My own irritation rising to meet hers, I gave her a long, very calm look. “I appreciate that you love me enough to worry about me, but it’s simply old memories plaguing me, like a bad joint that aches when the weather changes.”
“Tell me anyway.” She raised her brows in challenge, but her voice held an almost pleading note.
Uncertain of my footing, I wondered where this was going. She didn’t usually press like this. “Essla, there are things my vows prohibit me from speaking of. I can’t tell you.”
Her winged eyebrows lowered, forking into a dark frown. “Those vows again.” She spat the words as if they were distasteful.
“Those vows again,” I agreed. I found I’d folded my own arms in a mirror of hers, unconsciously harmonizing with her even when she pissed me off. Too late to undo it without tipping her off. “They are nothing important, especially compared to your other concerns. My secrets have nothing to do with the security of your realm. You needn’t be concerned that I would keep something from you that you need to know.”
Her frown cleared, leaving her expression carefully blank, though her lips parted slightly to draw in a quick breath before she firmed her mouth and her gaze went steely. “I see,” she replied in a neutral tone. “I suppose I’d foolishly believed I could listen to your worries as you’ve so often listened to mine. I apologize for my presumption.” She stood to go.
I cursed myself. I’d hurt her, thoughtlessly and clumsily. Putting a hand on her arm, I stopped her. “Essla, I’m sorry.”
She stared past me, her throat working as she swallowed whatever words sprang to her lips. When her gaze met mine, her eyes had gone silvery with the sheen of tears she’d never permit herself to shed. “We’re all growing further apart—have you noticed? Dafne is preoccupied with her pregnancy and translating for Kiraka. Ami is ensconced at Windroven with her lover and the children—I’ll never pry her out of there.”
“And Andi?” I prompted. Of everyone, I knew Ursula missed Andi the most.
“More like our mother every day,” she replied, weary affection in her voice. “Of us all, she’s carrying the heaviest burden, so I do my best not to add to it. Everyone is devoting themselves to preparing for this war. We all know that Annfwn will be where Deyrr attacks. And here I sit in Ordnung, doing nothing, far away from it all.”
“You’re hardly doing nothing.” I could only wish she’d do a bit less. “You wake before dawn and rarely go to sleep before midnight.”
She shook her head, studying her boots. “All meetings and talk, talk, talk. I’ve lost most of my Hawks to other duties—Jepp and Marskal off fighting the battles I used to.”
I understood what she meant. She and I, both creatures of action, accustomed to leading from the front. But being High Queen meant she’d had to return to Castle Ordnung and direct strategy from safe inside walls. As for me, my Vervaldr had all been released from their contracts, some almost certainly returned to Dasnaria, while others were absorbed into Ordnung’s guard, or dispersed into other parts of the troops we had amassed in defense of the Thirteen Kingdoms.
Though I’d taken over for the unfortunate Lord Percy, one of the first victims of Deyrr’s occupation of Ordnung and former Captain of the Guard, I had no real title or role. I wasn’t fool enough to believe that I could ever be more than Ursula’s unofficial consort, nor did that bother me. That was the nature of the vows I’d given her, to support her in any way I could.
That also meant keeping her safe.
“You’re needed here,” I told her, emphasizing what she already knew. “You’re too important to risk on the front lines of this fight.”
“I know that in my head. My heart is another matter.” She took a deep breath, uncharacteristic vulnerability in her eyes when she met my gaze. “Speaking of which, I didn’t expect you to disappear on me.”
The vague dread coalesced, sharpening into wary surprise that she’d say such a thing. “I’m right here,” I said, and turned her so she faced me, squeezing both shoulders so she’d feel it.
“Are you sure?” She studied me, emotion banished, all keen observation. “You haven’t been the same since my injury.”
Shocked, I let go of her, sudden cold numbing my fingers nerveless. The events of that terrible day flooded back in excruciating and vivid detail. The heat of the tropical sun and the pitch of the Tala ship beneath my boots, rocking in the gentle waves. The eerie silence and the sharp scent of blood, raw meat, and entrails spilling from Ursula when the High Priestess gutted her. How I stood there frozen, helpless, unable to move in the slightest. All those years I’d built my strength, honed my skills, to make myself into warrior enough to protect the woman I loved and it had all been for nothing.
