The sight of him standing tall and strong across from her made her feel like a piece of glass had just carved its way into her heart, not unlike the blade from so long ago.
“I missed,” she said, recalling the pain of dying slowly, with the blade piercing her lung instead of her heart.
“Aye. If you hadn’t, I’d never have come upon you while you were still alive. I’d lost so many. You, and vengeance, were what I’d lived for. And you, the woman I loved and the only good thing remaining on earth, left without a word. Would have snuck off into death.”
“What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t trust you to let me do the right thing—you’d have taken that choice from me as you’d done the previous night. Tied me up, thrown me over your horse, and taken me away to hide.”
His jaw tightened; she could see in his eyes that it was true.
“I was not just the woman you loved. I was a warrior, the leader of a lost people. We’d been crushed in that last battle—the Romans even slaughtered the women who made up the last line of defense. They’d have come for me, taken me to Rome to be slowly executed as an example of our so-called barbarism, or worse, ransomed back to the Iceni.”
Her tribe would have paid a price they could ill afford, and they’d already suffered so much. She hadn’t wanted to fight anymore. “I couldn’t be either of those things. You’d have done the same if you had been in my position. Why shouldn’t I
have had that right?”
“We could have fled. Gone north.”
She could admit that now, as Diana, she might have run with him. Run with the man she loved when the battle was lost, and hidden for the rest of their lives. But not Boudica.
“That’s what you don’t understand, Cadan. Boudica would never have done that. After the death of her daughters and the theft of her land, she saw no future for herself. Not even with you.”
“What?” He took a step back.
“She—no, I mean, I cared for you.” It was becoming harder to speak as Boudica once she realized that their choices might have been different. “But she didn’t have her whole heart to give and what she had wasn’t enough to change her path. Paulinus took that when he took her daughters, when he took her home. When she picked up her sword in vengeance, she never planned to lay it down. There would be no life for her if she failed to expel the Romans from her land. She knew that she stood for her people, was a symbol for her cause. And her warriors were dead.” She could remember them, as she knew he could, too, their bodies scattered across the fields in all directions.
“Had she fled, the people in the villages would have known. The last armies would have known that their chosen leader, the one who had sent them in to die in a near hopeless battle, had abandoned her honor and fled. Fleeing was never an option and there was no life that she wanted to flee to.”
He said nothing, just stood strong and still in the middle of the room, and she watched as he tried to process what she’d told him. The woman you loved didn’t love you back in the same way. Couldn’t love you back in the same way.
She could see everything more clearly now that she remembered who she was. It was as if a fog had cleared from her mind. She felt more herself than ever. Boudica’s memories gave her context for her own life, for the things she’d felt and missed and hadn’t understood. They were clearer now; her whole life was clearer.
The feelings she’d had for Cadan—the mixed-up mess of attraction, mistrust, affection, hate, love, curiosity—had all begun to make sense when she regained her memories. She knew him now; knew his past and why he’d done the things he had.
They had both been broken by loss those many years ago. He by the slaughter of his family, and by the time he’d spent alone atoning for a sin he thought he’d committed. And she by the loss of her daughters and her home. But that didn’t make him any less hers.
She realized now that she’d hurt him as much as he’d hurt her, perhaps more. He hadn’t respected her will, but she had abandoned him without an explanation, leaving him to wonder and mourn for millennia.
I was selfish. Noble and well intentioned, and she wouldn’t take back her actions, but selfish all the same. Though wasn’t that always the way of it? Fighting for a great cause could lead one to neglect the details. Like the people around you who were still alive. Like the strong, beautiful man standing across from her. His bravery and self-sacrifice awed her.
With their wounds laid bare, their sins stood between them like an impassable lake of pain they continued to fill with buckets full of more. There was only one way across.
“I’m sorry, Cadan.” Tears burned her eyes. “Truly. For what she took away from you by not saying good-bye. She was brave and her cause was just. But I’m sorry for not saying good-bye. For the hurt it caused you.”
It felt as if something large and hard was lodged in Cadan’s throat. He hadn’t thought he needed Diana’s apology. Or that he would agree with her.
He was ashamed to admit it, but when he truly thought about it, when Diana made him think about it, he’d cared for Boudica, but not in the way he should have. He’d still been reeling from the pain of losing his own family, had been running toward redemption or forgiveness or death. Which it should be, he hadn’t known or cared. Boudica had become his solace, a woman who’d been as betrayed by life as he had and had given him something to fight for again. If he could just protect her. On the eve of the final battle, he’d been overcome by the fear of losing her.
He scrubbed a hand over his face. Christ, she was right. He’d wanted to protect her, true, but more out of a desire to save himself. To prove that he could. He’d wanted to protect her, but she’d wanted to fight, wanted her vengeance. Wanted to protect her daughters, even if it was only their memories, by killing the man who had taken their young lives. As he wanted to do for her. Could he begrudge her that? His fear, which had made him take her choice from her, was the same fear that had driven her so many years ago.
He hadn’t seen it then, had been blinded by his past. After her death, he’d buried his head in the sand. Thinking about it had only made him ill. But he could see it, now that he’d heard her perspective. It had taken nearly two thousand years, and Diana, to make him see that it hadn’t been his choice to make.
He’d been so caught up in his own pain that he hadn’t thought about hers. She’d been their leader, their queen, but above that, she had been the woman he loved.
“I—” Keep going. “I’m sorry.” He dragged a hand through his hair. “You’re right. And it’s something that I could only realize when I heard it from you. In my head, I just couldn’t have that perspective. I was a product of my upbringing, and then of my own fear. I took your choice from you, and I shouldn’t have. I’m—sorry.”
Cadan stood, not daring to move, possibly unable to, as his words hung in the air. He’d never been able to think of the past in that way. She began to walk toward him, and his heartbeat drummed in his ears. Diana stopped inches from his chest and reached up and laid her palm on the side of his face.
“You’ll never do that again, right? You’ll let me fight my own battles, and never take the choice from me even when it’s a hard one to make?”