clever thing.”
Color stung my cheeks. Goddess, I’d thought he’d meant something very different by that.
“Anyhow, that was my life,” he said, “for a very long time. I tried on every identity I could. Kept the pieces I liked best, let goof the others. And along the way, I sampled every food. Soaked up every vista. Learned every accent I could wrap my tongue around. Which happens to be all of them.”
