Jennifer Armintrout - Veil Of Shadows

The noise of his movements continued. He was nearly beside her now, but she held still. She would not meet him. “It is easier to blame myself for my part, than to point a finger at those who were ultimately wronged most.”

She felt the heat of him beside her, and she wanted to lean on him, to feel the reassuring presence of him against her body. But he’d hurt her, and he’d been so angry only moments ago. She could not use him as her refuge now, as she had in the nights since they’d come aboard the ship.

“There are so many things that are not in our control in our lives. We cannot hold ourselves responsible for them.” He sighed and leaned back on the wall. “You killed Bauchan, and Flidais. You lied to your mother. But your lies did not make Flidais betray her. You did not make Bauchan come to the Court with ill intent. You did not loose the Waterhorses upon our people.”

She rocked herself from side to side, tried to sit up, but the motion yielded no result save for exhausting her. She lifted her head and tentatively laid it in his lap. She did not want to take such comfort in him if she had no guarantee that they would not part once things had been settled with the Upworld Queene. And she did not wish to admit that that knowledge frightened her more than any sentence that Queene Danae could pass against her.

“You say that, because it is easy for you to say it and feel that you’ve done me some service by your words.” Her breath heated the fabric of his robe beneath her cheek. “But if I said them to you, you would not believe them.”

“I have nothing that I blame myself for,” he answered too quickly, with too much false confidence. “I am fulfilling my vow.”

“To me.” She did not know where these words came from, for she could not have thought them herself. “You fear that you failed someone else.”

He took in a sharp breath, and the muscle of his thigh tightened beneath her cheek. “Who told you such a thing?”

“No one told me anything, explicitly. But I could read the truth of it in your face as you gazed on the water.” A sudden, cold shock proved it. “You looked at it as though it were your enemy. You gazed into the depths as if you hated and feared it, but could not look away from it.”

He took another breath, ragged, as though he held back with great effort something that he would not allow to be heard out loud. It was a struggle he could not win.

When he spoke, it was from a place as shrouded in fear as the clearing from her dream. But this time, the dread did touch her, so palpable was it in his words.

“The night I came to you, when I…fulfilled my promise to tell you of what transpired in your mother’s Council…” He halted, swallowed audibly. “You were not the only one to have a Darkworld lover. There was a woman, a Gypsy woman. She was a girl, really, perhaps younger than you. I never asked, and she never told me. They are timeless, ageless, her people. At least, they seemed so. She had asked me to go with her, to flee the Underground and stay with her always….”

The words struck her like a weapon she did not see coming, and the wound in her deepened, split anew by the pain in his voice. If her hands were not bound, she would have covered her ears to keep from hearing, for she knew what would come next.

And, as if knowing that his own sorrow would cut her to her core, he sharpened his words, formed them carefully and slowly. Perhaps he said them for the first time. “All of her people were killed. By Waterhorses. And her, as well. I left you that night and found them slaughtered.”

Her mouth was thick, as though the moisture there had fled to become the tears that filled her eyes. “If you had not come to me, would you—”

“No!” He threw the word down like a gauntlet. “You cannot blame yourself for their deaths. You cannot involve yourself in it, and do not play at it as though you could possibly share my pain!”

She squeezed her eyes shut, let a tear fall. Not because she believed she had any connection, no matter how superficial, to his tragedy, but because in her connection to him his hurt was too much to bear witness to.

“Anyway,” he began, softer now, “it was too late. They had been dead for some time.”

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