stood between two gnarled trunks and looked north, toward home.
Ludivine touched his arm. “You didn’t abandon them.”
“I did,” he said flatly. “Let’s not pretend otherwise.”
“If you had stayed, Merovec would have killed you.”
His grip on Illumenor’s hilt tightened. “I can protect myself.”
“Of course, but that is something we could not have risked.”
He rounded on her. “Why? Because with me dead, you would have had to work harder to bring Rielle home?”
Ludivine’s pale gaze was steady. “It would have broken my heart to lose you.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“It is nevertheless true.”
“Surely you don’t expect me to believe that anything you say is true.”
She watched him quietly for a moment, perhaps hoping that her steady silence would wear him down, that he would apologize for his unkindness, that he would draw her into his arms and kiss her brow as he had always done.
But instead, he watched her with the patience of a mountain until she was the one to look away and sink heavily onto the grass.
“I have made a grave error somewhere,” she muttered, “but I cannot see it.”
“Your error was in thinking you could control us like pieces in a strategy game,” Audric snapped. “You thought you could scheme with Rielle, keep her all to yourself, and still protect her from him somehow. You convinced her to hide the truth from me, and you ushered her through the trials, and you encouraged her to practice the art of resurrection, which is exactly what he wants of her, and you did all of this without consulting anyone.”
As he spoke, he grew angrier. His fury did not erupt, but rather overflowed steadily. The world was a whirl of dim light and roaring sound, but he stayed put where he stood and breathed through the heat of his anger.
His fight with Rielle was too fresh for him to make the same mistake twice and push away his strongest ally in the war for Rielle’s allegiance.
If it could even still be won.
And the fact that he had to think of such things—Rielle’s allegiance, as if she owed that to him or anyone—disgusted him so thoroughly that he realized with a swift, quiet turn of understanding that he hated himself utterly.
He stared down at Ludivine, steeling his heart against the sight of her sitting there with slumped shoulders, staring bleakly at nothing, a lock of mussed golden hair come loose from its crown of braids.
“All those months ago, when the Borsvall soldiers ambushed me during the Boon Chase,” Audric said, “and Rielle lost control of her power while saving me—you could have stopped her then, isn’t that right? You could have entered her mind and subdued her, kept her power secret. She would not have been found out. No trials, no Sun Queen.”
“I could not allow you to die,” Ludivine said hollowly.
He waited a beat, then crouched before her. “Because you love me?”
“Because Rielle loves you.”
The words gutted him. Did she still? He might never know. “Because you wanted her to love me. You wanted us to love one another, and wed, and you wanted us to have children, maybe, for each of these things would have bound her more securely to me, to the crown. To you.”
Ludivine flinched. “Because if you had died, it would have broken her heart.”
“And in her heartbroken state, she might have done something rash. Fallen into the arms of one ready to soothe her grief. As she has now done, despite all your efforts.”
“I didn’t—”
“Perhaps you could even have stopped the assassins themselves in their tracks.” He realized it for the first time, baffled that it had never occurred to him before. Had she prevented him from deducing the truth? “But you didn’t stop them, because you wanted Rielle’s power to erupt. You wanted her to start exploring it. Why?”
Helplessly, Ludivine opened her mouth and shut it again, her pale, slender hands clenched on her thighs. “It’s not as simple as that, Audric—”
“And if you had told me the truth about my father’s death,” he interrupted, “I could have helped her. I could have helped you. We could have been a united front, you and I. All her fears, all the guilt she carried after what happened at the fire trial. Those last minutes with her father. The nightmares that no doubt plagued her—her own, and Corien’s too. I could have helped her bear every one of those burdens. But you denied me that choice. And you denied her the comfort I would have given her, the