—The Last Testaments of Gaudrel
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
She looked at me, her head angled to the side, her expression unreadable—sadness, anger, relief? I wasn’t sure—and then she nodded. Ice crept through my veins. She recognized me. Her lips moved silently, mouthing my name, and then she turned away and the shadows swallowed her.
“Wait!” I called and ran after her. I searched, turning in all directions, but the stairwell and landing were empty. She was gone.
The wind, time, it circles, repeats, some swaths cutting deeper than others.
I braced myself against the wall, my head pounding, my palms damp, trying to explain her away, searching the rules of reason, but it settled into me as true and real as the chorus of cries I’d heard in the heavens the day I buried my brother. The centuries and tears had swirled with voices that couldn’t be erased, not even by death, and Venda’s was a song that couldn’t be silenced, even by being pushed from a wall. It was all as true and real as a Komizar who clutched my neck and promised to take everything.
“The rules of reason,” I whispered, a mindless chant that still tumbled from my lips. I didn’t even know what it meant anymore.
I took a shaky step forward in the dark, and my boot knocked something exactly where she had disappeared. It made a strange hollow sound. My fingers slid along the wall, and instead of more stone, I found a low wood panel. With a gentle push, I slid it open and found myself under a dark sweep of stairs in the middle of the Sanctum. Bright light splashed the hall in front of me, and I was grateful for a world of hard edges, heavy footsteps, and warm flesh. All things solid. I looked back at the wood panel behind me, questioning my brief descent down the hidden stairway, and wondered what I had really seen. Was it real and true or only terror at being trapped? But the name she had mouthed, Jezelia, still juddered through me. Guards walked by, and I slunk back, hiding in the shadows. I had escaped one trap and fallen into another.
This was the busy hallway that led to the tower where the Komizar said he had a secure room for Rafe. I was about to step out when three governors approached and I had to duck back down. All I needed was a free moment to dart out and run up the stairs, and I was certain I could find Rafe’s room, but the hall seemed to be a main thoroughfare. The governors passed, then several servants carrying baskets, and finally the quiet held. I pulled my hood over my head and stepped out—just as two guards rounded the corner.
They stopped short in surprise when they saw me.
“There you are!” I snapped. “Are you the ones who were ordered to leave firewood outside the Assassin’s room?” I shot them both an accusatory eye.
The tallest of the two glared back. “Do we look like barrow runners?”
“We aren’t filthy patty clappers,” the other one snarled.
“Really?” I said. “Not even for the Assassin?” I put my hand to my chin as if I were memorizing their faces.
One looked at the other, then back at me. “We’ll send a boy.”
“See that you do! The weather’s turned cold, and the Assassin wanted a roaring fire by the time he returned.” I turned and walked away in a huff, climbing the stairs. My temples pounded as I expected them to come to their senses, but all I heard behind me was their grousing and shouting at a poor hapless servant down the hall.
After one dead end, two close calls with the wrong rooms, and a quick exit through a hall window, I walked along a ledge that was sufficiently hidden from the view of those below. Peeking through windows rather than opening doors proved to be a safer way to explore, and only a few windows later, I found him.
His stillness struck me first. His profile. He slouched in a chair, looking out an opposite window. The smoldering, calculated stare that had made me uneasy the first time I saw him made me apprehensive again. It breathed menace and frightening reserve, a bow stretched, loaded, aimed, waiting. It was the stare that had made platters in my hand tremble as I set them down before him in the tavern. Even with my slight side view, the ice of his blue eyes cut like a sword. Neither farmer nor prince. They were the eyes of a warrior. Eyes bred with power. And yet last night he’d made them warm for Calantha when she sat close and whispered to him, made them spark with intrigue when the Komizar asked questions … made them hooded with disinterest when I kissed Kaden.
I thought of the first time I’d made him laugh as we picked blackberries in Devil’s Canyon, how fearful I had been, but then how his laugh had transformed his face. How it had transformed me. I wanted to make him laugh now, but here I had nothing to give him that was the least bit amusing or joyful.
I should have revealed myself immediately, but once I knew he was alive and that he had food and water, I was struck with the need for something else—a few seconds to watch him unseen, to view him with the new eyes I had only just gained. What other sides did this very clever prince have?
His fingers tapped a strained beat on the arm of the chair, slow and steady, like he was counting something out—hours, days, or maybe the people who would pay. Maybe he was even thinking about me. Yes! You were a challenge and an embarrassment. I thought about all the times we had kissed back in Terravin. Every single time, he had known I was the one who had broken a contract between two kingdoms. And before we had kissed, there were all the times I had looked at him with moon eyes, hoping he would kiss me. Had he felt smug justice watching me leaning on brooms hanging on his every word? Melons. He told me he grew melons. The stories he fabricated—just like the ones he’d created last night for the Komizar—flowed out far too smoothly.
I know your feelings about me may have changed.
My feelings had changed, without a doubt, but I wasn’t sure how. I wasn’t even sure what to call him anymore. The name Rafe was so tightly woven with the young man I thought was a farmer. What should I call him now? Rafferty? Jaxon? Your Highness?
But then he turned. That was all it took. He was Rafe again, and my heart jumped. I saw his bloody lip, and I squeezed through the narrow opening, careless of sound. He leapt to his feet when he heard me, startled and ready for battle, not expecting someone to enter his room through a window and even more surprised that it was me.
“What did they do?” I asked.
He brushed away my hand and questions, and hurried past me to the window. He peered out to check whether anyone had seen me, then turned back, crushing me in his arms, holding me like he’d never let me go, until suddenly he stepped back as if unsure his embrace was still welcome.
Whether it was prudent or not, I didn’t care—I burned with his touch. “I suppose if we’re going to fall in love all over a
gain, kissing will be part of it.” I gently brought his face to mine again, avoiding his split lip, and my mouth fluttered across his skin, kissing the crest of his cheekbone, down to his jaw, across to the corner of his mouth. Every taste of him suddenly new. His hands tightened around my waist, pulling me closer, and rivers of heat spread through my chest.
“Are you frothing mad?” he asked between heavy breaths. “How did you get here?”
I had known this was coming. This was not part of our plan. I stepped away, pouring myself some water from the flask on a table. “It wasn’t hard,” I lied. “An easy walk.”