used to say that he was struck dumb the first time he saw her. She was standing in the door of her family home with an arrow aimed directly at his heart.”
His father sounded like he had an odd sense of the mating dance. She could imagine being struck dumb at the sight of someone pointing a weapon in your direction, but not then wanting them as your telroi.
“She sounds like my kind of woman.”
“She would have approved of you. She wouldn’t have let you know that, but she would have.” His hand cupped the back of her head, his fingers smoothing through her hair. “You know that my people have the custom of kidnapping our telrois from other clans or Lowland villages. She’s one of the few that came willingly. She gave up her family and life because she saw something in him that called to her. When he died, something broke inside her. She was not the same for a very long time. Some days I don’t think she ever got back to the person she was.”
Grief will do that. It was like a many-headed beast; every time you chopped off one, two more heads sprung up to bite you in the ass. Left unattended, it could reach deep inside, ripping out the vital parts that made up a person.
“She met Cale’s father in that time. Everyone knew the two of them were not a good match. He was ambitious but lacked the discipline to make his ambitions a reality. He latched onto her because she was the former wife of the Hawkvale and thought she would bring him the acclaim and recognition he craved.”
Shea leaned against Fallon harder, letting him take more of her weight—wishing that she could prevent the ugliness that was coming.
“When that didn’t happen, he changed, taking his frustration out on her. And me sometimes. Back then, I was small. He would taunt me about my inability to protect her. He did that until I was finally big enough and well-trained enough to put a stop to it. I took my mother and Cale and we left him. Henry helped with that too.” His voice was hoarse by then. Shea’s eyes smarted though all this happened years before she met Fallon. “I thought it was over then. My mother gradually became the woman I remembered. In the end I was wrong, that man was simply biding his time. Waiting until I was off getting our revenge before striking. He snuck into our tent one day and killed her and two others. He tried to kill Cale too, but Henry managed to get there in time to save him.”
Fallon fell silent after that. Shea rubbed her chin against his shoulder, trying to give him wordless comfort. It was a poor offering, given what he’d shared.
“I understand your desire to cling to this notion that you can keep me safe,” Shea finally said. She lifted her head to look up at him in the poor light. “It is a noble feeling, but you must understand that it is not possible to wrap me in swaddling to protect me from what’s out there. Just look at what happened earlier with the mist. There are no guarantees in the Broken Lands.”
“You cannot argue that the danger you are in increases every time you go outside the camp.”
“That is true, but your enemies are more likely to do me in, than anything out there. You know this or else you wouldn’t have put as many guards as you could spare on me.”
She could tell by the loaded silence he didn’t want to concede that point. Seeing a chink, she pushed on, “Fallon, you can’t make me into something I’m not. I’ll never be a pretty trinket on your arm or a ball of fluff sitting by your side. I deserve more; I am more.”
The shadow of his head dipped in the dark and Shea got the sense his intense eyes were focused on her.
“What is it that you like about being a pathfinder?”
Shea drummed her fingers against his chest. She’d never really thought about it before. It was just the world she was raised in—the world she was born into.
He didn’t wait for her answer. “Because from where I sit, you don’t appear to like it.”
Shea reared back. How could he say that? Yes, she might not be able to quantify what she liked about it, why it drew her, but that didn’t make it less the case.
“How can