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Ruskin snarls. “My head is perfectly fine, and I’d watch what insults you throw around, sir, before you regret it.”

“He’s not insulting you, Ruskin,” I say gently, taking another small step towards him. “He’s your best friend, and it worries us that you don’t seem to remember that fact.”

Ruskin examines me and I’m hit with the urge to shiver. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt such scrutiny under his stare. My body responds to it even in the middle of my worry. I can feel the heat of his eyes as they sweep across my body.

“You’re human, and so can lie, and yet…” He walks a circle around me, and I think I see a flicker of something hungry and feral within his gaze. He’s sizing me up in more ways than one. “I feel I can trust you.” He shakes his head, like trying to throw off an annoying fly. “Which doesn’t make sense, because?—”

I reach down the bond, sending a flood of emotion across it. The golden bridge that connects us shines bright with the force of my love and my trust for him. He stops walking, eyebrows rising like he’s just been hit in the face and doesn’t know what to do about it. Then his gaze darkens, and I feel him responding across the connection, sending a wave of desire that feels powerful and primal. He wants to be close to me, I can feel it, but he doesn’t seem to know why.

“What is that?” he asks, even as I flush at the signals he’s sending through the connection.

“It’s a naminai bond, my love.” I watch his face and see a sign of recognition. He knows the phrase. “You can tell it’s real, can’t you? You feel you can trust me because we’re soulmates, you and me, Eleanor. I’m telling you the truth.”

His eyes refocus and he looks at me in a new way, with a mixture of awe and wariness. That caution is still there. He believes what I’m telling him, but he’s afraid of it, I think. Frightened by the power of that yearning which is still washing over me through the bond.

“What is going on here?” It’s a blunt demand, and he looks at us both imperiously, like it’s absurd we haven’t yet provided him with the answers he wants.

“He doesn’t know anything,” Destan says despairingly. “He’s completely lost it.”

“I told you to watch your mouth,” Ruskin says coldly. “And I know many things. I know that this is an Unseelie gate to Styrland, for example, and that we’ve just come from Interra.” He examines his hands, thinking. “I know that I am more powerful than both of you, even having just fought off that beast,” he says, sounding matter-of-fact rather than boastful. He drops his hands. “And I know that even though I don’t know you, sir, you are a subject of mine, isn’t that correct? I am your king.”

“But how do you know those things, Ruskin?” Destan presses. “How can you be sure if you don’t remember us?”

Ruskin looks out to the horizon, a shadow falling across his face as he searches for something he can’t seem to find.

“That…I cannot tell,” he admits. “When I reach back, there aren’t specific memories. Nothing to recollect about my past, my personal experiences—just a collection of knowledge and the feeling of my magic.” He points at Destan. “The magic that tells me he’s from my court.” Then he looks at me. “And the magic that tells me you are mine, and that we are indeed true name matches, even if I don’t know how that is possible with a human.”

I blush at the possessiveness of his language. Maybe it’s a strange reaction, but when he’s looking at me with that fiery intensity, I can feel all the intimacy of our bond pulling me towards him. And yet some of his words are so impersonal and distant. It’s confusing, but not as confusing for me as I imagine it is for him.

I move towards him once more, relieved he doesn’t draw away when I take hold of his hand. To my surprise, his strong fingers respond, wrapping around mine and squeezing. Stars, I want to hold him, to wrap my arms around him and breathe him in deep. Part of me thinks that maybe if I kiss him again, let my lips explore his, marking out his jaw and neck like I’ve done a hundred times before, he’ll remember. But it’s never that easy for us, is it? When I look down, I see him eyeing our entwined hands with disbelief, as if he couldn’t quite believe he’d joined his fingers with mine.

“All right. Then let’s start from the beginning. What’s the last thing you remember? I mean, in detail.”

He rolls his eyes and gently releases my hand to run his fingers through his hair. That wave of want is still beating through the bond in a way that makes my skin tingle. I can tell he’s fighting between the pull of that connection, urging him to be close to me, and his own natural wariness. He wants to put up the spiky, hard shell that he presents to the rest of the world. It’s too painful to think I might be included in that group now—“the rest of the world.” A nobody to him in mind, if not in body.

“I was in Interra with a woman,” he says.

Destan and I exchange a look.

“We came through the portal—it wasn’t planned. I just know we were fighting and I was trying to put distance between her and something…something important. But the spells went wrong. Our magic combined in a way that created a rift between the realms. We fell into Interra, and that beast attacked me. She left me for dead—I think she found a way out on her own.”

“And you don’t remember why you were fighting her?” Destan asks tentatively.

Ruskin’s Unseelie eyes flicker into view. “Obviously not,” he says imperiously.

“Ruskin, that woman was your mother, Evanthe.”

There’s a flash in his yellow-green eyes, but his expression doesn’t change. A few days ago he would’ve been honest with me—would’ve shown me the full extent of what this revelation meant to him, but now he’s closed that side of him off.

I feel a crack splinter its way through my heart as the enormity of this new obstacle hits me. Everything between us—every touch, every fight and confession—wiped away in an instant. It’s like a death. The loss of everything I was to Ruskin and everything he knew that he was to me. My feelings haven’t gone anywhere…but they feel oddly adrift without an answering anchor in him. I don’t understand how everything we’ve built can be gone so easily when we fought so hard for it—when we’d only just found the trust we needed in each other and accepted the bond. He might still physically be able to feel that link to me, but all the context for it is gone, stripping it of its meaning.

“She wants me dead then, my mother,” he says neutrally.

“Yes, I’m sorry.”

He shrugs dismissively. “She means as little to me as the pair of you. I assume it’s some kind of power struggle? Being a king invites enemies, after all.”

I gape at him, the heart that had been breaking before hardening at the callousness of his words.