openly offered that she had unquestionably accepted since he found her in the grove. And he found her, she now realized, because he’d known exactly where to look.

“Athan?” Dnara stepped out of Jenny’s protective stance.

Athan glanced her way then lowered his eyes. The shame he felt was so easy to see, and it caused a new kind of pain she had been inadequately prepared for. Clutching the fabric of her dress above where her heart beat rapidly with anxious tremors, she asked for a truth she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear.

“Athan, the day you found me... It wasn’t by accident, was it?”

The clearing went quiet, and it felt like the whole world leaned forward to hear Athan speak a single, truthful word. And the word he spoke was, “No.”

With that one word, the delicately crafted cage he’d built to keep her close and trusting cracked apart. Shadows seeped in to coil around her ankles. Athan had not been a kind stranger who had come upon her prone figure in the mud, saved her out of the goodness of his heart and carried her in his arms to safety. It had been a planned, orchestrated compassion to win her trust, to draw her out of the Thorngrove and to have her follow him wherever he led her. An invisible, tightly tethered collar made not of metal and starstone, but of soft smiles, gentle glances and sweetly spun lies.

Dnara did not feel the first tear that fell as it slid slowly down her cheek, nor the second. She couldn’t feel anything. Not the pounding of her heart, not the way her fingernails dug into the meat of her palm, not the burning in her lungs as they urged her to breathe, and not the light touch of the wind as it struggled to exist in this knoll of dead trees, mad cackling ravens and broken stone walls. She stood in the clearing, staring at him, feeling nothing but emptiness within a rising black sea.

26

The ravens cackled in their mad laughter from the branches overhead and Rupert’s ears twitched as his head bobbed in a want to pull his reins free. Jenny stood on feet solidly moored to the earth, her sword held steady but flicking first to Melakatezra then to Athan then back once more to the black haired woman. Jenny’s uncertainty of who to fight, of who to protect Dnara from, spoke a truth Dnara herself couldn’t bear.

“I’m so sorry,” Athan said, lifting his gaze up to her. “I intended to tell you everything, I swear, but I ran out of time.”

“It is the equinox,” Melakatezra pointed out from her place casually seated on the crumbling stone wall. “Which is why I’m here; why we’re all here. And let’s be honest, dear Athan, you’ve had plenty of time to tell her everything, if you had been absolutely certain of your decision before now.”

“That’s not true,” Athan argued. “I knew the moment she woke up in my campsite that things weren’t exactly as you’d said they would be. I just... I needed more time to decide, and then...” He glanced Dnara’s way, his eyes wet and red. “Then I wasn’t sure how to tell you the truth, Dnara, without it destroying everything between us.”

“Everything between-” Melakatezra cut off her own words, raised a hand to her painted lips as her eyes widened, then she threw back her head in boisterous mirth that sent the ravens into another discordant cacophony. The dead-wooded knoll and ghost filled tower reverberated with the sound of their sardonic harmony rising up into the starless night, growing louder and louder until abruptly it ended, plunging the clearing into a condescending silence. Melakatezra stared across the clearing at Athan, the smirk on her lips sharper than the blade in Jenny’s hands. “You fool.”

Athan’s fist tightened. “Shut up.”

“And so it was,” Melakatezra continued her proclamation. “The downfall of man.”

“Not our downfall,” Athan claimed. “Our salvation. ...And my reason to fight for what I thought had been long ago lost.”

The black sea of shadows gathering at Dnara’s feet recoiled and the wind tried once more to reach her. She couldn’t hear its whispers this time; her heartbeat pounded too loudly. The look in Athan’s eyes reached out to the pain in her chest, and she wanted to understand why.

“What do you mean?” she asked, and Athan’s eyes filled with anguish.

Melakatezra stood up from her place at the wall, clucking her tongue and walking towards Athan. “My poor, foolish boy. You see? She doesn’t understand; she can’t understand. It wasn’t created to comprehend such things.”

The wind stopped its whispering and the sea calmed as Dnara looked to the woman for answers Athan seemed unable to give. “I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t, child,” Melakatezra responded, an unexpected compassion weaving its way into her aloof expression. She raised a hand and directed it towards Athan. “He’s in love with you.”

Her words struck Dnara in the chest, causing a sensation both of fear and elation. She’d read many stories in Keeper Ishkar’s books, learning what it meant to be angry, to overcome adversity, to stand firm with bravery and how to run with fear. She understood pain, being alone and feeling out of place. She’d even come to understand joy, and the security of having Athan near. But, love?

She felt attached to Athan, that was true, but her feelings beyond that had become muddy and lost in the sea churning at her feet since he’d revealed his deceit. Perhaps there may have been love there, somewhere deep down and undiscovered, but now it lay buried under a growing ache in her heart, a painful sting running along the scars on her arms and a festering anger that threatened to drown her. Even staring wide-eyed at the world, she couldn’t bear to look at him.

“I don’t... I...”

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