“Is that how it was with Ryven?”
I knew the question would come. I knew we would have to talk about him more but I wasn’t prepared with the emotional lump that formed in my throat immediately at the mention of his name. I thought I would get better but every time I thought about him, I felt myself getting worse. How did you move on from that? How could you heal when you felt like you lost something so vital to your life?
“With Ryven it was always different.” I swallowed back the lump and forced myself to talk about him. Maybe it would help. Maybe it wouldn’t. “I always wanted to know more. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know what made him tick, what made him angry, annoyed, sad, joyous. I wanted to touch him even when he was the biggest ass in the world. When he touched me, everything felt like a distant memory.”
She nodded and threw herself down onto the snow. The birds took that as their sign to leave and immediately leapt from the cliff. It didn’t take long for them to be distant specks in the sky. My legs were stiff from the strange, upright saddle but I managed to sit down in the snow beside her. The cold seeped through my leather and soothed the soreness from my limbs.
“Maybe I’ve been unfair to him.”
“I think maybe you’re right.” I gazed at her out of the corner of my eye.
“But you need someone with you at all times,” there it was. The kicker. The other reason she hadn’t pursued him in her loneliness. It came back to me again. How could she even see me as an ally with these feelings? I was certainly thankful we were talking about them. The last thing I wanted was resentment because of it all bottling up.
“Maybe it’s time I start training again.” I knew it the moment I touched the clouds. I could no longer be a shell of the woman I once was. I needed to live. I needed to try my best to find joy in every moment. I needed to laugh and love again, even if the latter didn’t come for a long time.
She deadpanned. “Do you really think we should leave you alone even after you’ve done your training?”
I nodded. “Yes, and eventually we will have more guards. We will have more people to fill these castle halls and the city outside.”
“That’s even more risk to your safety.”
“Then I think you’re fine to pursue your relationship or budding romance with Alric until we have more people around.”
“That’s irresponsible,” she muttered under her breath but I could already tell the wheels were spinning and she was thinking about what she could do to get Alric alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
JUNIPER
There was no wasting time when it came to me getting back to my training. Alric was knocking on my door before the sun was in the sky. Either he was extremely motivated to get alone time with Reva or he had no idea and was simply excited to break up the monotony of things. If he didn’t know about Reva thinking about alone time with him, I wasn’t going to be the one to spoil it. I was sure that he would eventually crack and tell me anyways if he already knew.
I thought my body hurt. I thought pushing my magic to its limits, fighting exhaustion and travel, and fighting my enemies was bad. I was starting to learn that there was always a point past that limit you thought you couldn’t get past. I thought that was when we’d trekked to this castle. I thought that was fighting exhaustion, starvation, and frostbite. Oh boy, was I wrong. I’d crashed right through the limit I thought I had and here I was.
Alric was certainly keeping up with his training. I didn’t know where but I regretted slacking now. The first lap was like torture. It didn’t take me long to get winded. When he whacked me with the wooden sword, I thought for sure my arm would go with it. He kept preaching something about muscle memorybut I knew I didn’t have it. How could I possibly have that when everything hurt this bad?
The only thing that kept me pushing forward was the thought that Reva would come to hate me eventually. The friendship we had would turn into duty and any formalities, any friendliness would dry up to dust. I needed her to have her own life outside of her duties to me. I needed her to have more freedom than the cloud. I needed her to have a release that included the man of her dreams.
I leaned heavily against the door to my chambers and wondered if I could use my magic to bar him out the next day. I wouldn’t survive if I kept up at this pace. I thought I was out of shape before, but this was a million times worse. I couldn’t keep going. I would have to go every other day.
It didn’t help that my motivations were different now. Before, I’d been all about training to spite Ryven. He had no idea what I was up to and it was my juicy secret. Now? Now there was no competition with someone else. There was no spite. All that was fueling me was friendship and I hated to admit it but there was nothing enticing about that. I could only push myself so far with the thought of Reva and Alric.
It was a good thing there wasn’t any kind of soil in my chambers or I would have gotten down on the floor to create a cocoon around myself and hibernated for the rest of the winter.
You mustn’t hide from your duties.
“Oh, you want to speak to me now, do you?”
I threw my bathroom doors open and rolled my eyes.
We cannot tell you everything. You must learn things on your own.
“How am I supposed to do that? You’ve filled my walls with romance novels, you don’t answer any of my questions when I do voice them out loud, but at this moment I don’t think thatentirely matters. You’re in my head, aren’t you? Plus, I’m not hiding. I just wish I could.”
There is much to come that you need to be prepared for. You cannot continue to hide in your rooms. You must make yourself better. Prepare for battle. Explore your new home. You will find that your people aren’t just the ones suffering across the sea. They are also here, in the woods. In the mountains. In the sky.
My jerky painful movements to get my clothes off stopped. “What do you mean? There are people here?”
They might not be your definition of people, but yes. They are your subjects just as the birds are.
