by Melanie Rawn
Sionell bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said any of it.”
“No, my dear. You shouldn’t. But not for the reason you’re thinking.” Turning to Meath, she finished, “Don’t drag it out too long. Everyone’s tired and needs a good night’s sleep.”
She left them, but did not go looking for Pol. She sought her own rooms and tucked herself into a chair where she could watch the stars. A long while later the bedchamber door opened—as she had known it would—and solid footsteps hesitated on the carpet behind her.
“Come in, Meath,” she said without glancing around.
“Sioned—”
“Did you expect me to be surprised, my old friend?”
“You knew?” He came to stand by the window, between her and the stars.
“Oh, yes.” Her voice sounded strange in her ears, like nubby silk, smooth but with a catch in it every so often. “As little as I remember of that time, I knew that someone watched. Andrade would never have demeaned herself to do her own spying. No one else would have been so scrupulously careful not to be noticed. And the feeling always faded before the sunlight did, so my watcher had to be eastward of me, where the sun sets earlier. Graypearl seemed logical.”
“I should have realized,” he admitted ruefully. “You’re not angry?”
“Should I be?”
“A little. Perhaps. I don’t know.” He sat in the window embrasure, leaning back against the wall. “Did you find Pol?”
“I didn’t look. It’s not me he needs to talk to.”
Meath frowned, then gave a start. “Sionell? They’ll rip each other’s eyes out. I thought he was going to slap her.”
“Lacking manners as he may, slapping her isn’t what he has in mind.”
“You’ll have to explain that one. And what you meant about why Sionell shouldn’t have said what she did.”
“Isn’t it obvious? She thought she’d hurt me, and she was sorry for it. But you know, Meath, now that Rohan’s gone, it doesn’t bother me much anymore. He was the one who was ashamed. Oh, not of Pol, but of what led to Pol’s birth. He was always afraid of that side of himself. The savage.”
“And you?” he asked softly. “What did you fear that you don’t anymore?”
She inhaled deeply and blew out the breath in a long sigh. “It’s a long time since I stopped being afraid that Pol would despise me for what I did. No, what I always feared was the look in Rohan’s eyes. As if he’d betrayed not just me but everything he was.”
“With Pol as living proof? But it wasn’t Rohan’s fault. He knew that.”
“What the mind sees clearly, the heart often clouds. Things happen as they happen, Meath. What will be arises from what we are.” She remembered the pebble and the pond, and the visions that had come to her there. “Pol is the result of scheming and lies and murder—but he’s also a living reminder that Rohan wasn’t perfect. No one likes to have that thrown in his face, but when one is High Prince. . . .” She ended with a shrug.
Meath shook his head. “Rohan was never that arrogant.”
“Of course he was. As much and sometimes more than the rest of us. He knew it, and laughed at it most of the time. But he was the High Prince. If he couldn’t govern his own life, how could he govern the princedoms?” She saw that she was drumming her fingers on one drawn-up knee. The emerald sparkled by candlelight. Only a sparkle, not a throbbing. “Rohan’s tragedy was that he tried to be a civilized man in a world of barbarians. His triumph was that he kept on trying.”
“Well, Pol’s tragedy is not who birthed him,” Meath said firmly. “That’s too easy.”
“I quite agree.”
He waited for more, but she said nothing. At last he prompted, “You still haven’t told me why Sionell was wrong to say it.”
Sioned glanced at him, another little smile teasing her lips. “Not because Hollis and Ruala shouldn’t know.”
“Because of Pol himself, then?”
“Meath, you are giving a very good impression of a dragon gnawing at a bone already picked clean.”
“To get at the marrow,” he growled. “Crack it for me.”
“It’s wide open and has been since she started talking.”
“Sioned—” he warned.
“Oh, very well.” She hunched down in her chair, legs curled to one side, hands clasped around them. “She knows what he is and it doesn’t matter to her. Being diarmadhi is just one more part of him, one more color in his pattern, if you will. But he’s painfully aware that to some people, this would matter very much.”
