“I’m aware.” Her tone was biting, though I knew it was directed at the situation, not me. “But the way she looked at me…” Ana?s sighed. “There is no one individual to whom I’m telling the whole truth. On some level or another, I’m deceiving every single person in my life, and trying to keep track of it all…” She rubbed a hand across her eyes. “I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t know what I want.”
I silently considered her admission. Ana?s was not a sympathizer by the true definition of the word. She believed power mattered: that half-bloods and humans were not our equals. Yet she was as dedicated to the success of the revolution as the rest of us. Not because she might stand to benefit from Tristan taking the throne. Rather, it was a feeling deep within her core that those with power should use it to protect those without, and she seemed to take every loss of a half-blood life as a personal failure.
Chewing on the inside of my cheek, I finally asked, “Are you going to tell Tristan the truth about why your father has decided to move against him now?”
Ana?s exhaled softly, then shook her head. “This is why we can’t trust Pénélope with our secrets.”
There was no anger in her voice, only resignation, so I waited to see if she’d say more.
“I don’t want him to know about the betrothal.”
“Why?” I asked, curious, though I knew I was walking on dangerous ground.
She twisted a ring around one finger, the gemstones winking in our troll light. “Because he’d feel obligated to do something,” she finally said. “He’s not always rational when it comes to his father, Marc. You know that better than anyone. If he learned his father had broken our betrothal, he’d bond me for no other reason than because his father said he couldn’t.”
“I think he’d be more motivated to undo the hurt you’d endured than by spite,” I countered, knowing how protective my cousin was of her.
Ana?s wrinkled her nose. “That’s worse.” Her hands grew still. “I want him to choose to bond me because he loves me or I don’t want him to choose me at all.” Turning her head, she stared at me, unblinking. “Are you going to tell him?”
“No,” I said, admiring her bravery even though I could see it costing her in the end.
“I didn’t think you would.” Her eyes drifted to Tristan, whose face was still bright with excitement, and her lips curved with a sad smile. “You’re the only one who understands what it’s like to love someone, to be willing to do anything for them despite knowing that you’ll never get to be with them.”
Though I didn’t think it was intended to do so, the sentiment was like a punch to my gut. “I’ll do whatever it takes to keep Pénélope safe,” I said.
“I know. You’re the only one I trust her with.” But her hands still balled into fists. “This plan of ours is working for now, but it won’t work for long. I’m afraid… I don’t think I can bear to lose her. But the only way I can see to protect her is to kill him.”
Her father.
“When Tristan talks of killing his father and taking the throne, I know he sees it theoretically,” she said. “As a step in his plan. But when I think of doing the same, I imagine it as it would be. The way it would feel to twist his neck or plunge a knife into his heart. What it would be like to pull him apart as a child might a spider. I see the blood on my hands.”
A tremor ran through her and I didn’t know what to do or what to say, because Ana?s so rarely showed any form of weakness. To acknowledge it might do more harm than good.
“I know he’s evil,” she continued. “I know he’s a villain and that he opposes everything I’m fighting for. But he’s still my father.”
“It might not come to that,” I said, knowing my words were hollow because they did nothing to alleviate the fear growing in my chest. “All we need to do is play our parts until Tristan makes his move, then we can pluck Pénélope from danger and your father can learn to live under a new regime or face the consequences.”
“I know,” she said, rising to her feet and stepping out onto the surface of the water. “But I’m afraid that by the time Tristan’s ready, it will be too late.”
Chapter Twelve
Pénélope
Over the coming days, I found myself a creature consumed, the intrigue I’d become a part of fighting for precedence with more personal thoughts, the only commonality between them that they both centered on Marc. I saw him often, but always we were in the company of others, and that charged moment we’d shared in the throne room, the intensity of physical contact, remained so elusive and impossible to repeat that part of me wondered if it had happened at all.
But while that fleeting few minutes of intimacy slipped further into the fabric of my imagination, the notion that my friends – and my sister – formed the heart of the sympathizer cause became more and more of a reality to me. Over and over, I ran through the events of that day, and those that had preceded them. From Marc arranging for the human trader to transport contraband, to the twins being behind the strange order, to my father’s inference that he’d expected to catch the humans with propaganda. Most of all, I reflected on how Ana?s had lured my father to the King’s audience where he articulated how little regard the upper classes possessed for half-blood life minutes before sympathizer propaganda was released attacking that very belief system. All of it seemed like a perfectly orchestrated plan to stir up anger against the King and the aristocracy, and one that could only have been accomplished by players at the highest levels.
And I’d put everything they were working toward in jeopardy.
It didn’t matter that I hadn’t known. That I’d been motivated to rid my sister, Marc – and all of Trollus – of a future ruler who I’d believed was a villain. A tyrant in the making. Good intentions didn’t make up for the fact that I’d given my father information to help in his war against the only faction in Trollus attempting to do any good. Which meant I needed to find a way to undo the damage that I’d done.
* * *
Opportunity came in the form of one of my father’s gatherings. A select group of aristocrats arriving under the cloak of illusion through the open front door, the only clue to their presence the massing of power under our roof. A group of trolls who, for reasons unknown, wanted no one in Trollus to know they were meeting in one place.
Which, in my mind, meant they were discussing something worth hearing, especially when they all ventured into the atrium.
Easing open one of the delicate doors, I slipped off my shoes and crept into the glass structure. This was my father’s abode, and for that reason alone, I avoided it unless in my sister’s company. Still, I knew the paths through the garden like the back of my hand, as well as the best places to hide.