Page 18

He pulled back, his gaze crawling over my face with a tenderness I had never seen from him before. “We’re leaving.”

I moistened my lips and gave my head a small shake. “Where would we go?” It was a mistake to ask. Relief flooded his eyes, and I knew I’d given him hope. Hope that could never be fulfilled.

There would be no safe place for us in Penterra. We would be hunted down and found. We could reach Acton or the Isle of Meru on a passenger ship. The voyage would not be easy. The Dark Channel was notorious for its perilous waters. The ships that crossed safely were those that tossed live bait overboard to appease the creatures lurking beneath the black waters. Goats and pigs usually did the trick... but sometimes other bait was necessary. Criminals sentenced to death were condemned to the holding cells of ships bound abroad as silage. I shuddered at the thought of their last moments, cast out into monster-ridden waters, even if they were guilty of terrible crimes. The cold rush of the sea, the sharp terror and even sharper tear of teeth...

Assuming we could safely reach one of those distant shores, we could not rely on refuge from our allies if our identities were ever discovered. We would be forced back home. There would never be a day lived without looking over our shoulders, without gauging whether what we said or did might give us away.

“There is no escape,” I asserted. “This is my life. I won’t hide from it. Or run away. Besides. They would find us. Your father...” My voice thinned, fading like a dying wind as I shook my head. His father would never let his only son go. He would put bounties onour heads and send the most seasoned trackers after us. “We would never be free.”

“I don’t care.”

I smiled indulgently and lifted a hand, brushing my thumb against his bearded cheek. Now he was behaving like a child. “Yes, you do. You have to care. And so do I. I care about my sisters. I cannot abandon—”

“They’re not even your real sisters!”

The words gouged into me like fangs. All my tenderness vanished in a flash. “I can’t believe you just said that to me.” He sounded like my bullies... like his father and those who never accepted me, who made certain I always felt like an outsider: the children who whispered loudly enough for me to hear their words, the housemaids who exchanged looks and rolled their eyes when I was formally announced alongside my sisters. I never thought he would stoop to uttering such words to me, to becoming one of the dark shadows in my life.

He gazed at me intently, imploringly. “Tamsyn, I’m not trying to be hurtful. But it’s true. You’re not one of them. Not really. You take the beatings. You take their abuse. You don’t matter to—”

“Who even are you?” I shook my head. This was not the boy who had filled my head with stories of the other whipping girls who had come before me and gone on to do great things. He began to speak, but I held up a hand, not really interested in his response. “Stop. Enough. This is what I do, what I am. What have I been all these years except forthis?” I demanded in a heated rush, lifting my arms wide at my sides. “You never objected before, but now, suddenly, it’s so very wrong?” I dropped my arms, staring at him accusingly. “Take comfort. At least I won’t be a whipping girl anymore. That’s finally done.”

His eyes went hard, the warm brown sinking to a dark granite. “You know that, do you?”

Anger flashed through me. “Well.” The word twisted bitterly around my lips. “Whatever the case, it shouldn’t bother you. It never has before.”

This time, he flinched, and I felt both satisfied and awful. I didn’t want it to be like this. We’d only ever been friends. I didn’t want this ugliness between us.

A long moment passed before he pronounced grimly, “You will go through with this, then.”

I nodded once, suffering the force of his deep brown eyes, so full of pity and disappointment that I reached inside myself and questioned whether rejecting him—rejecting us—was a mistake, after all. I had never disappointed Stig before, and my stomach sank and twisted at doing it now.

“You will marry him,” he went on. “Go to his bed. Let him take you north, to those savage lands. Far away from here.” He paused a beat. “Far away from me.”

I peered into his face, read within the lines of his expression what I had never seen before, what I felt still in the numbing tingle of my lips. It took everything in me not to reach for my mouth, not to touch the echo of him there.

I pressed my hand deeply against my side. “Tomorrow I will do my duty and marry Lord Dryhten. And who knows? Perhaps he won’t even want to take me with him.”

Once he learns the truth, he might want to get as far away from me as possible.

Stig shook his head, a frustrated little sound breaking loose from him that I felt resonate inside me. “Oh, he’ll take you with him.” His breath sawed out of him, more animal than human. “He wouldn’t leave you behind.”

I studied him in the gloom, not sure what to make of that assertion. I was not nearly as confident.

Moistening my lips, I said in a shaky voice, “Life is full of hard choices, and this—”

Stig laughed then—a cruel sound that made me recoil. “Oh, Tamsyn. Is that what you think? That you’veeverhad a choice in anything? You speak of your duty, but what is it really but bondage? You will trade one captor for another tomorrow.”

I took a step back, bewildered at why he was punishing me withsuch unkind words. He was supposed to be my friend, like always, but he might as well be calling me stupid. That was what I heard. My eyes stung, welling up with moisture.

“Arranged marriages happen all the time, Stig. You will likely—”

He cut in. “Who knows how he will treat you? What he will do to you? There will be no one to stop him. He could kill you and no one would do anything about it.”

I suddenly felt cold all over, as though I was already a corpse, warm blood draining from me, and I hated him right then. I hated my friend for making this so hard... for putting this bitter fear into me.

As though he could read my thoughts, his voice lowered. “Tamsyn.” He took my hand in his and gave it a squeeze. “I’m trying to free you... to save you.”

My lungs ached, my breaths coming harder. It was like he was squeezing my chest and not just my hand. I felt a flicker of something akin to longing. Just as quickly, I crushed the impossible emotion, stomping it down like a bug beneath my shoe.