Anton stared ahead, adjusting his position to move farther away from me. It was a subtle distance, only a fraction, but I felt the icy air take hold of the increased space from his body, which had been offering me much-needed heat. I locked my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering. If a fur-lined coat were to materialize before me, I might trade its warmth for my ideals, after all. “A caravan?” he asked, avoiding the entire point I’d been laboring to make. “Do you mean to tell me you’re Romska-born? Your coloring is all wrong.”
My fingers moved to touch the end of my blond braid. The Riaznian Romska were known for their deep-olive skin, dark eyes, and darker hair. “I never claimed to be a blooded Romska, only that I kept company with them.”
“Because you are an Auraseer?”
“Yes.”
“Because you sought to evade the empire?”
“Yes.”
“Because your parents thought giving you up to the nomadic tribes was a better trade than the loss of your freedom?”
I shivered, not from the stinging cold but the wonder that the prince had me pegged. “Yes.”
He nodded and roughly exhaled in a muzzled sort of laugh. His breath frosted the air. “As if anyone in Riaznin could acquire freedom so easily.”
His rudeness amazed me. I sat stunned, gaping at him until a dip in the road jostled my mouth into working order again. “You call what I went through easy?”
“I did not say it was easy. Ease has nothing to do with the fact you couldn’t have attained freedom no matter what you went through.”
“You don’t know anything about me!” I snapped. He didn’t have me pegged, he had me simplified. To him, I was merely another commoner who dreamed of a life the empire’s shadow couldn’t touch. No doubt he thought himself big enough to be the one to cast the shadow.
“I am speaking of true freedom,” he said.
“Yes, which you’ve been kind enough to define as a thing I will never have—a reality of which I’m well aware and have had seventeen years to digest, thank you very much.”
His eyebrows arched. “For someone trained in the nuances of emotion, you are quick to anger.”
“Trained?” I laughed, my blood flaming. “Don’t you see how untrained, how unqualified I am? My time spent without true freedom while evading your empire has cost me the years I could have honed my ability for the servitude that has now been thrust upon me! And if I am angry, it is only because I feel what you, yourself, have not restrained.”
“I am not angry.”
My fingers curled in frustration and clawed the seat. I felt a flash of blinding pain from the animal that was slaughtered for the leather beneath me and the meat it must have provided at the emperor’s table. But that pain was swiftly eclipsed by my fury that Anton was right. He wasn’t angry. “You must be,” I said, despite the fact his face wore only the markings of piqued curiosity, and nothing I sensed within him could contradict it. That realization didn’t diffuse my anger in the least. If anything, it heightened it.
“Do you never take responsibility for your own emotions?” he asked.
“They far too often belong to someone else.” My teeth were on edge. Why couldn’t he be angry? He’d had anger enough to spare at the convent. Why now make me out for the fool I was?
“Is it so difficult for you to discern the difference?”
I bit the inside of my cheeks to prevent myself from speaking. He would not bait me again. This conversation had proved disastrous. I’d set out to seek the answer to the mystery behind his driving a troika alone, and he’d divulged nothing, yet succeeded in stripping me bare of too many secrets—my upbringing, my history of escaping the law, and the humiliating truth that I was the most ill-qualified Auraseer in creation to meet the task lying before me.
Anton shook his head for a stretch of silence. “Valko will make mincemeat of you.”
Nostrils flared, I shifted away as far as possible until my hip pressed the cold side of the sleigh. I didn’t need him to remind me of my bleak prospects. “I’m going to sleep now,” I announced, as if I could lull my frazzled nerves so easily.
“Very well.” He flicked his wrists and sent a light whip along the reins to keep the horses apace. “Dream while you can, Sonya. All too soon you will awaken to a life even I cannot forestall.”
I scowled. What did he mean by that? Laying my cheek against the sleigh, I fidgeted and tried to get comfortable. Was he saying he would grant me another life if it were in his power? I pictured his boot tapping the stones of the convent while his gaze swept over me. He knew I would be no good as sovereign Auraseer. So of course he would choose another, if possible, and let me go if it meant better serving his brother—his dynasty. I stewed over that until the steady clip-clop of the horses slowed my breath and made my thoughts scatter and drift until my anger ebbed away.
On the cusp of sleep, I heard my name, again and again, echoing across the expanse of my mind. There was something about the way he’d said it. Perhaps because it was the first time my name had fallen from his lips. Or perhaps it was the whisper of the feeling I had when he spoke it—Sonya—and the inkling that the prince had, after all, found a small measure of pity for someone else. Pity for a girl like me.
The irony was I no longer wanted his compassion. I wanted release, from being me, from being everything I was, or had done, or would do, which was just cause to be pitied all the same.
CHAPTER SIX