I hadn’t been able to protect Ursula any more than I’d been able to save Jenna. Fury and fear warred in me.
“Your injury?” I sneered the word, unreasonable rage firing in me that she could speak of it so casually. “Let’s rephrase for accuracy. You mean when you very nearly died.” So pale and weak in my arms when she collapsed, her blood pooling on the deck around us. If not for magical healing, she would have died there. For long moments, I’d been sure she was gone. And I’d been helpless to do anything about it.
A flare of unhappy triumph crossed Ursula’s face. She was too much the warrior not to be pleased with her accurate piercing of my emotional armor, and too much the woman who loved me not to be sorry about it. “I didn’t die.”
“It was a near thing… and you’re still not totally healed.”
She opened her mouth to protest and I cut her off with a chop of my hand through the air. “Don’t lie to me,” I bit out. “You don’t have your former strength and speed. Your color still isn’t right, and you won’t get better when you work yourself to the bone and refuse to rest.”
“My kingdom faces attack from a two-pronged enemy, either of which could devastate us entirely on its own, and they’ve joined forces. I’ve been betrayed from within, I’m still new to my throne and utterly out of my depth. I can’t afford to rest.”
“I understand that,” I ground out. “But you can’t afford not to rest. If you don’t care about yourself, at least think about the people who love you.”
“I love you, too,” she replied seriously. “Because of that, I’m suggesting that whatever is going on inside your head is getting to you. Normally you’re very good at leaving the past where it belongs, but lately you’re letting it eat away at you. You were the one to teach me that ignoring emotional wounds weakens us. If you won’t talk to me about it, then find someone else to listen.”
I scrubbed my hands over my scalp, willing my brain to kick in with a reply to soothe her. “I just worry about you is all,” I said. “There’s nothing else that needs discussing.”
“Like I worry about you?” She parried.
“No.” I called on the meditative calm of the Skablykrr that had always served me so well, but couldn’t grasp it, my hand groping in the mental dark and coming up empty. “That’s different,” I threw out, a poor defense and we both knew it.
“Is it?” she asked coolly, neatly knocking that aside and leaving me open.
I had no answer, nothing else to offer. She dipped her chin in wry acknowledgement, then shrugged it off. “You’re a stubborn man, Harlan, and I’ve got other things to do this morning than bash my head against this particular wall.”
She put her hand to her sword and took a few steps, then changed her mind and turned back to me, a certain resolve in the line of her jaw.
I knew that look well, though it usually meant she’d decided to draw a metaphorical dagger she’d hidden up her sleeve in dealing with a recalcitrant ambassador or courtier—and the strike of that hidden weapon would inevitably be devastating. Though I’d seen her use it on others, she’d never turned it on me. She’d softened me up, deflecting and tiring me, all in preparation for this particular blow.
She scanned the immediate area, checking that the guards still gave us
privacy, making sure her battlefield remained clear.
I braced myself. This would hurt.
“I know about Jenna,” she said.
~ 3 ~
No amount of bracing could’ve prepared me for that.
Hearing the name I hadn’t spoken—or heard anyone else speak—in over twenty years fall from Ursula’s lips shocked me as little else could. She’d timed her attack perfectly, distracting me by evoking the fear for her that plagued me, outmaneuvering me, then slipping under my guard to deliver that strike directly to my heart.
She watched me with keen attention, no doubt cataloguing every whisper of reaction. I’d had to fall in love with a woman with an intellect as razor sharp as her sword. I should’ve known she’d ferret out my secrets eventually.
Even those I’d vowed to keep, because they weren’t only mine.
“How?” I finally managed to ask, once I had the breath to sound reasonably in control of myself. “Kral told you,” I realized, my thoughts finally catching up.
