were just a child then. So you can’t be jealous.”
“I’m not,” Ysabel assured him. “She was kidnapped by pirates, was she not?”
“Where did you hear that tale?” he asked “Yes, while we were engaged, but before we married, she was kidnapped and taken to sea.”
“Who instigated it?” Ysabel asked.
“We never found out.”
“Was her coin paid?”
Cardew hesitated, not sure why any of it would matter, but there didn’t seem any harm in answering.
“No, it wasn’t. As fate would have it, one of the pirates mutinied against the captain and fled the boat, taking her with him. They traveled to the Moonshae Isles and then she was returned safely to her father.”
“How fortunate! You must have been grateful to the man for saving her life.”
“Well,” Cardew said, hesitating as he sought the appropriate words. “I may have misrepresented his intentions. He took her with him as capital. He planned to barter her freedom in exchange for a pardon of his crime of mutiny. It was less than honorable, you see.”
“Yes, I see. What happened to him?”
“I have no idea,” Cardew said, his brow furrowing. “Why does it matter?”
“It doesn’t. It’s a sweet story, though. A pirate saves a beautiful elf and returns her safely to the loving arms of her fiance^ Don’t you see the appeal?”
“Dear Ysabel, you are so innocent. There was nothing sweet about it. It was sordid and unfortunate.”
Ysabel frowned. “I don’t understand…”
“And I’ll say nothing more about the matter,” Cardew said firmly. He was not about to share how a ruffian had cuckolded him. Cardew intended his tone of voice to chastise the girl and stop her from asking questions, but she stared at him without a trace of regret.
“Why did you tell the Inquiry that you saw me upstairs by Teague’s body? And that you saved me from the masked assailants? And that we hid together in the woods until morning?”
“Because that’s what happened,” Cardew insisted. “Don’t you remember?”
“I remember a lot of things, but not that.”
“Bella, it was a horrifying experience. You were a mere child. You can’t trust your memories.”
“Why did you blame the dwarf? Are you such a coward that you had to direct attention away from your incompetence?”
Cardew was shocked into silence. That he was Amhar’s accuser was a well-kept secret. He and the ministers conducting the Inquiry agreed that it might sully his reputation as Hero of the Realm if he were also the prime witness against the dwarf. In fact, he’d been paid a large amount of coin to let the Inquiry take the credit for discovering the identity of the culprit behind the massacre.
“Who has been filling your head with such nonsense?” he demanded angrily.
“Did you find what you were looking for in the jungle?” she asked innocently.
“Ysabel! What do you do! Listen at keyholes? Read letters not intended for you?”
“Did you find it or not?”
“I cannot believe that you…” Cardew sputtered.
“So you didn’t find it. When Tresco said that you failed, he must have been speaking of the artifact.”
“You are obviously not the girl I thought you were.”
“And yet you are exactly the man I thought you were,” Ysabel gave him a disarmingly sweet smile. “A weak-willed coward who blamed an innocent and condemned him to die, couldn’t satisfy his wife, and couldn’t uphold his end of the bargain in Chult. I would rather stay an unmarried crone than ever let you touch me again.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
3 Flamerule, the Year of the Ageless One (1479 DR) Chult
Something banged shut with a ringing sound, and Harp opened his eyes. At first he thought it was the sound of the metal doors closing at the Vankila Slab. But when Harp opened his eyes, he was looking up at the apex of a pearly dome, not the gray stones of a prison cell.
Disoriented, Harp turned his head and saw the brass starscope gleaming beside him. He was in Majida’s observatory. But where had she gone? And how long had he been unconscious? Waking up in an unfamiliar place and missing a few hours from his memory was nothing new in his life. It was usually accompanied by the onset of panic and the sickness that followed too much alcohol. But Harp felt unexpectedly calm as he pushed himself upright. Sitting on the green rug, he stretched his shoulders, trying to get an uncomfortable kink out of his neck. He tried to recall the last thing that had happened. Majida had lit the heavily scented incense. They had talked about Liel.
“I can’t promise it won’t hurt,” Majida had said. “It depends on you.”
“I don’t care,” Harp had assured her. “Believe me. I don’t care.”
When Majida began her spell, and Harp’s vision slipped sideways, although he’d have sworn he hadn’t moved from his position cross-legged on the floor. And there had been pain, at least at first. But then his mind had reached for comfort the way a drowning man reaches for something to keep him afloat. He remembered his mother, brushing the hair back from his sweaty face when he was ill as a child. He remembered the time he’d ridden on his father’s shoulders, laughing with delight as they ran through a meadow filled with orange wild flowers. And there was Liel. Mostly his mind found its comfort with her.
In the early days on Gwynneth Isle, what he had felt for her was so fragile it seemed as if it would break if he thought of it too often. One night at sunset, they had climbed the Delmark, a stony plateau that rose above the treetops at the heart of the forest. Sitting on the edge of the rock with their legs dangling off the side, they watched the sun bleed into the distant ocean. It was windy on the hill. Chilly, but not unpleasantly so. Still, she leaned against him, and the warmth of her body was like a buffer against the cold. In that moment, he knew that she would be with him for the rest of his life, even in those times when they were not in the same place. It was as if she had become fundamental for him, an inextricable part of how he understood the world.
He wanted to touch her, to rest his hand on the small of her back or put his arms around her. But he was uneasy at the idea that their relationship had become anything but a diversion for both of them. He had not planned on falling in love with her. Considering she was engaged, it was inconvenient and complicated. He wouldn’t let it happen, he assured himself. He wouldn’t let himself love her. It would be enjoyable, and then it would be over. As if she sensed a shift in his mood, she turned and gave him a little smile. It was disarmingly sweet, unassuming in its beauty, and utterly innocent of the destruction that would follow in the wake of their affair.
“Do you miss the sea?” she asked, puzzled by his intensity. They had talked of him teaching her to sail, so her question was not unexpected.
“I miss-you,” he said.
“You’re silly,” she said, lying down and putting her head in his lap. The first stars were appearing in the twilit sky. “I’m right here.”
He stroked the side of her neck where the delicate strokes of ink disappeared behind her ear. The artist had been a mastershaping leaves, vines, and flowers that were elegant in their simplicity yet somehow enhanced the beauty of an already striking woman. She sat up so she could lean her head against his chest and slip her arms around his neck.
“What?” she asked as he studied her face.
Telling her she was beautiful seemed trite somehow. That word would never convey the emerald color of her eyes, the curve of shadow under her cheekbones, or the way her upper lip was slightly fuller than her lower.
“You have a pointy little chin,” he told her.
“Is that so?”
“Yes,” he said, kissing it. “And pointy little ears. And pointy little elbows.”
“Fortunately, you don’t seem to mind.”
“That’s true. I don’t mind at all.”
