CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Mikael stood only a few feet away, broadcasting relief at the sight of her. He took in her borrowed finery, thinking loudly that the Anvarrid-style dress dragged on the ground, made for someone taller with a straighter figure. Her hair had been carefully plaited and bound up, he noted, with ribbons that actually matched her clothes for a change.

“You look much better,” he said politely. “I hope you’re rested. You kept falling asleep last night.” He took her gloved hand and drew her down to the second landing. He sat with her on the steps, much as they had that first day she’d come here. “I guess I’m supposed to be saying good-bye,” he told her. “I probably won’t see you again for a while.”

Because of the rules. Because they forbid him to associate with a child.

“I’m not one of your people,” she attempted. She could almost feel his apologetic smile.

“That doesn’t excuse me from obeying the rules,” he said. “It’s been overlooked so far because Cerradine needed us working together. Otherwise we would have been prevented from meeting.” Hurried thoughts rushed through his mind, of things he shouldn’t consider. “I put you in a great deal of danger, but I couldn’t have found Elisabet in time without you. I wanted to thank you for your help.”

Through her light touch, she could sense the ache in his knee and his sore jaw. He seemed to have a sore throat now, too. All she had was a tender cheek and a cut on her ankle. “I wanted to.”

“That might have been because I badly wanted you to help,” he said. “I have the ability to overrun people’s wills, particularly sensitives. I took advantage of that, and I’m sorry.”

He surprised her with his remorse, as if he’d forced her to help him. “I know who I am when I’m alone,” she said. “I never answered your question, but I gave it a lot of thought while I sat in my room the day before yesterday.”

“And?” He truly wanted to know her answer.

“I’m just me. People have ideas of what they want me to be like, and it’s easy for me to be what they want when I’m near them, but at heart, I’m still myself. It’s easy for me to be around you because we’re both a lot alike to begin with. I get into a great deal of trouble without your prompting. You didn’t force me to be different from what I already am.”

He didn’t speak for a long time, thinking that any changes he’d forced on her had already happened. They had to have met before, his mind rambled, and the damage had been done then, changing her life irrevocably. “I hope that’s true,” he finally said, not believing his words.

Shironne sighed. “I wish I could be around the next time you have a dream. Perhaps I can locate a mirror in it.”

“What?” She’d surprised him with the change of topic.

“To find out what I look like.”

“You saw yourself in my dream?”

“Yes. Well, part of me. I wore the tunic I wore the first day you saw me, and I could see my hands—which was strange. I’ve not seen them in so long. Actually, I saw what you think my hands look like. You didn’t know about the scar on my palm, so when I looked down, it wasn’t there.”

“What scar?” he asked, a strange tension in him now.

“I have an old scar on my palm.”

“May I look at it?”

It seemed a reasonable request, so she tugged off her right glove. She felt his leather-gloved hands taking hers, curiosity in his mind.

He turned her hand over, exposing her palm. “Do you know what that scar looks like?” he asked.

Shironne blushed. The scar cut across her palm, straight and shallow, just like an Anvarrid wedding mark. “Yes, I know.”

He asked himself how she’d gotten it, thinking loudly that it was a common place to have a scar, his mind simultaneously whispering the opposite.

Embarrassment rushed through her. It had been such a childish incident. She hated admitting it. “It happened when I was eleven. It’s embarrassing, so please don’t laugh.”

“I would never do that,” he said, his undertone revealing amusement anyway.

She snatched her hand away. “Oh, very well. My mother took us to the summer fair. She wanted to find out what Dahar looked like. She’d never seen him or even a likeness of him, so she took Perrin and me and we went to the melee because she’d heard he was one of the judges.”

He knew of the incident. She could tell that from his mind. “You know what happened, don’t you?”

“You fell over the railing into the arena. Were you terrified?”

Then she knew.

She’d landed atop a fallen fighter. He’d tried to catch her, but there had still been a small knife in his hand. It had actually taken her a moment to notice that her hand was cut, but he’d wrapped her hair ribbon around it and lifted her back up to her mother.

That had been Mikael Lee.

“No, I wasn’t,” she finally answered him. “It was an adventure. I was scared when the other fighters came in our direction, but you didn’t let them get near me. I could sense that you wanted to keep me safe.”

He laughed softly. “Do you remember anything else?”

Shironne remembered the incident as vividly as if it had been yesterday. “Oh yes. It was the first time I had ever seen anyone Family up close. You had blood on your face and a helmet on, but I remember your eyes. You had beautiful eyes. I fell in love with you a little bit,” she admitted. “I was eleven.”

Shironne tried to fit that memory of startlingly blue eyes together with what she knew of Mikael Lee now, wishing she’d seen his face better that long-ago day. She pressed her lips together, fighting back a sharp pang of regret. She would never know now what he looked like.

“They teased me mercilessly for a long time after that,” he said. “They made jokes about little girls falling for me.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said, although it wasn’t quite true. She was sorry they’d teased him.

Mikael laughed again. “No harm done. I wondered about you from time to time—if you were all right. I didn’t know it had left you with a scar.”

“It’s not important.”

“Let me see your hand again.” He carefully took the tips of her fingers and touched them to his left palm. He’d removed his glove.

His thoughts winged around her, telling her that he looked at his scarred hand sometimes and wondered about the girl from that day. He didn’t actually remember it, but he’d ended up cutting her somehow, not intentional at all, but quite permanent. His blood and hers, across the knife in a strange parody of an Anvarrid wedding ceremony, but without the grand temple, only the sand of the fairground arena.

He turned his hand, twining his fingers with hers. His thoughts tumbled into her consciousness, mentioning things he should not: that they were bound; that the tie wouldn’t be broken by anything save death, but he could go far away and not trouble her overmuch; that perhaps she might not mind his presence; that she was too young to have all her choices taken away from her. His hand pulled away then, ending her closer link with him.

Shironne heard boots clicking in a familiar stride, the colonel coming down the steps again. Mikael rose and helped her to her feet. She replaced her glove, annoyed that everyone considered her too much a child to know her own mind.

No, he didn’t. That wasn’t what he thought. Instead, Mikael feared that, as Kai had warned her, he would overwhelm her mind, stripping her of everything that made her who she was, making her just a reflection of him. He feared that he would destroy her, and that was why he’d said he could go away.

But that assumed she was weaker than he, that he was too powerful for her to handle. “I don’t need to be protected from you,” she whispered.

He knew exactly what she meant. She could tell that.

“Take care,” Mikael said softly, his words sincere. He placed her hand on the colonel’s sleeve. His footsteps went away, up the stairs to the palace, and she knew he didn’t look back.

She tried to recall what he’d looked like that day on the fairground, but only his eyes formed in her mind. She would walk in his dreams again someday, though, and perhaps then she would see the face of the Angel of Death.