“Yes.”
He considered that, seemed on the verge of agreeing, perhaps even on the verge of tears, a sight she would have never thought to see, but then his features shifted, and the fear and uncertainty left his face, and he was the man, the force, she had known once more. He regarded her with hard, blue, somehow cold eyes. “I will train the boy,” he said finally, his voice dry and without any hint of emotion.
She stared at him for several seconds, trying to decide what she was feeling to see the mask in place once more. Was it regret? Relief? Perhaps it was a mixture of both. She sighed. “I think that will be good.”
“But even so, that will not guarantee that he will be safe.”
“No,” she said. “This world, Prince, is full of much—pain and grief and fear. But guarantees, I’m afraid, are in short supply. As long as he is alive, the boy will have those who seek his death. As long as he is alive, Feledias will not stop until he sees him dead.”
“You’re saying that I cannot keep him safe.”
“I’m saying that no one’s safe, Cutter. Still, as for the boy’s safety…I’ve got some ideas about that.”
“What are they?”
She winced. “You’re not going to like them.”
He sighed. “No, no I don’t expect I will.”
“As long as the boy acts like a fugitive—as long as you act like he is—then he’ll be treated like one. Feledias and his ilk will never stop hunting him, and the price on his head will only continue to increase.”
“So what, then?”
She turned to him, meeting his eyes. “A fugitive can be hunted down, can be accosted everywhere he goes. But a prince—”
“No.”
The word was a dry growl. The mask slipping again, but this time giving way not before sadness or fear but anger—and that, at least, was familiar. Maeve knew, logically, that the man would not kill her, that she was his friend or at least as close to one as a person like him was capable of having. The problem, though, was that knowing a thing logically and knowing it emotionally were very different. She believed she was the man’s friend, but then she had thought of him, so recently, as a force of a nature, like a thunderstorm or a tornado. And only a fool tried to befriend either. Her mouth felt impossibly dry, and she cleared her throat. “What I mean—”
“No, Maeve,” he rasped, and his great chest was rising and falling with suddenly rapid breaths. “I would not wish that on him, not on anyone. Princes are not known for living peaceful lives—that I know better than anyone.”
She considered leaving it then. Perhaps only a fool would try befriending a thunderstorm, but it took a special kind of idiot to step into the maelstrom with a thought to challenging it. She was on the very verge of leaving it, in fact, but then she remembered the boy sitting on the bed, the boy who did not understand why so many wanted him dead, who was looking to her for the help he so desperately needed.
Maybe only a pure idiot would spit into a hurricane. And maybe she was that idiot, after all. “Don’t you tell me no, Cutter,” she snapped. “That boy has a birthright. And whether you want him to have it or not doesn’t make any difference—that birthright is his, and it’s going to follow him all his life. Better that he knows the truth, all of the truth. Besides, a fugitive can be hunted, can be killed, with little fuss, but princes are not so easily cast aside. And if his identity becomes known, your brother will not so easily be able to dispatch him, for the people would not sit idly by while a member of the royal blood was slain out of hand.”
He stared at her, clearly surprised by her outburst, and she couldn’t blame him—she was surprised herself. She waited tensely, holding her breath, to see if he would decide that he’d had enough of her and would reach for the great axe still strapped to his back. He did not though, and after a time, he grunted. “Even if I wanted to prove that he was a prince, it’s useless. Feledias destroyed all the records of his birth—you know that as well as I do. As far as the world knows, Matthias doesn’t exist at all, or at least he’s just another fugitive from the law with a price on his head.”
Maeve met his gaze, clearing her throat. “Not all the records.”
He frowned, clearly trying to figure out what she meant, but she said nothing, only waited, watching him, letting him come to the realization on his own.
She saw it when it came, saw it in the tightening of his features, the narrowing of his eyes. “No.”
“Cutter—Prince—it’s the only wa—”
“Maeve, in case you’ve forgotten, the man has no love for me. Besides, last I heard, Feledias threw him in the dungeon. Likely as not, he’s dead already, and even if he isn’t, he may as well be, for there’s no way we’d ever make it to him.”
“You know he’s not dead,” she said. “The people are willing to put up with a lot from their princes, Cutter”—she paused, meeting his eyes meaningfully—“a lot, the gods know they’ve had to, but the people love Petran, and they would not sit by and watch him be executed. After everything that happened, they are already…disillusioned with the royals. To see their Petran killed…it would cause a revolt.”
“Maybe,” Cutter agreed, and there was no denying the reluctance in his voice, “but Feledias may not see it that way.”
She grunted. “I don’t have any love for your brother, Prince, but he is the cleverest man, the cleverest person—a far greater compliment as, by and large, men are fools while the gods saw fit to grant all the cleverness to women—I have ever met. If I