My brother Kral had unexpectedly defected to our side of the war, becoming the only member of my family I didn’t have to dread facing on a battlefield. He also formed the third point of our lethal family triangle: Kral, Jenna, and me. The bad blood had festered between us for years until we agreed to put it away. Not that we’d actually dealt with it. I’d thought he didn’t care to discuss it any more than I did.
“Not Kral.” Ursula replied, confirming that. “He’s as tight-lipped on the topic as you are. Jepp told me.”
“Jepp,” I echoed, feeling thick and stupid. Former scout in Ursula’s elite troop of Hawks, Jepp had inexplicably fallen in love with my domineering and arrogant brother, and was the reason he’d left the Empire. She didn’t give up her footloose ways and settle down—she hadn’t changed that dramatically—instead she sailed the seas with Kral on his ship the Hákyrling. And Ursula had restored Kral’s title and status as General, but of our forces in the field. The Hákyrling was patrolling the magic barrier, watching for incursions from Deyrr and monitoring the build-up of the Dasnarian navy.
Surely Jepp hadn’t learned about Jenna from Kral. Ah… but, Jepp had gone to Dasnaria as a spy. She’d been to the Imperial Palace.
Acutely aware of Ursula’s scrutiny as I put it together, I sat, the weight of the past and the secrets I’d carried so long suddenly feeling too heavy to bear. “Jepp learned the story in Dasnaria.” I nodded to myself when Ursula’s expression confirmed it. “Who told her?”
“Your other sisters, Inga and Helva—more sisters I had no idea existed—told her the whole story. She reported it to me.”
I winced, rubbing my eyes with one hand, bracing myself on the wall with the other, as I felt oddly dizzy. Of course Jepp had reported everything to her captain and queen. “How long have you known?”
Ursula’s mouth thinned, not pleased with that response. Truly I was lucky she hadn’t cut my throat in my sleep. The last time she’d discovered I’d kept a secret from her about my family—that I was a former prince of the imperial household in Dasnaria—she’d drawn blood, then coolly cut me out of her life. Not that she’d had much luck with that. As she’d noted, I could be a stubborn man.
“I debriefed Jepp on the Tala ship while I was recovering from my injury.” She raised a brow, daring me to quibble with the term again. I wouldn’t. I needed to pick my battles with her very carefully now.
I nodded, assimilating all of it. That had happened months ago. All this time, Ursula had known and said nothing. I could take comfort that she’d continued to share my bed and welcomed me with her body, but I could see now that we hadn’t been quite the same—and that I’d been too preoccupied to notice.
“It seems then that the distance between us isn’t entirely of my own making,” I said, more of a feint than a strike, just to test her defenses.
Her jaw tightened, her thumb caressing the faceted ruby in the hilt of her sword. “I’m right here,” she said, tossing my words back at me. “And I’ve given you plenty of opportunities to tell me all of this. Including just a moment ago.”
She had, I realized, asking me all those leading questions about my family, about the bad blood between me and Kral. Asking me to confide my worries in her. And I’d deflected them all, out of habit, in part. Also out of the comfortable assumption that she didn’t know that history. Over time it had been easier not to talk about any of the sisters I’d left behind, when I talked about Dasnaria at all. That’s the great problem with lies of omission—over time, they begin to feel less like lies than an alternate truth, one that becomes a façade that weakens with age.
Because I hadn’t replied, she continued. “Jepp explained that these vows of yours are related to this family history, so I should give you latitude for that—in fact, she thought long and hard whether to tell me everything she knew—but I’ve had a lot of time, and enforced inactivity, to contemplate this and I think there’s a lot you could have confided in me, had you chosen to.”
I couldn’t argue with that. The fact that Jepp had considered not reporting everything she knew… that would’ve lodged in Ursula’s heart, and craw, as well. I’d well and truly fucked this up.
I spread my hands, making myself meet her penetrating gaze. “I apologize. I’m at fault and I don’t expect forgiveness.”
She stared at me, unrelenting. “You do that so easily, but I don’t think this is that simple for me.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t tried to kill me,” I ventured, trying for the joke.
