Mistwood

He was silent for a long moment, which she spent scanning the narrow alleys and the other members of the procession with equal vigilance. She found that she could focus separately with each eye, allowing her to survey their surroundings for danger while simultaneously watching Rokan’s face. She was fairly sure she couldn’t have done that two weeks ago. Her stay in the Mistwood had made her stronger.

For all the good it had done her.

“I’m sorry,” Rokan said finally. It was not what she had expected him to say.

“I don’t know who killed him,” she said, answering the question he should have asked. They had reached the main boulevard of the city now, and people were cheering from the rooftops. “But there was magic involved.”

Rokan matched his horse’s pace to hers so that he could turn and watch her face. “Albin?”

“Not directly, though I’m sure he was behind it.” Seeing two things at once was giving her a headache. Isabel reverted to human sight. “The spell that killed Ven couldn’t be used from far away. It was someone in the castle.”

Rokan shivered and pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders. “Why would anyone want to kill Ven?”

Isabel knew the answer to that: he had been about to tell her something important. But she had no intention of letting Rokan know that she had been there, had seen a man die and been unable to stop it. “Probably,” she said, “because Ven was protecting you.”

Rokan nodded. He rubbed his thumb back and forth across his lower lip, then said, “But that doesn’t really matter, does it? I don’t need sorcerers. I have you.”

The question dropped like a stone, for all that he tried to make it sound casual. He watched her as if he was trying to piece together a puzzle, waiting for…what?

“Of course you do,” she said coldly.

The rest of the ride was silent and uncomfortable. Rokan kept glancing at her sideways, but every time he opened his mouth to speak he changed his mind. By the time they clattered back into the castle courtyard, Isabel was sure he was wishing he had ridden with Lady Zabia instead.

She spent the next few days searching every guest room in the castle, but found nothing to hint that any of the occupants was a sorcerer. She was caught twice, despite all her efforts, but the ones who caught her—a serving maid and a cook—just turned and left her to continue with her work. Which, at least, settled the question of whether everyone in the castle knew she was the Shifter.

She finished the last room late at night and stood for a moment seething in frustration. She glared at the empty bed of a visiting baron who was spending the night in someone else’s, trying not to think about what she had to do next.

Rokan depended on her. He would be left with nothing to rely on after she told him.

Better he find out now than later.

She started to turn, but she had waited too long to make the decision, and the pause had stripped away some of her certainty. The Shifter would have gone to him right away. The Shifter would have done it weeks ago. The Shifter had no pride, no need to prove who she was.

“I’m not the Shifter.” She said it out loud, surprising herself, testing how it would sound when she said it to Rokan. It sounded like a lie.

She forced herself to think of Rokan dead. Even holding the image in her mind was difficult; her whole being recoiled from the thought, from a hurt so raw it was painful just to imagine it. What would it be like if Rokan, not Ven, had fallen while she watched? All his wit and enthusiasm and dreams gone in a moment of careless inattention. Her throat tightened until she couldn’t breathe.

She knew what death looked like, felt like, smelled like. She even knew what a dead king—

A flash of memory, almost. It didn’t last long enough for her to grasp it, but on its tail came anguish so sharp she gasped out loud. A faint hint of what it felt like, for a Shifter, when a king was killed.

Not again, she thought, and managed to leave the room with almost no effort at all.

The guards let her pass, watching her but making no move to stop her. She felt them turn to stare at her as she entered Rokan’s room and closed the door behind her.

The room was dimly lit, making the foam in the tapestry of the sea look starkly white. She shifted her eyes as she started toward the bed. She saw that it was empty, stopped, sniffed the air, and turned toward him. He was standing by the window at the end of his room, his back to her, staring out into the darkness. She had not been quiet when she closed the door, but he didn’t turn.

“Your Highness,” Isabel said, not sure why she was suddenly so formal. She tugged at the edges of her sleeves. “It’s Isabel.”

“I know.” There was an undertone of bitterness to his voice. “Who else could it be?”

A moment passed before she grasped that. It made her angry, and she took two quick steps toward him. “If I was the one you were thinking of, I would probably be coming with a knife.”

“No. She wouldn’t have had the courage for a knife.”

Isabel stopped halfway between the door and the bed. Rokan said, in a voice so quiet she barely heard it, “I know that, yet I still miss her.”

He didn’t look at her, just kept staring out the window. All but one candelabra had been put out, casting his face in shadows so deep that even her cat’s eyes could barely make out his features. But something about the line of his jaw, the set of his shoulders beneath the black silk tunic, stirred instant empathy in her. She wondered why. Could the Shifter ever be lonely?

The question released a flood of memory. Not of her past lives as Shifter, of the castle and the court, but of her woods. She had never thought much about the time before Rokan came to find her; she hadn’t been human for most of it, and animals didn’t remember the way humans did. A vague blur of images, of hunting and running and flying, had been enough. But suddenly she knew that, through it all, she had been desperately alone. And lonely.