“Andry?” he guessed.
“What does Pol care what Andry thinks? In fact, he’ll probably enjoy flinging it in his face. No, this is someone much closer—whose love he fears will change, once she knows.”
Meath’s eyebrows climbed his forehead into his thick fringe of graying hair. “Meiglan? You’re crazy! She worships him!”
“Mm-hmm.”
“You’re not serious!”
“Never more so. And it’s precisely because she worships him. It’s not something you or I ever came up against, you know. We like what we are, we enjoy what power gives us. So does Pol. He loves using any kind of power. But what he possesses is different from the ordinary kind of Sunrunner. And that’s really what he wants to be. Ordinary.”
“Pol?”
“Well, look at the girl,” Sioned invited. “That delicate, shy, enchanting little darling of his heart, who adores him utterly and never questions a word he says. Personally, I’d find that stultifying, but . . .” She wrapped her arms around her knees again, resting her chin on them. “Don’t mistake me. I’m fond of Meiglan. But what she loves isn’t Pol as a whole man. She’s afraid of the Sunrunner and the man who talks with a dragon and the High Prince—”
“—and the diarmadhi? Yes, I begin to see what you mean. But they’re happy, Sioned. She suits him.”
“In many ways, yes.” All at once she grinned. “Though he got the shock of his life when she turned up at Stronghold! You should’ve seen his face!”
“I don’t think she deserves your contempt!” Disapproval knitted his brows back where they belonged.
“There, you see? You misunderstand me. I admire her courage in coming to the Desert. But I admire her even more for leaving. Pol is the center of her existence. She’s lost without him. I know something of how that feels,” she admitted without bitterness.
“Meiglan wouldn’t change if she knew. You could never make me believe she would, Sioned.”
“Your belief doesn’t count. Pol’s does. Sionell brought that fear back to him tonight. It doesn’t matter to Ell except as a potential source of power to defeat the Vellant’im. She won’t change. Meiglan might. And to make things really amusing, at the same time Sionell made him see something else—of which, thank the Goddess, she is blissfully ignorant.”
“I’m tired of guessing games,” Meath snapped.
“Oh, it was all over his face! He didn’t Choose the woman he should have, and he’s finally realized it.” Sioned rested her cheek against her knees, closing her eyes to the sight of Meath’s shock. “Goddess grant that it doesn’t become his tragedy.”
• • •
No one spoke to him or even looked at him on his way to his tower rooms. No one dared.
Let her claw him? Run away? Well, she’d drawn blood and he’d fled.
Damn her for doing this to him.
As if it was her fault.
He tore off his tunic and flung it anywhere. It slid across a table and a pair of crimson glass bowls caught in its folds as it fell, bouncing softly against the carpet. There wasn’t even the satisfaction of a crash. He had an insane urge to smash the crystal beneath his bootheels, grind them into the rug. Destroy a tiny part of the beauty Sorin had created here at Feruche.
Sorin’s Feruche. Not Ianthe’s, where he’d been born—as Sionell had pointed out to his shame tonight. He hated her for it.
He loved her more than pride or shame or his
own life.
He must be losing his mind.
Love shouldn’t hurt like this. Love was the finest thing a human could feel. There ought to be wine in his blood, not acid. That was what all the bards sang of, what all the tales and legends asserted was true, what everyone hoped for while growing up, what he had seen over and over again in the marriages around him.
It shouldn’t hurt this much. But how should he know? He’d never felt this way about Meiglan.
He could never love Meiglan this way, not if he spent a hundred years with her. Nothing in her could awaken this passionate hurt.
Gentle Meggie. Delicate, shy, enchanting Meggie.
She was everything Sionell was not.
That was how he had always thought before.
Now—
Sionell was everything Meiglan could never be.
He discovered he was pacing, and had crushed the bowls under his heels. Deep red shards littered the carpet like bloodstains. It didn’t make him feel better. He was deeply, insanely, desperately in love with a woman who was not his wife.
