“You lie.” His quick gaze blazed with smouldering depths.
“No. I’m not lying. I am her. I don’t even know if you want to hear the truth, to know the things that I could share with you.”
“Don’t talk in riddles to try to confuse me.” The flash of anger I knew all too well from Tristan Prince at Fire Stone flared. His lips stretched into a tight line and the skin along the bridge of his nose tightened while a pulse thudded in his throat.
“Why don’t you want to know about my magic? About the secrets I’ve been keeping from you?”
“Secrets? Do you think I haven’t known our entire lives what runs in your veins? Do you think I don’t know who you are? What you possess?”
I gasped. I wished I could see my recollections of Mae’s life clearer. This wasn’t in the memory bank for either of us.
“So you know why my father wanted me to hide it from you? Because you would want my power for yourself.”
He frowned, confusion etching deep into his forehead and he thrust an agitated hand into his hair. “See now you talk like her.”
A flare of jealousy blossomed at him talking of the other Mae. I was that Mae right now. He was my Tristram right now.
This was some awful love square with the four of us, years apart at the centre of it.
“I am her. Tristram, you need to keep our people safe. The army coming for us; they want me, and by all that is holy you have to let me go. If you don’t, we are going to die.”
“You said this the other day, but how do you know? How do you know we are going to die?”
My eyelids fluttered shut for a moment and I sifted through scattered thoughts and memories: the dreams I had in Fire Stone, they were memories of Mae’s life. I sought them out, trying to find a way to explain. “Remember the day your father died, and Alana ran through the forest to find us?” He nodded but didn’t say anything, a dart of agony flashing across his face at the memory of his brother and father being slaughtered.
Softly, I continued. “I knew it was her before she stepped through. The forest, the earth, and all the things that live in it, they tell me things. Give me things. It’s like they need my power and I need theirs.” I kept my eyes shut as I spoke, it was easier that way. “If you don’t let me leave, then you and I will both die, and the forest will die with us. All that will remain here is our blood and our bones on those stones. The power that I have, which I think you are meant to protect, it will die with us.”
I paused, unwilling to meet his gaze. His lips brushed mine, the lightest of caresses and then again, sweeping back and forth. “You taste like her,” he mumbled against my mouth. His tongue teased between my teeth and a raging fire of heat bloomed in my stomach, growing and seeping into all of my limbs.
“How do you know?” I murmured against his kiss.
“Because I’ve always known what she would taste like. Always known what she would feel like in my hold.”
I opened my eyes to find jet orbs staring back at me. “I am her. I’m your Mae, same as you are my Tristram.”
“Tell me.” His expression and determined gaze dug down deep into the centre of my soul.
“But I’ve already lived this life. It’s how I know how we die. I’ve met you many, many years from now and loved you all over again.”
His eyes widened. “So why are you here?”
“To save us.”
Chapter Five
“Come.” He grasped his fingers with mine, tangling us together. He hadn’t pushed me away; he was still connecting us. My heart fluttered wildly in my chest. I wasn’t the only one to feel the deep tie that anchored us together.
We walked in silence for a while. All the time I knew eventually I’d have to let go of his hand and walk away. For him, for them. For us.
“Where is she, if you are here?” His question took me by surprise.
“I think she’s still here. I think.” I shrugged. “I’ve stepped through the stones before, briefly. I didn’t even know I’d done it until I got back, and you found me. I’d been missing for days, you were frantic.” I stopped talking, remembering the way he’d reacted when he’d seen me again. Like I was the sun and he’d thought for a moment he’d been about to live in blind darkness.
He nodded thoughtfully.
“I can’t believe you are accepting this.” I cast a searching glance in his direction, hoping to hide it under my lashes.
“My father said that I was a terrible baby. Always crying, never satisfied. My mother used to nurse me above all the other children. Always carried me, never able to put me down.”
“Needy. That sounds like you.” I smiled. It sounded like them. Both of them.
“But he said on the day you were born, the moon shone with blood, brilliant and red. It filled the sky and I stopped crying. I never cried again.”
“Until I pushed you off that rock that time.”
Tristram’s gaze roved over my face. “I can’t believe you aren’t her, but I know it all the same.”
“We are the same. Just from different times. But her and I are the same. I know it. Feel it.”
“So, anyway. The blood moon rose, and I stopped crying and fussing. My father always said he believed I’d settled because I must have sensed you’d arrived.”
I nod slowly. “That makes sense actually.”
By my fingers he pulled me to a stop. “It does? Because not much is making sense to me right now.”
I nodded up at him, basking in his golden glow. “In my present you’d been sketching me on scraps of paper since you were
