It was fortunate, though it had nothing to do with the soil. “I know a good many who’d debate that statement, but I’ll let you have it.”
“How magnanimous of you.” She tilted her head, quietly waiting for him to say more, and yet the truth of what had driven him to the dam stuck in his throat, not something he’d admit even to Otis. Especially not Otis, who hated the Valcottans so thoroughly for what they’d taken from him that he’d see Keris’s beliefs as a form of betrayal.
She’s different. The thought rippled through his head, though he had no reason to believe it. He barely knew this woman, this soldier. And yet he found himself saying, “You’ve witnessed the aftermath of raids against your people?”
She nodded. “Many times.”
“I have not. Had not, that is.”
“Until Bermin’s raid on that farm today.” She exhaled a long breath. “Was it as you expected?”
“Yes. And no.” Keris turned to the glittering city, the mist rising to dampen his hair and clothes. “The silence is different than other silences. It’s not the lack of words, but lack of motion. The still hearts and unmoving chests. The empty eyes.” Visions of the farmers at work juxtaposed with them lying in pieces across the farmyard and fields, and he blinked, trying to force them away. “One moment going about their lives, the next, their lives cut short. And for what?”
“Vengeance.” The word came swiftly from her lips, then she hesitated and added, “Retaliation for the loss of our people in the recent raid is the reason Bermin gave.”
A raid that the two of them had unwittingly caused.
“Yes, an eye for an eye. Yet those your people and mine would seek vengeance against care nothing for the lives taken.” He remembered how Otis had barely seemed to see the carnage around them. How the patrols who had come had been wild with anger over the sight and absent any grief for the loss.
Reaching down, he picked up a rock and threw it hard, swearing as pain lanced through his cursed shoulder. “Those in power don’t care in the way they should.”
“I care.” Her voice caught. “It breaks my heart every time I see it. I feel sick with guilt for not having prevented it. And…” Valcotta hesitated, then blurted out, “Have you ever had an idea lodge in your thoughts like a spark, and rather than your efforts extinguishing it, they only cause it to burst into flame? And for those flames to illuminate the world in such a way that you half wondered if you’d been blind before?”
“Yes.” Because her words had lit a spark in his own mind, though he hadn’t decided what, if anything, he intended to do about it.
Turning away from him, she sat, legs hanging over the edge of the dam. Keris lowered himself to the damp stone next to her, immediately feeling the waterfall’s mist dampen his trousers.
“My mother was murdered in front of me by Maridrinian raiders when I was fourteen. She didn’t even know how to hold a weapon, but she fought to save my life. They tied me to the cross holding her body and left me there to die.”
Keris’s stomach clenched. It was a cruelty his father had made popular in his younger years before he’d inherited the throne, and many of the soldiers in Nerastis continued to use it in honor of him. “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t respond, only sat in silence for a long time before finally saying, “I dedicated my life to becoming strong enough to fight back against men like the one who killed her. To protecting those who could not protect themselves. To defending Valcotta from those who’d harm her. And to the pursuit of vengeance. But along the way, I lost myself. Forgot myself. And all that remained was the need for vengeance.” She looked up at him. “That was the truth the spark revealed to me.”
“And now you seek to find yourself again?”
She nodded. “Except that when I do, I fear there will be no place for her in Nerastis. Or anywhere in Valcotta.”
That had always been the way he’d felt. As though his true self was so at odds with the man his father—and all of Maridrina—wanted him to be that it would be impossible for him to survive unless he escaped. That was why he’d been so desperate to flee to Harendell. Except his cowardice had consequences, his selfishness used as the linchpin in Lara’s and his father’s plans to invade Ithicana. And while he’d not caused the Endless War between Maridrina and Valcotta, in refusing to use his own power to try to mitigate the harm it caused his people, was he not complicit?
If you truly believe in something, you should be willing to suffer for it. To die for it…
“There will be a retaliation for the raid today,” Keris said softly. “One of some significance.”
She tensed, then shifted closer to him as though they were coconspirators in danger of being overheard. “When? Where?”
“Telling you that would make me a traitor to my nation.”
Valcotta was quiet, then she said, “A traitor to your king. And to the princelings and their sycophants in that domed palace. But not a traitor to your people—not a traitor to the innocents who have no say in this war and yet give their lives in payment for the actions of those who do.”
Keris felt what she was saying to his core, and yet if he did this, his soldiers would die where otherwise they would not.
As if hearing his thoughts, she said, “The soldiers in your barracks chose this life. Are paid handsomely for it. And what’s more, Silas Veliant and his ingrate sons care a great deal more for the loss of a soldier’s life than they do a farmer’s. Lose enough of them, and they might cease with the raids for the sake of keeping their hold on Ithicana. And…” She hesitated. “I think for my Empress, if she lost the need to retaliate, it would be the same.”
Keris wondered what Valcotta would think if she knew he was one of those ingrate sons. Not just a princeling living in the domed palace, but the princeling.
“We can’t stop this war,” she said. “But perhaps we could change the nature of it.”
The spark she’d lit in his mind was a spark no longer, but a flame, and it illuminated a far different future for himself than he ever imagined. “Can I trust you, Valcotta?”
She leaned toward him, her cheek brushing against his jaw, the sensation sending a rush of desire through him. Her breath was hot against his ear as she whispered, “I think we both know that the question is whether I should trust you.”
He huffed out a breath, not entirely certain whether it was his head, his heart, or his cock that was making this decision. Only that he was making it. “Have you enough authority to influence strategy?”
She lifted one eyebrow. “Do you have enough importance to know anything worth influencing strategy over?”
He laughed softly. “I do.”