“I thought about it,” she answered crisply, but without her usual fire. Then she looked away. “I don’t understand why you wouldn’t at least tell me about Inga and Helva. Brothers. You only ever mentioned brothers. You know everything about me—things no other living person does, because you wouldn’t settle for anything less—and you didn’t trust me with the smallest thing. All I can think about is what else I don’t know about you. I’m not at all sure where to go from here.”
“Court should be starting soon,” I offered, still hoping for levity. The other possibility, that I’d destroyed her trust in me, didn’t bear thinking about. Ursula didn’t trust easily. What another woman might be able to forgive and forget would feel like the ultimate betrayal to her.
She leveled an icy glare on me. “As you so love to say, they can hardly start without me.”
I braced my hands on my thighs, studying them. “Why today?” I asked.
“Excuse me?” She’d drawn her High Queen imperious attitude around herself like a protective cloak, the offense clear in her voice. When I looked at her, she’d indeed straightened her spine, looking every inch the warrior queen.
I barreled on, eager to at least extract myself from this corner she’d boxed me into. Standing, I gestured to the heights of Ordnung’s walls, arguably one of the very few places we could speak without being interrupted or overheard by the ubiquitous staff and anxious courtiers who plagued every moment of Ursula’s day. She’d picked this spot and plotted her attack, meticulously planned and devastatingly thorough.
“Why did you choose today to confront me with this, when you’ve known for months?” I clarified. “You could’ve told me you knew long before this, instead of asking leading questions, testing me. You let me hang as you reeled in the rope.”
“Don’t you dare try to turn this back on me,” she warned, quiet fury in her tone, her fingers sliding down to curl around the hilt of her sword. She stood just outside my reach, were I to draw my own broadsword on her—a distance she knew precisely from all the times we’d sparred.
“Will you draw on me?” I asked softly. I didn’t think she would. We’d come a long way with each other, and she’d promised never pull a weapon on me again. Not a physical one, anyway, or rather, not with lethal intent. But my Essla was a woman of strong passions and not always predictable. I could best her with my strength where she outmatched me in speed.
I, however, could never harm her. Not physically. In her righteous
anger, she might have no such scruples with me.
“I’m tempted,” she replied.
“Then do it,” I dared her. Better to fight it out and get it done.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Then she sagged, releasing her blade and lifting her hands to her face. “It would be easier. I’m aware that’s one of the ways you manage me.”
Reflexively, I stepped toward her, to comfort her, to—
“Don’t.” Her hard voice cut me short. She dropped her hands and gazed at me. “To answer your question, two reasons why today. The first…” Her voice shook as it never did, and she firmed her jaw. “I think I couldn’t stand it anymore. I promised you a long time ago that I wouldn’t walk away again without letting you explain, but I waited every day for you to tell me about this—even pieces of it—and day after day you pretended it wasn’t there, carving a hole between us. Yes, it would be easier to call you out, to match blades and see who takes first blood, but that would be redundant. First blood is yours. This cut me, Harlan. Cut me to the quick and I’m still bleeding.”
“Essla, I’m sorry,” I said, fully realizing the weakness of those words, how ineffective to express anything at all.
“I’m sure you are.” She smiled slightly, but it didn’t touch the sorrow in her eyes. “And I wish that could be enough for me. Maybe it’s a flaw in my character, but it isn’t enough. There aren’t that many people in my life I can believe will always tell me the truth—now more than ever. You were one of those people.”
The past tense hit me like a knife to the kidneys, and I groped for breath to reply.
“You have a choice, I think,” she continued. “The second reason is that starting two weeks ago I received a series of messages from Dasnaria, relaying information supposedly leaked from the Imperial Palace.”
I grappled with that equally astonishing news—as well as the fact that she’d kept it from me. “How do you know that’s where it’s from?” I asked.
“I don’t have a way of verifying, do I?” She snapped. “The information is coded to make me think it comes from someone in your family. ‘From inside the fist,’ it said.”
The Dragons of Summer Page 2