“It all looks so peaceful,” she said, gazing out, still skirting the heart of the topic. “So… normal. Like I recall it being back in the day, in Uorsin’s early years.” She waved a hand to disperse the shades of all that had happened later in the tyrant’s rule.
We didn’t talk much about her father, the late High King Uorsin, and for good reasons. In fact, it said something that she’d mentioned him voluntarily at all. Just speaking his name put unhappy lines around her mouth, signs that the emotional wounds he’d given her had cracked open to seep pus and old blood. She liked to see herself as whole and healed. I knew her better than that.
I set a hand on the small of her back. Through the flexible silver bodice, Ursula’s lean and strong muscles were as tight as I’d anticipated. My Essla is built like a racehorse, all slender speed and alert readiness—and she’s equally as high strung. She tried to hide the strain of rule from me, the anxiety she felt for her sisters and her realm, pretending she didn’t need me or anyone. Still, she leaned in to my touch. Gratifying, given how long and patiently I’d worked to earn her trust.
“Things were good then, in the early days?” I asked leadingly, willing to accept this conversation instead of the one that clearly weighed on her.
She frowned slightly, watching something on the road. I followed the line of her attention and found nothing salient, so she must have been seeing images play out in her memories, frowning as she always did when she remembered her father.
“Maybe I just have the idea things were good because he said so all the time,” Ursula said slowly. “Uorsin was a great one for singing his own praises. But that’s how I remember things, back when Salena was alive, when Andi was still little, and before Ami was born. Abundant and peaceful.”
“Those were the years right after the Great War ended,” I noted.
She huffed a sigh of acknowledgment. “Exactly, which would play in. If nothing else, Uorsin put a stop to the bloodshed and conflict. He built the roads and mandated that everyone use Common Tongue. In those early years, he accomplished a great deal, and most of the kingdoms prospered. People were relatively happy.”
“People think that war stimulates trade,” I reflected, “when the underlying truth is that the end of war allows trade to rebound.”
She nodded, her gaze unfocused, attention still on the past. “I’d come up here to the walls sometimes, just to watch the road and all the people living their lives.”
Their normal lives, she meant and didn’t have to articulate. “You wouldn’t have been ten years old yet,” I observed as neutrally as possible. She so rarely spoke of her childhood that I treaded carefully when she did, even when I wasn’t certain—as I was now—that she was building up to something else entirely.
“True,” she replied, then fell silent, brooding, so I moved fully behind her, working my fingers into the gaps of her bodice to loosen the knots I could reach. She rolled her shoulders with a murmur of relief, and continued. “Truly, back then I came up here mostly to figure out what Andi saw in it. Even at barely four, she had a knack for slipping away from her nurses. We’d always find her up here or on one of the towers, staring out like she’d lost something.”
“Was that before she had her bedroom in the tower?”
Ursula flicked me a wry glance over her shoulder. “Yes. The tower bedroom was a solution to the problem of her forever running off. With the views from the windows, she was at least content to stay in her room and look out from there. That changed, of course, once she discovered horses—and proved remarkably good at evading notice to ride off for hours in unpredictable directions. If we’d known then that we were dealing with a budding sorceress, we might’ve done things differently, but Salena would’ve been the one to know that and…” she shrugged.
“I might point out that you were but a girl yourself and bore no responsibility for what your mother and father should’ve handled, as parents and as king and queen.”
“There you would be wrong. Taking care of Andi and Ami was always my responsibility, whether they liked it or not. And the Thirteen are my responsibility.” Her face hardened, and she turned to face me. “You’re worried about something. That’s why you keep coming up here. But not about war. What aren’t you telling me?”
I shouldn’t have been surprised at what she noticed. Even apparently and thoroughly preoccupied with matters of court and defense, Ursula missed very little. “This is simply a good place to think,” I hedged, hoping that might be enough to deflect her.
She leaned back against the parapet, facing me with crossed arms. “You think and think, yet you never tell me what plagues your thoughts. Don’t you think it’s about time you changed that?”
“You don’t need to worry about me,” I told her, a weak defense, but I didn’t have a better one.
She laughed, short and without humor. “First, that’s not true. Second, I do worry because I love you, and I’m reliably informed that it’s not only natural to worry about the people we love, it’s usually expected. Third, that reply was an evasion.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. I might’ve left the Imperial Palace of Dasnaria far behind in my misbegotten past, but I’d been around plenty of rulers in a variety of lands and I knew how to handle an irritated monarch. More, I knew Ursula. Better than I knew my own heart. “You have plenty on your mind and I can handle myself.”
“Another evasion,” she shot back. Debating with Ursula often felt the same as sparring with her, though it was rarely as enjoyable since the odds of getting my hands on her were much lower in a debate.
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.