I shook my head, unable to speak.
“Tell me,” he said quietly.
My chest shuddered with uneven breaths. I forced a smile that I felt nowhere inside, but the tears flowed down my cheeks unchecked. “I have only one living kin in this entire world, and she thinks this is all my fault.”
A frown pulled at the corner of his mouth. “Your fault? We’ve all made mistakes, Pauline, and yours—” He reached up and his thumb grazed my cheek, wiping away a tear. “Your mistakes are the very least among them.”
I saw the regret in his eyes, my hurled accusations still swimming behind them. He swallowed. “There is not only blood kin, Pauline. Some family you are born with, other family you choose. You have Lia. You have Gwyneth and Berdi. You are not alone in this world.”
A long quietness hung between us, and I wondered if the mention of family had reopened his own wounds. I saw the same pained expression on his face that I had seen hours ago when he confronted his father. I wanted to say something, offer him some sort of kind words like he had just given me, but something fearful still paced behind my ribs. He drew in a deep breath and filled the silence for me.
“And you have the baby too. You need to give him a name.”
A name. It shouldn’t be so hard.
“I will,” I had whispered, and brushed past him, telling him he’d be able to see Lia soon.
I placed the baby back in the wet nurse’s arms. “I need to leave him here a little longer,” I told her. “The citadelle is still in turmoil. It is no place for a baby. I’ll be back.”
She nodded understanding, promising to take good care of him, but I saw the doubt in her eyes. She rubbed a gentle knuckle over his cheek, and my still unnamed baby nestled happily into her arms.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
A soft red hue seeped behind the edges of the drapes. For seventeen years it had been my familiar signal of dawn. It was odd to move about my room again. Home. But it didn’t feel the same. It was tight, confining, like trying to pull on a jacket that no longer fit. Too much had changed.
My mother hadn’t been by. Aunt Bernette and Aunt Cloris had come three times during the night to check on me, both of them weary, with red-rimmed eyes. They gave me doses of the thick, syrupy medicine the physician had prescribed.
“It will help restore your blood,” Aunt Bernette whispered and kissed my cheek.
When I asked her how my father was, her face dimpled with worry, and she struggled with a hopeful reply, saying it would take time.
Aunt Cloris cast wary glances at Kaden, who dozed in the chair beside me. She didn’t like it, but clucked only mildly at the breach of protocol. Finally, late in the night, she shooed him off, having prepared a room elsewhere in the citadelle for him. I had slept fitfully after that, one dream dissolving into another, and I finally shook awake when I dreamed of Regan and Bryn riding together in a wide valley. I didn’t want to see what came next.
Per Aunt Bernette’s orders, I took another dose of the sickly sweet syrup. I didn’t know if it was the sleep or the elixir, but I was feeling steadier on my feet.
I tied back the drapes, and light flooded into the room. I looked at the bay, a rare clear day where the rocky island of lost souls was visible in the distance, its white crumbling ruins catching the morning sun. Ancients who were once imprisoned there were said to still rail against walls that no longer existed, caught in a timeless prison of another kind, memories caging them as strongly as iron bars. My attention traveled west to the last standing spire of Golgata, still leaning, facing its imminent demise with stoic grace. Some things last … and some things were never meant to.
I heard a tap at my door. Finally. There were clothes in my dressing chamber—all still locked in trunks—the ones Dalbreck had dutifully returned. They had never been opened. But if I was to address the conclave this afternoon, or for that matter, any of the many tasks before me, I couldn’t do it in a thin borrowed nightgown. Aunt Bernette had gone to fetch someone with keys. I was about to search for a hairpin so I could pick them open myself. It was going to be a long and full day.
“Come in,” I called as I pulled back a drape from a window in the dressing chamber. “In here.”
I heard footsteps. Heavy ones. Boots. My heart thumped against my breastbone, and I stepped back into my room.
“Good morning,” Rafe said. He was back in his own clothes, no longer needing to hide who he was.
My chest beat harder. Every emotion I had tamped down bubbled up at once and I heard the eagerness in my voice. “I was wondering when you’d come by.”
There. I saw it in his eyes again. Saw it in his swallow.
“You’re looking better than you did last night,” he said.
“Thank you for coming to help.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. I guess I was waiting for a note.”
“I recall you telling me not to send any.”
“Since when have you listened to me?”