chose his words carefully. “I always thought I’d have liked to meet her.”
Something shifted in her gaze—suspicion, or surprise—and she looked away. “Why?”
He almost loosed a breath. “So that I could understand her. Ask her why she did it.”
“She never meant to.” Her voice was soft as a sigh, and as she gazed into the flames, her face was a well of sadness. “She never meant to hurt anybody.”
The confession was unexpected, and struck a chord deep within him, one he’d kept buried beneath the great legend of Ramson Quicktongue he’d built for himself over the years. He knew, bone-deep, the feeling of hurting someone and being helpless to do anything about it.
And the ones you hurt tended to be the ones closest to you.
* * *
—
Ramson had been seven when he met Jonah Fisher, on the first day of their military training. He’d sized up the gangly, dark-haired boy who looked as though he’d been stretched from a shadow, stalking down the stone halls with a steady, slouched gait. When they announced his name, a titter ran through the boys and girls. Fisher wasn’t a real last name; Fisher was a last name they stuck on Bregonian boys from the orphanages of Sapphire Port.
And it struck close to home.
Ramson himself had been close to inheriting that name. It had something to do with his mother not being properly married to his father, he’d gathered. But while some children like Ramson were never seen again, Ramson’s father, Admiral Roran Farrald, the second most powerful man of the Kingdom of Bregon, had instead plucked Ramson from the small town of Elmford where his mother resided and elected him for placement at the Blue Fort, Bregon’s elite military school. Only the most capable were selected, Affinites among them, and Ramson took this as a gesture of trust. He vowed he would never disappoint the father who remained as distant as the moon in the night sky, monochrome light cold and bright.
But children were the most perceptive of creatures, and the underhanded slights Ramson had received for most of his life were not lost on him. Neither were the whispers of bastard and packsaddle son.
The jeers of his new classmates struck a quiver of fear within him, and he joined them, making his taunts the nastiest and his voice the loudest among them.
Jonah Fisher paused. He looked around, expression bored, as though he’d rather be anywhere but there. “You got nothing better to do or what?” he asked.
The class burst into laughter, Ramson included. He’d heard people speak with Jonah Fisher’s accent before, down at the fish markets and out in the poorest outskirts of Sapphire Port. Ramson was a city-bred boy, and his father had paid for his tutoring since he’d turned five. He prided himself on being the quickest thinker and fastest talker of his class.
A crack rang through the hall. It echoed and reverberated as utter silence fell.
Jonah Fisher held a sparring rod from the racks at the side of the training hall. He stood before the class, still wearing that uninterested expression. “All of you better walk your talk.” His voice was calm, but an undercurrent of threat ran through his words. “Show you know how to really fight. Go on,” he goaded, to the dead stillness of the children.
Ramson looked around. The trainer had stepped away; there were no adults nearby. Just a class of several dozen children who would one day become Bregon’s elite marines. Who would fight for the top rank in his father’s navy.
Packsaddle son.
He’d show them. He’d show them all that he was no Fisher, no bastard, no throwaway shunned by his own father. He was Admiral Roran Farrald’s son.
He would prove it.
Ramson stepped forward. He felt all the eyes of his classmates shift to him, and the attention was wind in his sails, propelling him forward and lifting his courage. “We walk our talk here in the Blue Fort,” he said coolly, grabbing a rod of his own. He’d never held one before that day; it was heavier than he’d expected, the wood rough against his palms.
Fisher cast his black eyes on Ramson. He lifted his rod in an unsettlingly familiar way. It shifted loosely in his hands, flowing like an extension of his body.
Ramson mimicked him, lifting his own rod. It swayed unsteadily, off balance. His heart hammered in his chest, and he could feel his courage evaporating as quickly as a puddle of water on a Bregonian summer day.