A woman who had adored him as a child, loved him hopelessly as a young girl. A woman whose love he had thrown away. A woman who had loved and wed someone else, one of his dearest friends, a man eminently worthy of her love—more worthy than he, Goddess knew.
A woman who despised him for being her beloved husband’s death.
He could almost hear the Goddess laughing at him. She could be cruel, that one. He had seen that aspect of her tonight in Sionell’s eyes.
Someone had the colossal gall to enter the anteroom of his chambers. He swung around and snarled through the open inner door, “Leave me!”
“Not before I’ve said what I came to say.”
Oh, perfect. It only lacked her actual presence to make his madness complete. He nearly lost his balance with pain and weakness and something close to fear. Sionell stood in the doorway, inevitable, implacable, her gaze like icy sapphires.
“So,” Pol said. “You still haven’t run out of swords to stick in me tonight?” Astounding; his voice was level and as cold as her eyes. He felt feverish, almost sick. “Well? Come on, then. Have at me.”
She said nothing. He couldn’t look away from her eyes. He had never noticed their exact color before—the dark gray rim around the irises, the flecks of silvery white paling the blue, making them as changeable from blue to gray as his were from blue to green.
“I’m waiting!”
Sionell bent her head, lowering her gaze to her clasped hands. “I came to tell you I regret what happened tonight.”
How dared she spare him—and herself? “Is that your idea of an apology?”
She drew a slow, controlled breath. “I didn’t say ‘I’m sorry’ because I’m not. But I wish it hadn’t happened that way.”
“I can’t imagine what you would have preferred.”
Her face lifted. She was tall, and long-limbed, and didn’t have to tilt her head back to look up to him the way Meiglan did.
“I would prefer that you hadn’t made such a mess of it. Nobody cares, Pol. It makes no difference to any of us that you’re Ianthe’s son by birth and not Sioned’s. But you act as if—as if it’s some kind of disease that will disfigure you the moment you admit who and what you are. I’ve never understood why you’re so ashamed. You didn’t choose your parents, or how you were born. You had nothing to do with it.”
“Stop telling me what I feel! What do you know about it?”
Her brows arched. “We’ve had this conversation before.”
More than nine years ago, in the Flametower at Stronghold.
“I don’t like it any better now than I did then,” he shot back.
“I know. I’m wondering when I can stop repeating myself. The people who love you will go on loving you, Pol. It’s not important to them—”
“The way you kept on loving me just the same, Sionell?”
She straightened abruptly, eyes kindling, hands clenching into whitened fists. This was the Sionell he knew, proud and passionate and quick-tempered.
“You know what I wish?” he continued, goading her. “I wish that once, just once, you and I could talk to each other without having it turn into a fight.”
“We do seem to make a habit of it,” she said through her teeth, but still controlled, still holding herself back.
“Yes, I knew you’d start shouting at me sooner or later. I must say I prefer it to being treated as if we’re polite strangers. I thought it would be for Tallain, and now for Maarken—my fault. The whole damned war is my fault. I should have—”
“Tallain? Maarken?” she echoed in bewilderment. “What have they to do with this?”
“They paid,” he snarled. “Everyone’s paying except me. I haven’t been more than bruised in any of the battles I’ve fought. Hundreds have died, been maimed for life—but I walk around whole and unhurt. There’s shame for you, Ell. Because what the Vellant’im really want is me. And everyone around me will prevent their taking me if it kills them. Which it’s been doing quite regularly.”
Sionell gaped at him, so incredulous that for a moment she couldn’t speak. Then her fist connected with his chin—no open-palmed slap but a real punch, with so much force behind it that his head snapped back and he staggered.
“You selfish, arrogant swine!” she hissed. “As if the entire world is centered on you! They don’t fight for you! It’s their homes and their families they care about, not you! You’re not bloody worth it!”
