he would not allow to be heard out loud. It was a struggle he could not win.
When he spoke, it was from a place as shrouded in fear as the clearing from her dream. But this time, the dread did touch her, so palpable was it in his words.
“The night I came to you, when I…fulfilled my promise to tell you of what transpired in your mother’s Council…” He halted, swallowed audibly. “You were not the only one to have a Darkworld lover. There was a woman, a Gypsy woman. She was a girl, really, perhaps younger than you. I never asked, and she never told me. They are timeless, ageless, her people. At least, they seemed so. She had asked me to go with her, to flee the Underground and stay with her always….”
The words struck her like a weapon she did not see coming, and the wound in her deepened, split anew by the pain in his voice. If her hands were not bound, she would have covered her ears to keep from hearing, for she knew what would come next.
And, as if knowing that his own sorrow would cut her to her core, he sharpened his words, formed them carefully and slowly. Perhaps he said them for the first time. “All of her people were killed. By Waterhorses. And her, as well. I left you that night and found them slaughtered.”
Her mouth was thick, as though the moisture there had fled to become the tears that filled her eyes. “If you had not come to me, would you—”
“No!” He threw the word down like a gauntlet. “You cannot blame yourself for their deaths. You cannot involve yourself in it, and do not play at it as though you could possibly share my pain!”
She squeezed her eyes shut, let a tear fall. Not because she believed she had any connection, no matter how superficial, to his tragedy, but because in her connection to him his hurt was too much to bear witness to.
“Anyway,” he began, softer now, “it was too late. They had been dead for some time.”
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