I know, she said, and was asleep.
Hope stirred within me. I brushed a lock of loose hair from her face, careful not to touch her skin. Maybe, if I could find who did this, I could also find a way to save her.
“To tell the truth,” Roshar says, still staring at the blank target, “I thought there might be something you’d want to tell me that, for personal reasons, you do not wish to tell your father.”
He has my full attention now. “Like what?”
“Oh, something to do with that girl, maybe.”
“I have nothing to say about Nirrim.” She did not love me. I was good enough for a time. It didn’t matter, in the end, how I kissed her. It didn’t matter how her body arched at my touch. It didn’t matter that she was tender. What mattered was her honesty when she admitted that she didn’t feel what I felt.
Do you not love me like I love you? I asked. Won’t you come with me?
No.
“Are you home for good?” Roshar asks carefully.
“Yes.”
“Then shall we?” He nods in the direction of the house. As I walk beside my godfather, I sneak a glance at him. He is not very tall for a man, and I am tall for a woman, so we are of a height. I see clearly the tension along his jaw—the way he avoids my gaze, yet feels it. My father’s truest friend. My mother loves him, too. Yet Roshar is no Herrani, and we have always known that his political loyalties are due first to his queen, not my country.
People don’t like to imagine the worst possibility, my mother often warns. And so they are caught unprepared when the worst comes.
Roshar quickens his pace. The smell of grass is raw and strong.
Could it be you? I wonder as he strides just ahead of me, as though to escape my glance, which I know has turned into an examination.
Did you pour poison into my mother’s cup?
My father smiles when I enter the library and touches my cheek—a light, fond double tap, as though he is settling something into place, and that thing is his idea of me. I bristle, though I know he means to be kind, and say, “What is so amusing?”
“Not amusing. I’m happy you’re home.”
I cannot say, I heard your silence in my mother’s suite. I have Sid, you said. No, she answered, You don’t. I cannot say, Why didn’t you defend me? I cannot say, I spied on you in your moment of fear, when you exposed what every single person in Herran, down to the smallest child, already knows, knows as intimately as they know the signs of a coming green storm: how utterly lost you would be if anything happened to your wife.
I say, “You find something funny.”
“People say you look like Kestrel, but no one looks like you. You would stand out anywhere.”
I look down at my freshly cleaned hands. “This is about how I am dressed.”
“It is more than that. But yes, a little.”
“Why must what I wear be such a favored topic of conversation?”
He considers this, rubbing the scar on his face. The open window lets in a warm breeze that lifts the edge of the curtain and lets it fall. Gently, he asks, “Do you not mean it to be?”
I fling myself down into an elegant reading chair, slinging my trousered legs over one arm and lounging against the other. “Yes, sometimes I want to be noticed. It also annoys me, how everyone finds my appearance so interesting. I can’t explain it. You want to have a state dinner to show everyone that your heir has returned and Herran is safe, the hereditary line unbroken. So here I am, your prize pony.” I hear my voice shrink. “I want to look good. But not your way. Mine.”
“Sid, you do.”
I look up at him. He does not tell me to sit up straight or remember my manners. He does not remind me of my duty as a princess. I say, the resentment clear in my voice, “You found me funny.”
He takes the chair across from me. He is too large for it, like a wolf in a birdbath. “If I found anything funny it was how we are different.”
A cold stone sits in my throat. I wish I had his height, his strength, the way he commands respect without uttering a word.
“What I mean is,” he says, “in a crowd, I would rather be invisible.”
“You are saying I’m a show-off.”
“Can we not have every word between us go wrong? I am saying that I like how you’re dressed, and if you enjoy holding the center of attention, that is no bad thing.”
“Right. Important for a princess and future queen.”
“Sid, why did you leave Herran?”
“I was bored.”
“That is not the real reason.”
“The parties here are always attended by the same people and I’ve slept with all the interesting ones. I require more variety in my entertainment.”
Nirrim calls this sort of thing a midnight lie: where I tell a truth that functions like a lie because I’ve said it in order to disguise a greater truth I don’t want known. The thought of Nirrim makes me wince. My father notices. He says, “If you sought pleasure, that doesn’t seem to be what you found.”
“You underestimate my ability to take pleasure in almost any circumstance, save this conversation.”
“Please,” he says, “answer a direct question. Don’t make a game of it.”
I shrug. “The god of games loves me.”
“You stole one of my ships.”
“Borrowed.”
“Sailed in the middle of the night.”
“The tide was right.”
“Left no note or word.”
“My actions spoke for themselves.”
“Why can’t you trust me? Why can’t you tell me what’s wrong?”
I shouldn’t have to. It should be obvious. No one has forgotten I am engaged to Prince Ishar, son of Queen Inishanaway, ruler of Dacra from its northern grasslands to its watery capital to its islands sprinkled in the sea. If my father cannot guess that I don’t want to marry any man, it is because he does not want to. My mother, who knows full well my refusal, since I screamed it at her the night I left, probably has said nothing of it to him. He would have mentioned it by now if she had. But he should know, and the fact that he does not proves that he does not know me.
The window brims with dark green lawn. An irrielle bird sings, ending with a percussive chirping as dry as the sound of snapping fingers. My father’s gray eyes search mine, worried, and I fill with anger, my pulse sharp in my throat. Yet I know how this feeling will end, because I have felt this way before, and the outcome is always the same. I will not show my anger because I am afraid of wounding him with it—especially now, when the person he loves most lies sick and he prays daily to his god, saying, I have served you. I am yours. Show mercy, and take me instead.
Do I know he does this for a fact? No. Yet he is Arin the Plain King. Death’s Child. My father. It is easy enough to imagine.
I want my father to imagine me.
My anger dissolves into sadness. I run a hand along the chair’s old brocade silk, which shines in places, lies flatly dull in others. My hand is not my mother’s hand, with her narrow fingers, strong yet soft. My hand resembles my father’s—rough from the sea and marked with scars, though mine are not from battle, merely training for it. Herran has been at peace the whole of my life.