I realized my fingernails dug into his leg above his knee. I jerked back my shaking hand. “I’m sorry.”
The eyes of the thin-browed girl popped wider. “She must be the new Auraseer.” The girl pointed at me. Her dark jealousy broke apart into a shower of awe. It prickled a buzz of energy across my skin. “The prince has brought the new Auraseer!”
One by one, the heads in the square turned to me. Even the fistfight broke apart.
Their wonder combined with the pinprick energy of the girl, until together it felt like a thousand knives nicking at my skin. Each cut sliced deeper.
Tears slid down my cheeks. Too many expectations. Too many people to disappoint. Too many teeming emotions begging to be defined. I felt like a glass figurine skittering to the edge of a mantel in an earthquake. Any more of this and I would fall, break into a million pieces. “Make them stop,” I pleaded as I hung onto Anton, my words jumbled and scarcely audible. “I can’t . . . I can’t do this.” With the road blocked, who knew how long we might be trapped here?
Tendrils of his anxious concern reached me. I felt them in the warmth of his skin past his shirtsleeve. But the auras of the people swiftly crowded them out. “Don’t look at them.” He flicked the reins in an effort to budge the horses along.
I squeezed my eyes closed, but the multitude swarmed inside me, bees in a hive far too small. “That doesn’t help.” My control was slipping away, just as it had on the night the mob of peasants amassed at the convent’s gate.
“Think of something—anything else.”
I pictured the Ilvinov Sea. I would stare at it from the bell tower of the convent. I pretended the murmurs in Torchev were the roaring of the ocean, the rise and fall of white-capped waves. Auraseer, the water called to me. Just a girl. Too young a girl. The depths churned with feelings, dark and curious, bitter and dangerous. Rising into an enormous swell, the water slapped down, pushing me under. Tossing me. Thrashing me. I couldn’t breathe.
“Sonya, open your eyes.” Anton’s hand slid across my lower back and held me like an anchor. “Look at me now.”
My nose pressed into his cape. My body seized like a madwoman’s. I peered up at him.
“Think of me.” He set his jaw, striving to radiate a show of powerful calmness. It wasn’t authentic. He was worried. I sensed it from our close contact. He didn’t believe I could endure this. I didn’t believe I could.
“You’re not enough,” I said.
“I am enough. Stay with me.” His strong grip nudged me closer, and his fingers spread, fitting between the bones of my rib cage. “Look at me. Focus only on me.”
My head throbbed. I couldn’t concentrate. Behind Anton, flocks of strangers stared and pointed. The road grew more crowded as the steady influx of people were bottlenecked in. Anton shook me, drawing me back to him. “What do you see when you look at me?”
“Well . . . you,” I replied in exasperation.
“What about me? What color are my eyes?”
My vision dotted with stars. I wasn’t breathing properly. “Brown.”
“What kind of brown?”
I wanted into curl into a ball and make myself disappear, hide from the city dwellers of Torchev, from their brazen curiosity, their shameless amazement, their confounding presumptions of me. Instead, I clung to the intense challenge of Anton’s gaze. In the broad daylight, with no moon to soften the edges of him, with no trees to cast him under their mottling shade, I saw the prince with new clarity. “Butter,” I said.
“Butter?”
“Butter,” I repeated.
“Butter is not brown.”
“It is when it simmers in a pot and smells dark and nutty.”
One of his eyebrows lifted in submission. “Very well. And what of my nose?”
“This is foolish.” I sneaked a glance behind him at the people.
“You think my nose is foolish?”
“No!” I whirled back to him. “No, of course not.”
“I was told I have my grandfather’s nose.”
“Did your grandfather have a small mole on the bridge, nearly touching his right eye?”
“He did not.”
“Then you have been lied to, Prince Anton.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Tell me about my hair.”
My heart pounded. How many people were watching us? How many knew I could see into them? “I’ve never met a boy so vain.”
“My hair, Sonya,” he said, keeping me on task.
I swallowed. “I like it windblown. No doubt you will have it slicked to perfection once we reach the palace.”