“He loves you, you know.”
“Who?”
Matt. He loves you.”
Cutter turned away from her, clearly uncomfortable, choosing the flame, choosing the dead, over the thought that the boy might love him. Others might have found it funny that a man who was at home on a battlefield with enemies seeking his death and a great axe in his hands and blood—his own and that of his enemies—staining him might be so discomfited by talk of love, but Maeve did not find it funny. Mostly, she found it sad.
When it was clear that Cutter would say nothing, she sighed. “He wants you to train him.”
He grunted. “I know.”
“And yet…?”
He turned back to her then, and though his face remained expressionless, she could see a storm of emotion in his gaze. “No. I…no.”
She grunted. “You’re probably right. Being who he is, there’ll be no shortage of men and women wanting to see him dead, your brother chief among them. Better if he can do nothing to defend himself, if he’s only left at the mercy of men who have none.”
He frowned. “I would have thought you’d be glad.”
“In a perfect world, perhaps. In a world where villages were not massacred just to make a point to one man, in a world where men and women were not forced to feed the bodies of their loved ones to the fire and watch their ashes drift on the wind. But we do not live in a perfect world, Prince, and it is not a kindness to send the boy out into it without the means to defend himself.”
He turned away and several seconds passed, so that she began to think he would not answer. But then, he did. “I wanted to protect him, Maeve. I would not send him out into the world, if I could help it. It is why I took him to Brighton in the first place.”
“And yet, the world found him,” she said. “Your brother found him.”
“I tried, Maeve,” he said, turning to her. “I wanted…I wanted to keep him safe.”
“I know,” she said softly. “But no one is safe in this world, Prince, him least of all.”
He met her eyes then, and his features twitched, as if the mask he always wore was threatening to come off. “What do I do, Maeve?”
She grunted, startled by the question. She had known her prince for a long time and had lost count of the scraps they’d been in, had lost track of the number of times they had faced seemingly impossible odds and yet had managed to come out the other side. And in all those years, in all those bloody battles, she had never known him to be uncertain. Even when their situation had seemed dire, their deaths imminent—perhaps, even, especially then—he had always seemed to know what to do, had been a creature of certainty, of will, and it had been that will which had carried them through so much when others would have, when others had fallen. He had braved assassins, armies of the Fey, creatures out of nightmare, had beaten some of the world’s best warriors in single combat, and none of that had ever made so much as a crack in his seemingly insurmountable will. But where the world’s greatest warriors and most dire threats had not marred that certainty, a young boy had.
A storm of emotions raged in Maeve then as she stared at his face, the mask of certainty gone for the first time she had ever seen, and chief among those was fear. Fear for what it might mean that the mask was finally slipping, for whatever else the man had been, brutal, often cruel, he had always been certain, and it had been that certainty, more than anything, which seemed to make him more than a man, which made him, instead, a force of nature. One that could never be defeated, could never be killed, one that a person could only hope to avoid or, if avoiding was impossible, hunker down beneath the force of it the way a family might hunker down at the approach of an impending storm.
It rocked her, seeing that mask slip, seeing that beneath it all, beneath the thousands of stories told about him, her prince was just a man after all. Suddenly she felt short of breath. She had not realized until that moment just how much she had come to rely on the man’s strength, on his certainty even while she’d thought him less than human because of it. And he was less than human, that much she still believed, but he was more too. “You talk to him, Prince,” she finally said.
He frowned. “Talk to him? What good will that do?”
“More than you know,” she said honestly. “You have kept him alive thus far, a task most would have thought impossible, particularly since your brother has been hunting him since he was born. But it isn’t enough only to live, Prince. We know that better than anyone…don’t we?”
“What will I say?”
Asking her as if she somehow knew, he, the world’s most feared man, staring at her with fear in his own eyes, waiting for her answer. And here, at least, she would not disappoint him. “The truth, Prince. He has not had an easy life so far, and I doubt it will get an easier. Tell him the truth.”
“You mean…about his past? About…his mother?”
“Yes,” she said, “for he deserves to know. But more than that, tell him how you feel.” She leaned close. “Tell him about his father.”
He recoiled at that as if she’d slapped him,
