Her thoroughly Tsurani viewpoint sparked shock, and Kevin bridled. ‘Do you think our King would come here? After your warriors have been ravaging his lands for nine years? “Forget we’ve burned your villages, Your Majesty. Just step through this gate into our world!” Not bloody likely. Remember, this King has been a field commander with his father’s army almost since the start. He knows whom he faces. Trust will be a very thin commodity in the Kingdom of the Isles until your people prove otherwise.’
Mara conceded that Kevin was right on all points. ‘I would guess from your perspective we would be worthy of distrust.’
Her equanimity struck a nerve, mostly because he expected a fight. Kevin laughed, a cold and bitter sound. ‘I love you as the breath of my life, Mara of the Acoma, but there is just one of me. Thousands of my countrymen know the Tsurani only upon the battlefield. What they see are men who have invaded their homeland for bloody conquest. There will be no easy peace in all this.’
Framed by an arching trellis of akasi vines, Mara frowned. ‘Do you infer that Ichindar will be asked to surrender the lands the Warlord has gained?’
Kevin laughed again. ‘You Tsurani. You believe that everyone thinks as you do. Of course the King will demand that you depart. You’re invaders. You’re alien. You don’t belong on the Midkemian side of the rift.’ Caught by an upwelling tide of irony, Kevin looked into Mara’s face. She looked worried, even hurt, but uppermost was her concern for him. That wrenched. She did not share his concept of cruelty, could never grasp what it cost him to beg for the concessions that had given Patrick and his fellow slaves the most basic sustenance. Torn by his improbable love and his inborn sense of justice, Kevin rose precipitately and left.
The trouble with the Kentosani town house was that it had no vast yards to get lost in. Mara found Kevin within a few minutes, crouched on their bed mat, casting small pebbles into the fish pool that separated the outer screen from the wall shared with the building next door. She knelt and circled his waist with an embrace from behind. With her cheek against his back she said, ‘What do you see in the fish pool, beloved?’
Kevin’s reply held flinty honesty. ‘I see years of pretence. I let myself become lost within your love, and for that I am grateful, but upon hearing of this coming peace . . .’
‘You remember the war,’ she prompted, hoping he would talk.
Mara sensed bitterness behind the fine tremors of rage that coursed through him as he said, ‘Yes. I remember. I remember my countrymen, my friends, dying trying to defend their homes from armies we knew nothing of, warriors who came for reasons we could not understand. Men who asked for no parley, but who just came and butchered our farmers, took our villages, and occupied our towns.
‘I remember fighting your people, Mara. I didn’t think of them as honourable foes. I thought of them as murdering scum. I hated them with every fibre of my being.’
She felt him sweat with the memories, but when she did not withdraw, he made an effort to calm himself. ‘In all this I have come to know you, your people. I . . . can’t say I find some of your ways pleasant. But at least I understand something of the Tsurani. You have honour, though it’s a different thing from our own sense of justice. We have our honour, too, but I don’t think you understand that fully. And we have things in common, as all people do. I love Ayaki as if he were my own.
‘But we’re people who have both suffered, you at the hands of my countrymen, me at the hands of yours.’
Mara soothed him with her touch. ‘Yet I would change nothing.’
Kevin turned within the circle of her arms and looked down at a face shining with tears that were considered an unconditional weakness in her culture. Immediately he felt shamed. ‘You’d not save your brother and father if you could?’
Mara shook her head. ‘Now I would not. Most bitter of all is that knowledge, my beloved. For to alter my past griefs, I would never have had Ayaki, or the love I share with you.’ Behind her eyes were other, darker realizations: she would never have ruled, and so would never have known the intoxicating fascination she found in the power of the Great Game.
Stunned by her soul-bearing honesty, Kevin felt his throat constrict. He held Mara close, letting her tears wet his shoulder through his shirt. Half-choked by emotion, he said, ‘But as much as I love you, Mara of the Acoma . . .’
She let him push her away. Her eyes held his as she searched his face and discovered the harsh truth he could no longer evade. Fear twisted her spirit, and a sorrow not felt since the day fate had forced her to assume the mantle of the Acoma. ‘Tell me,’ she snapped. ‘Tell me all, now.’
Kevin looked tortured. ‘Ah, Lady, I love you beyond doubt . . . I will until death. But I will never embrace this slavery. Not even for you.’
Mara could not bear to look at him. In this moment, for the first time, she at last knew the depth of his pain. Gripping him desperately, she said, ‘If the gods willed it . . . would you leave me?’