I sing . . . but they are convinced, after all these years, that I do more.”
He did not want to hear it. It turned his belly into a gaping wound, and his rage into a mindless swarm. He could not afford to be senseless. He wanted to back away from her again, not in repudiation, but in self-preservation. He stepped forward instead, knowing that if he distanced himself now, she would think she’d repulsed him.
“I do not do more. I sing. I try not to be alone with him or to get too close to him. But there are times when I am . . . and . . . I do. I have navigated both as best I can.”
He dare not touch her, not in comfort or in support. He didn’t know if she would welcome it. She was rigid in front of him, her voice low, her breaths shallow. He let her speak, let her tell him what she wanted to say, and he kept his hands to his sides.
“The first time he kissed me, I told Master Ivo that it happened, and I swore I would never go near him again. Ivo agreed, but a week later, the king had a terrible headache and he kept sending for me. I held out strong until I found out he was giving ten lashes to every sentry who came back without me. Master Ivo scolded and stomped his feet, but the next week it became twenty lashes, then thirty, and one guard, not much more than a boy, died.
“I stopped threatening to quit singing and told him that if he forced himself on me, I would kill myself. You cannot coerce the dead. He must have believed me, for he has spared me that. But he is also afraid.”
“Afraid of what?” Hod asked, his voice barely above a whisper. He was trying to simply listen, to not react, to not lose his mind. Banruud would die. If it was the last thing he did, Banruud would die.
“He is afraid of lying with me and making me with child,” Ghisla said, so tremulously her words didn’t leave her lips. “Queen Alannah had one dead son after another until it killed her. If Banruud takes another queen and the same thing happens again . . .”
“It begins to look as though he is the problem,” Hod finished for her.
“Yes. And calls into question Alba’s parentage. He fears, more than anything else, losing the power her birth gave him. He took her from Ghost. I’ve seen it time and time again in his thoughts. He stole a daughter and rejected a son. Two sons, though he didn’t know about you . . . No one knew about you.”
He wasn’t sure how or how long she’d known . . . but Ghisla knew most things. She carried Saylok’s secrets on her small shoulders.
“Did you know, Hod?” she asked softly.
“It is what my mother told Arwin. It is what Arwin told me the day he died.”
She swallowed her sympathy. He heard it in her throat and in the tightness of her jaw, but she forged ahead, setting Arwin aside.
“And you feel nothing for him?” Ghisla asked.
“For my father?”
He heard her curt nod.
“I feel curiosity. And I feel disgust. For him . . . and for myself. I do not like the similarities between us. I do not like that we both love the same woman.”
He heard Ghisla’s heart leap and wondered if it was horror or hope . . . or both.
“He does not love me,” she said.
“I think he does. In his way.”
“And you do not love me.” She sounded so sure, so adamant, and he wondered how she could know so much and not know that.
“You are the only thing on this earth that I love.”
Her hands fluttered to her lips and then slid to her throat. But she did not profess her love in return.
“I don’t know where your allegiance lies,” she said, and the words were a quiet sob that she tried desperately to suppress.
“I have none. I have no allegiance to Saylok. I have no allegiance to Banruud, or the temple, or a clan.”
“You could have let Banruud die today,” she whispered. “Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “It was instinct more than . . . anything. And his death . . . today . . . was not part of the plan.”
“What plan? Do you have any allegiance to the North King?” she cried.