Page 88 of The Flame and the Forsaken

Mariel averted her eyes when Erran cut through the crowd and joined Yesenia.

Erran accepted a candle from someone with a tight smile. Yesenia narrowed her eyes from the side, something Mariel was also doing. “And what a feast it is!” he declared, his mouth pulling into the briefest wince. He shifted in place, squinted, looked around, and sucked his teeth.

He’s nervous.

Yesenia gave him a prodding look.

“I, as well, accept the noble charge bestowed upon me by Lord and Lady Warwick.” Both of his hands clutched the candle. His gaze traveled to the cradle with a lingering, thoughtful expression. “Esmerelda, as your father-in-honor, I am sworn to love and protect you as your father would, and will, if one day he cannot.”

Khallum and Gwyn joined them, each carrying a lit candle, which they each tipped toward Erran’s and Yesenia’s unlit ones. All four raised their flames, then placed them into sconces on the wall behind Esmerelda’s cradle.

Mariel exhaled through the applause. It was done. She could slip out without drawing too much scrutiny.

“Gratitude to you both,” Khallum declared. “And now we feast!”

“Khallum, if I may...” Erran stepped forward with one hand on his vest.

“May what? Another speech?”

“Of a sort. I’ve something to say, and I’d like everyone here to hear it because I haven’t the patience for fishwife gossip, and even less when it’s wrong.”

Khallum’s brows fused in skepticism, but he stepped aside.

Mariel’s body seized in one fluid clench. Evander, still hovering, made ahmmsound.

“Guardians,” she whispered. “Someone needs to stop him...” Her head shook back and forth. Back and forth.

Everyone fixed their attention to a breathless Erran. His eyes were wide and wild.

“Some of you were here for my blunders.” Erran scanned the crowd, and Mariel ducked behind the nearest person who wasn’t Evander. “Aye, some for both. I suppose curiosity is normal enough, but lies are harmful, so I’ll clear them up now.”

“I can’t listen to this,” she said and turned to leave, but Evander grabbed her hand and snapped her back. She ripped it away again. Where was Destin?

“Yesterday, I saw someone I had once cared for and was pulled into the past for a moment, before I could remember myself. A past I have no need or desire for, not anymore.” He licked his lips and gazed at his feet. “In being so unprepared, I hurt someone I care about very much, and I haven’t known the words that can make it right again.”

“The bastard,” Mariel whispered, heartsick and disgusted. “He’s trying to save face. So his father won’t...” She couldn’t speak.

“Mariel, come on, are you really so deluded?” Destin asked, finally stepping between her and the nuisance of a man who still hadn’t left.

“The woman I married, she’s so unlike me.” Erran grinned to himself, casting his eyes to the side. “Oh, in absolutely every way. And how cross she makes me, how utterly fecking stubborn...” He grew serious again. When he glanced at Khallum in apology, Khallum nodded in encouragement. “But this is about me and how I behaved. And if she’s still here tonight, I need her, and everyone here, to know how I feel about her. And that...”

Mariel refused to hear another word. He could rehabilitate his image without her.

She lifted the dress of her horrid gown and raced out of the banquet.

Chapter19

The Letter

Mariel was a woman possessed, propelled by the aimless despair of the lost. As she traveled from the stones to the brush to the sand, she rode the rhythm of her beleaguered breaths.

Her world had started spinning the day she’d married Erran. Even her identity no longer belonged to her. The princeling had been a means to an end, and she hadn’t once forgotten herself until the island. That cursed island, where everything had been the opposite of what it should, a world turned on its head and shaken until it was unrecognizable.

I need to be reminded of who I am and who I am not,she told herself as she slowed, nearing the jagged formation of rocks that had been the backdrop for the best moments of Erran’s life. Someone had once told her a person always returned to the place of their greatest contentment, and he’d gone therethat very afternoonwith Yesenia, unable to resist the past for even a day.

Mariel couldn’t compete. She didn’t want to. Only in confronting her pain could she be rid of it altogether and return to the rightful path her life had been meant to take before she’d allowed her heart the pointless, painful detour.

She climbed carefully over the sharp boulders marking the entrance, almost disappointed when none cut her. Nothing signified life more than blood, the capacity to bleed. As a young lass, starving and watching her loved ones diminish by the day, she’d dig her nails to her thighs on her worst days, replacing one pain for another—a safer pain to mask the dark and terrible one from which there was no escape.

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