I glanced back at the sestra and the two little girls as they shivered and still waited for us to depart. “We should leave.” I tightened the blankets around me. “Wolves roam these woods at night.”
Something behind Anton’s gaze sent a confusing fluctuation of warmth and cold through my body. Was he even listening to me? My thoughts strayed to my appearance. My face must be streaked with ashy grime. Perhaps my quick scrub with the bar of lye in the infirmary hadn’t been sufficient. I itched to touch my skin to be sure, but that would only reveal my awareness of how unprepared I was to meet the emperor—and my new fate.
He cleared his throat and averted his eyes from my mine, just slightly until they settled on the bridge of my nose, like he’d done inside the convent. Then, making a clicking sound with his tongue, he snapped the reins and the horses jolted forward. My heart lurched in my chest. This was it. I was leaving everything I had known behind. Again. I’d never lived in a place long enough to call it my home. Even my years with the Romska were always spent in motion, changing from caravan to caravan to keep me concealed. Now all that hiding was for nothing. The imperial palace would be my final place of residence. But how could it ever be my home?
I worried at my lip and twisted around to look once more at the aged woman who had tried to teach me, to tame me, to prepare me for this destiny if it ever chanced to become mine. I reached with my heart across the widening distance to Sestra Mirna and tried to feel out any sorrow from her at my leaving. The horses’ pace quickened. The sestra set her hands on the small shoulders of Dasha and Tola and guided them inside the ruined convent before I was even out of view. My breath hitched. I caged a sob in my throat. My sorrow for leaving Ormina was one-sided. Closing my eyes, I reminded myself it was better this way, better I leave now before I could harm three people I realized too late I loved.
I sat on my hands to keep them warm and steeled my resolve, pushing away the needling thought that the city of the emperor held ten thousand more people than this little village near the sea. Ten thousand more who would come closer to touching my instability. The only remedy was to be cold to them. Distant. Compassionless. Because any love I ever gave in this world only ended up destroying the very ones I cared about the most.
In the end it was I, not Anton, who broke the silence I’d made such a solemn pact with myself to keep. A three-day journey is an insufferable thing to bear with only the thoughts in one’s head. Especially if one is an Auraseer and can sense the boy she is alone with has a similar urge to speak. Or at least she hopes he does, because that urge multiplying inside her would be so much easier to justify as coming from him than would be the admission it could be originating from herself and her intense need to speak to someone, even a lofty prince, in order to distract herself from her anxiety over her future, which was as overwhelming as the harrowing guilt and sorrow for the dead she left behind. Conversing with Anton was the most viable option for escaping the darkness in my head, the darkness of who I was.
“Is it customary for princes to drive their own sleighs?”
I’d spent the better part of the last hour deciding how to phrase my question and felt rather clever in my choice of words, which were close to matching his from earlier. Would he notice? Think me impertinent? Or perhaps just think me ridiculous for trying to banter on something he’d said half the night ago? Because, truth be told, the first morning of our three-day journey had yet to dawn. We were still in the vast woods outside Ormina, and here I was already speaking to him. My will was about as iron as battered tin.
Enough moonlight shone through the canopy of evergreens that I caught the sharp glance he gave me. Had I startled him by breaking the silence or merely annoyed him? “It is for me,” he said, also using the words I’d answered him with before we left the convent.
“When my caravan traveled near Dubrov,” I said, “we were forced off the road for a good quarter hour while a baron passed us with an entourage of twenty guards and servants on their journey to his summer home. Twenty. For a baron, not a prince—not the sole heir to the throne of Riaznin.” It was a well-known fact the emperor had yet to marry or bear children. He was only a year older than his brother. Their closeness in age spurred a deep rivalry between them. Or so the rumors whispered. “And yet you came here alone.”