it?”
“Yes. No, but—” Aketo shook his head. He’d felt her regret that night at the well. Regret and uncertainty and worry that made his teeth ache. “I worry it was too soon.”
“Ah, I see. You know what she feels, but you do not understand her feelings because you haven’t spoken with her. You two have not yet learned to be vulnerable with each other.”
Aketo began to protest. They had been through a lot in Asrodei and Ternain. They’d saved each other’s lives more than once.
Osir continued, oblivious. “It is a simple enough thing to fix. You need only begin by being honest with her.”
“What if telling her the truth is breaking my promise to someone else?” He still hadn’t told Eva everything about his mother and the King.
“You needn’t worry about revealing your every secret. Start small. One truth exchanged for another. It is more important you learn to be honest with your heart. Your fears, what you desire. Share your heart with her; she will share hers in return.”
“You sound like my mother,” Aketo grunted.
“A high compliment if all you say about her is true,” Osir murmured, smiling lightly. He was the only one of Eva’s family to ask about life in the Enclosure. “If you can believe it, Tavan and Lirra are not the easiest to live with. And before Lei’s warning, nearly two dozen more members of our family used to live here. I had to learn to break up arguments without using my voice.” Aketo hadn’t heard Osir use his speaking magick once since their first meeting. “And that earning someone’s trust is easiest when you first give it.”
“I know that,” Aketo snapped, surprised to find he was suddenly annoyed with the speaker’s advice. He shouldn’t have had to explain something so simple. Aketo knew that, knew as well that he was holding back with Eva. That was why they hadn’t slept together. He wasn’t afraid he would change his mind, but that she would.
And then he would have to live with her regret, even if she never expressed it openly.
He needed her to see him as he truly was, in his home, with the family he loved. Yet he hadn’t realized until now that the distance between them was more than just the physical lines he wasn’t willing to cross. He’d let his secrets become an excuse not to be open with her about everything else.
Aketo was about to offer an apology at his tone, but suddenly surprise shot through Osir like an arrow.
“Get low,” he breathed, eyes narrowed as he glared at something to the west.
Without hesitation, Aketo lowered his body to the ground. They had been crouched at the foot of a rock outcrop since daybreak. Luckily the waist-high grasses hid them well.
Osir’s eyes must have been sharper than Aketo’s, because he could not see anything. He pulled out the eyeglass Eva let him borrow and scanned the horizon. First all he could see were the dark silhouettes of trees and craggy brush and more rock outcrops. Until movement in the west drew his eye.
Then he understood exactly what—no, who—he was seeing and a chill spread over his skin.
There were just three men that he could see. Their white uniforms glowed like firelight, reflecting the fiery sunrise, but what struck Aketo as even more important were the masks each man wore.
He rose to a crouch. “We have to get back to Nbaltir. Now.”
* * *
Aketo’s journey outside Sher n’Cai began about ten months ago. The last of the winter snows had just come and gone, and his father had written him to ask whether he would leave the Enclosure this year.
His father, Rodrick Sylea, was the bloodkin ambassador to the crown and one of the leaders of the bloodkin’s informal power structure in Ternain. Rodrick’s family had settled there after the Great War and, unlike most bloodkin families given to traveling the realm, remained for the next two centuries. Yet like many bloodkin youths, once he came of age, he’d joined a bloodkin caravan to travel every inch of Myre. Rodrick and Daischa, Aketo’s mother, had met when that clan came to Sher n’Cai. Of the few merchants that bothered to travel so far north to trade with them, all were bloodkin.
Back then visitors were allowed to linger for extended stays in the Enclosures, but after months in the mountains, the bloodkin traders planned to leave. On the eve of Rodrick’s departure, Daischa learned she was pregnant. As his mother told it, a