“Darren…” Now it was my turn to crack. “I—” I didn’t know what to say. My palms were trembling, and I pressed them against the sand and rocks to hide their tremor.
“Sometimes I wish I was never a prince…” His eyes clouded. “And I wonder what it would be like… if I were just a boy, and you just a girl—without all of this.”
I let my fingers slide to his. “It would have made everything a lot easier.”
For a while there was just silence. The heavy patter of his heart next to mine, the rise and fall of his chest. The quiet in and out of our breath.
Then he shut his eyes. “We should be them, someday.”
“We will.” My grip tightened on his hand. Whatever he thought, he wasn’t poison.
Darren wasn’t darkness, and I wasn’t his light.
The non-heir had proven time and time again he was more than his father’s son. More than an arrogant non-heir who thought only of himself. And now I wanted to show Darren what he looked like to me.
I needed to show him he was fire. My fire. Something filled with light. Something good. Someone just like me but wrapped up so tightly in his own barrier of darkness it could burn. Unless you knew how to unravel him.
And so I kissed him. Tugging his face to mine, I held his face in the palm of my hands and kissed his mouth. Just once. Pressing my lips to his I shut my eyes and channeled my one single promise.
I will never give up on you.
A spark seemed to light me up from the inside. Like tinder, my body shot to flames. And his returned. We were two coals burning in the dark.
When I pulled back his eyes were stars.
“Promise me, Ryiah, when this war is over, we leave this all behind. Promise we will be them.”
“I promise.”
****
The weeks following King Lucius’s funeral brought with them a wave of change. Some good, some bad… well, they were primarily bad.
The entire castle was in mourning. It was a three-month duration in which we were required to dress in somber colors and postpone the Crown’s weekly entertainment for the nobility at court. To honor our late king in longstanding tradition. Unfortunately, it also meant our wedding was postponed.
“Which is just as well because we don’t have Emperor Liang’s backing until we get King Joren to stop dragging his feet,” Blayne had been quick to point out. “Until he acknowledges our claim, we have no reason to forsake tradition and expedite a wedding.”
One of the other things to go from bad to worse. The Pythian king was now stating that he had received correspondence from King Horrace that stated his ambassador was acting without orders. His call “For Caltoth” could have been a “ploy” from Jerar to extract sympathies for a call to war. The letter even went so far as to say the attackers were executed before a panel of unbiased parties could question them. In other words, the Caltothians were blaming Jerar.
What surprised me most was that King Joren was even listening to their claims. After all, his own brother had watched his daughter get murdered before his very eyes.
How a king could just put aside the loss of his daughter and ignore the facts was beyond suspicious. A king so willing to listen to the man who had had his daughter slaughtered for show? There had to be more. Even to a girl like me with no knowledge of this sort of thing. Something else was afoot, I just didn’t know what.
Were the Pythians working with the Caltothians? But then why go through all the false efforts to negotiate? Why marry a daughter when she could have been sent to marry the other king’s son in the first place? Why pick the losing side?
Were they working with the rebels? But that wouldn’t make sense either. Caltoth was the one who had been raiding and attacking our border for years. And if they had wanted to rule Jerar our treaty should have been enough—they hadn’t needed to work up from the bottom rung of the rebels to seize control.
Or was King Joren so shrewd that he could sit upon his throne and deliberate? That he would ignore the facts and pick apart meaningless details to postpone promised aid after our call to war. To claim he sought the truth when he really just sought an escape.
Blayne sent two ambassadors to Pythus to plead our case. They would remain in his court as a constant reminder until he honored the New Alliance. An envoy traveled back and forth by ship, a new letter with updates on our progress every month to give us hope. Sooner or later Jerar would receive its promised aid. Our king refused to consider the alternative.
That wasn’t the only change to pass.