She had spent a summer with a pack of wolves but had never really been one of them; they had known what she was. She had circled above the trees with a flock of birds, but when they headed south, she stayed behind. She had passed other deer in sunlit meadows, but they had watched her warily, sensing the wolf she had been.

And suddenly she knew why she had allowed Rokan to catch her. It hadn’t been her ankle. She could have shifted her ankle whole.

The room had been silent for a long time. Rokan turned from the window. Now she could see his face, save for a wedge of darkness that arced around the side of his chin and the corner of his eye. Behind him the sky was as black as his eyes.

She shouldn’t be here. She couldn’t help him with his grief. She had already started toward the door when Rokan said, so quietly a human might not have heard, “Please talk to me.”

She stopped in mid-turn, surprised. “About what?”

“Just—talk to me. About anything.”

She searched for something to say. She couldn’t come up with a single thing.

After an awkward silence, Rokan sighed. “I’m sorry. I know you’re not…” He stopped. “Sometimes I forget what you’re not. What you are.” He half-smiled, a bitter, self-contemptuous smile, and turned to the window again. “I can be an idiot that way. I’m truly sorry.”

Isabel stood there, not sure what to do. She could hear him breathing: slow, unnaturally even breaths that went in and out with great care.

Rokan stepped away from the window to his neatly made bed. He threw himself backward on the maroon bedspread and stared up at the canopy. “My father once said that being alone is the price of greatness. But it was easy for him to believe that. He liked being alone. My mother was lonely all her life, and she hated it.”

“Didn’t she die when you were very young?”

“Yes. But I remember her.”

Something in his voice woke a memory in her. This was ridiculous—the Shifter didn’t have parents. She was imagining it, wanting to understand her prince. Ven had been right. She wanted to be human.

She wanted to be human because Rokan was human.

“She didn’t even have us.” He sat up. “My father didn’t want me to become weak. Feminine. He was ambitious for me, even before—” He stopped short, shook his head. “By the time Will was born, it was clear I was healthy, so Will wasn’t so important to him. She was so happy then, because she had someone to take care of.”

“How did she die?” Isabel asked.

“She got sick and she died. The whole thing took two weeks.” A muscle twitched along Rokan’s jaw. “My father gave me one day to cry. The next day I had to start fencing lessons.”

Isabel walked forward soundlessly until she stood at the foot of the bed. She put both hands on the polished wooden bed rail, leaning forward so her eyes were level with his. “You hated him.”

Rokan shook his head, lines of shadow cutting through his face. “I loved him. I thought he knew best. He wanted me to be strong.”

“But—”

“It didn’t matter. A week later I found out the truth about—” Rokan stopped short again and turned his head slightly so that his eyes were in shadow again. Isabel saw his throat convulse as he swallowed.

About how he became king. She knew what he had been going to say. She waited.

“About—” Rokan said, and stopped again.

Isabel’s heart pounded. A part of her longed for him to confide in her, to rely on her for protection even from this. But he was incredibly stupid if he did. He was foolhardy for even thinking about it.

“About his mistresses,” Rokan finished. “I never felt the same way about him afterward.”

Isabel let go of the bed rail. “How did you find out?”

Rokan’s chest heaved—with relief or regret, Isabel couldn’t tell. “Clarisse told me.”

“Sweet.”

“She didn’t realize how upset I would get. She didn’t care that much.” He traced a line of embroidery along the fabric of the bedspread. “I still don’t know how she found out, but she was always better at seeing reality than I was. She never trusted Daria.”

So the conversation had come full circle. “Does she trust anyone?”

“No. But she doesn’t distrust everyone, and she warned me about Daria. We had a screaming fight. I said things…and she was right. I should have listened to her.”

“Clarisse told you not to come get me,” Isabel pointed out. “You would be dead now if you had listened to her.”

Rokan smiled. It was slow and peaceful, a smile she hadn’t seen on his face since Daria’s betrayal. “Yes, she was wrong about you. Good to know.”

The silence that followed felt almost companionable except for the hot lump at the back of Isabel’s throat.

Finally Rokan stirred. “I’m sorry, Isabel. I never asked what you came here to tell me.”

She didn’t even think about it. “Nothing in particular. I was just—nervous. Shifter instinct.” Was there such a thing? “But you seem safe.”

“With you around, always.”

She turned smoothly, not wanting him to see her face, and left the room without another word.

Chapter Twelve

The guests for Rokan’s coronation began arriving in full force the next day, and Isabel barely had time to breathe. Every day new dukes and commanders and princes from various outlying countries arrived, all with entourages of family and servants and hangers-on. Now she knew what all the empty rooms in the castle were for. Within five days almost all of them were full, and it was still several weeks until the actual coronation.

She didn’t have much opportunity to speak to Rokan, who had to greet every new arrival personally. It was probably for the best. The weight of the secrets between them threw her off balance; being around him distracted her from protecting him.