“Tell me something I don’t know!”
Her lips thinned and her jaw jutted out and he thought she was going to hit him again. Incredibly, a little gulp of laughter escaped her.
“Oh—oh, Goddess, you’re right! It is a habit! We always tell each other the truth and it’s always exactly the wrong thing to say!”
She was laughing aloud now, throaty and slightly wicked, mocking them both. He tried. He really tried, but it was impossible to resist.
“You witch!” he accused, grinning. “You’ve brought out the worst in me ever since I was a little boy!”
“Well, it’s mutual,” she answered frankly.
“Shall we start over?” He moved closer, holding out his hands. “I’ll even apologize.”
“Yes, you will—but only if I apologize first. I know you,” she reminded him, accepting his hands.
Touching her was a mistake. He should have known that.
All he meant to do was brush his lips lightly, formally, over her fingers. Instead he turned the palms over and pressed a kiss into each. She freed one hand—not snatching it from him but sliding it from his loose grasp to caress his hair.
If it had stopped then, they would have been all right. But it didn’t stop. Pol bent his head and kissed her.
Sionell caught her breath and tried to turn her face away. He sought her mouth blindly, smiling when her lips opened to him slowly, delicately. She tasted of wine and warm spiced taze. He gathered her close—carefully, as if the heartbeat against his chest was a fragile thing. Silly idea; she wrapped her arms around his ribs and held him fast and kissed him so deeply that his knees turned to sand.
Sionell tried to balance them both, failed, and they lurched toward the tapestried wall. Pol braced himself against the deep woolen nap with one hand, running the other down the curves of her body, coaxing her thigh up so her knee crooked around his hip. She cried out, a word that might have been anything at all. Anything but refusal. Anything but that.
He answered with her name. She shook her head, her hair coming loose of its pins, tumbling around her shoulders and through his eager fingers, glowing like dark fire against the blues and greens of the tapestry forest. She captured his face between her hands, never relinquishing his mouth.
All the bitter hurt became a sweet ache, totally unfamiliar, totally hers. She wanted him. He drew his head back, about to ask a lover’s question, and saw her eyes.
Beautiful, passionate, and cold.
She wanted him. Wit
h all her will she wanted him—because this was the worst hurt she could ever give him.
“Oh, no,” he whispered, stricken. “Not like this—”
“How, then?” she asked, and her voice was as cold as her eyes.
“Ell—why?” he begged, and then said words he had never said to anyone in his life. “Love me. Please. I need you to love me, Sionell—”
She turned her face away.
“Please!” He buried his face in the fragrant warmth of her shoulder, trembling as no woman had ever made him do.
A small, choked sound left her throat. She dug both hands into his hair and pulled his head up, and in her eyes now was reckless fire. His hands clenched in the tapestry. As she pushed him down, down, the green forest and blue sky ripped from the wall.
• • •
The candles had long since guttered out. Hearthfire glowed from the other end of the room, making of the bed a looming darkness and of their bed on the floor a shadow.
“This isn’t what I wanted for us,” Pol murmured into her hair. “Not the way it happened. You deserve better than—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Remembering the urgent, inelegant love they’d made in the tangle of the tapestry and their clothes, he said, “It matters to me.”
“I suppose it would.”
“You do love me.”
“Long ago. The boy you were.”
“You still love me.”
She sighed, warm breath across his chest. Her words were measured into the soft darkness like smoothed stone building a wall. “If I explain it to you, will you try to understand? I adored you when I was little, with all the trust of a child and the sweetness a girl brings to her first love. You never saw it. But it didn’t break my heart, Pol. I was a child. I grew up. I saw what was there to be seen, that you’d never make me your Choice. I wanted to be first with you as you’d been with me, and I knew that would never happen.”
“I felt the loss of you,” he murmured. “I’d always counted on what you felt for me, and one day it wasn’t there anymore.”
“I didn’t marry Tallain because I couldn’t have you. I married him because I loved him.”