Page 50 of The Prince's Captive

He would never want this. Even if he did want her. Now he was going to keep her.

He would be lucky if he could manage to just scrape together a somewhat amiable friendship. He could live with that. He’d been resigned to having a marriage based on mutual respect and a deep abiding friendship with Aimilia. Now he didn’t even have that.

But those desires didn’t matter. Not with the opportunity Marcella now presented.

The end to the bloodshed. Real, lasting peace.

Holding onto that still didn’t make this any easier.

Having to just lie there in the darkness and pretend like he couldn’t hear her sobbing inches from him in the tent was torture. He’d tried to comfort her, but all it had gotten him was her kicking him in the stomach and given the specific night it was, he supposed of course she didn’t want him anywhere near her.

But even after her sobs subsided and her breathing evened out, Gavril could not sleep. His heart was twisting in his chest while his stomach rolled. This was such a mess.

He was still dead when they got back to Areator.

He was extremely dead when they got back to Areator. The only reason he’d managed to get Cyprian to officiate the wedding was because he’d lied.

Marcella had a point about illusionists.

Cyprian had only officiated the marriage because Gavril had assured him that he would fake the marks with an illusion and this would just be to stop the marriage alliance between Desero and Montis. Cyprian was horrible with illusions. Few Runai were as good with them as he was, so it was an easy thing to convince him of. If they believed Hypatia was married to him, then once everything was sorted, the marriage would be annulled due to the marks being fake and he would marry Aimilia as expected.

Only she wasn’t Hypatia. And the marks weren’t fake.

It was a real marriage. It had been the only way to ensure she wasn’t executed or handed over to the healers to study when they arrived back in Areator.

Letting her go wasn’t an option anymore.

Not after what he’d seen her do. Not when she could be the key to bringing peace between their people.

This whole war had started in the first place because of the Abyss. Gavril himself had never actually seen it, but he’d seen the drawings. He’d heard the stories about it. Furious and sick with seeing Asentai create with every step she took, bringing to life their world, Dhlenir had attempted his own creation. He’d gone out to the ocean Asentai had formed with her daughter, Obris, and he sought to create his own land. But he was not capable of creation, only corruption. And instead of creating anything, he created nothing. The Abyss.

It was a void. It was absence. Nothing that went in ever returned. The only things that came from it were demons and leeches sent to grow the void and one day swallow them all.

If they all wanted a chance at preventing that, since Asentai had clearly long since abandoned her creations, then they needed to put a stop to the corruption spreading. Leeches were abominations whose sole purpose was to absorb magic and grow the Abyss. Any time a leech appeared, his people exterminated it before it could do any harm. The Sordes didn’t.

The Sordes were a sign of Dhelnir’s corruption spreading. They had more leeches surface amongst them. They were weaker. The fact that they could only cast runes with one hand proved their vitae was corrupted. If they had pure vitae, then they would be able to direct it the way the Runai did into both hands with the perfect balance that their runes required.

For decades the healers and academics had been trying to get to the bottom of what made the Sordes different from the Runai. Where their corruption stemmed from so that the Runai could prevent it ever occurring in their people. That was just one use for the operating tables. Decades and thousands of bodies later, they had no more answers than the day the blood started running.

Oh, they had plenty of advanced healing runes to show for it but no answers about the corruption that forced the Sordes to use inferior runes.

At least, that was most Runai’s belief. It wasn’t Gavril’s.

One day during his academy days, when Gavril had been using the library to hide from Aimilia because he had a split lip hidden under an illusion he knew she would sniff out anyway, he’d come across the journal of an academic from the beginning of the war. Who, upon studying the first fifty Sordes that had gone up on the tables was starting to believe they were wrong. He could find no difference. He’d been told they simply hadn’t found the answers yet and he was ordered to keep looking.

Whether his death the next day was truly by his own hand or someone else’s, no one would ever be able to truly say.

Reading the firsthand account had Gavril physically ill. When he’d asked the librarian what the journal was doing in the library, he’d been told it was for the students on the healer track and academic track to refer to as an example of a false conclusion to avoid drawing in their own work. She’d snatched the journal out of Gavril’s hands and told him it wasn’t for the command track students like him.

Gavril didn’t think much about the journal after that afternoon. Other than one phrase toward the end of the journal. One of the last things the academic had written.

Ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant.

They make a desert and call it peace.

Peace. Gavril had never known peace. But he’d always wanted to. He did not want to be another man whose life was drowned in this ocean of blood.

Some days he thought about giving up. He thought about surrendering the fight and walking away from it all. Maybe he could not bring peace to everyone else, but maybe he could find some for himself. It was exhausting, and he was tired. But the fight wasn’t done with him yet.

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