Page 39 of The Prince's Mage

As she spoke, Gavril’s hand found her side. His fingers traced over the scar beneath her peplos. She never understood the dark look she caught in his eyes when he traced his fingers over it. It was just a scar.

She had scars all over now. A line on her forehead and on her cheeks that she often arranged her curls to hide. The bottom of her jaw. The back of her neck all the way down her spine. Across her shoulders and down to the pulse point on her wrist. Running down the middle of her chest and stomach. On the front and back of her legs. Every known path vitae traveled.

They were clean and clinical, much thinner than the one on her side, which was rough and jagged, but they couldn’t be completely hidden, unlike the one on her side. And she wasn’t an illusionist who could hide them.

The following night, he said, “I had an unfair advantage in my rune theory classes. I had to understand theory deeply in order to cast illusions. They’re one of the hardest disciplines for my people. Nikias taught me when I was five. He was ten and had just started learning them. It was the most effective way to hide any injuries since he had no skill in healing. I learnt how to do them before anything else.”

The words were on the tip of her tongue.

“Could you hide what was done to me under an illusion? Could you make it like it never happened?”

But she held them back. Because she needed the reminder every time she looked in the mirror or down at her arms while Gavril and Aimilia talked over her. Why she couldn’t stay. Why she had to capture Nikias and leave Gavril behind.

She didn’t really understand why Gavril told her these things.

She also didn’t really understand why she responded.

Or why she started volunteering any information about herself unprompted by anything from him.

Two and a half weeks after this tradition had started, one night, after her shuddering slowed, she rested her head against his chest. The beat of his heart anchored her, and she whispered, “There were these cats on clan grounds. Once a week, one of them would bring me a rat or a bird it caught. I think they knew I was alone despite living with a whole clan, and felt like they had to take care of me.”

The long silence between them was bursting.

She was suffocating. It spilled out in a whisper as shattered as she was since waking up on that table. “Even the animals knew how worthless I was.”

His fingers traced over the lines on her wrist and he murmured back, “Not worthless. They did it because they liked you. You don’t have to think someone is pathetic or worthless to want to take care of them.”

She didn’t respond. She couldn’t afford to.

Another time, she turned her head into his shoulder and said, “I knew it was hopeless, but I always wanted to matter. When Hypatia’s father told me I was going to take her place, be captured, and die, I told myself it was an honor. That I was finally going to matter. I didn’t think I’d ever be of much use.”

Now she could matter far above even those wild dreams. If she could just get Nikias.

Her recovery was too slow, and she didn’t even have the beginnings of a plan. She didn’t know how long she even had to accomplish this feat.

After a long stretch of silence where all she heard was Gavril’s breathing and all she felt was him holding her tightly, he whispered in a rough, broken voice, “I do not know what to say to that. I want you to speak, but when you do it tears me in two.”

Another time, his hand rested on her hip, tracing a rune.

He said, “This rune in my language is how you would writepuella.”

She scoffed into his shoulder, “Among my people, I have not been agirlsince I was thirteen and passed—barely—the test to become a mage—soldier as you like to call me. Girl is diminutive. Belittling. When I was called girl it was a reminder about how I was little better than a Solitus girl. Solitus girls stay girls until they are sixteen.”

“It is not one thing for us.” Gavril shifted, forcing her to look at him as he said, “It can be affectionate or insulting based on context. We mean nothing by it when we use it by itself. But I will—”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t bother me when you say it. I don’t know if I ever really was a girl or if I was always trying too hard to be a soldier. Guess I’m not really either.”

There was something else that happened most nights. She never fully caught it, so she wasn’t sure if she was imagining it or not. But she swore as she drifted off back to sleep, Gavril would murmur something in his language, something with the word ‘Asentai’ in it. Some kind of prayer.

But he was Inimicus. Yet… he’d prayed with her before he left. Could he have any kind of real faith?

She did not know. He never said anything about it.

Three and a half weeks after he’d started rushing in to save her from her nightmares, she was woken up by screaming. But it wasn’t hers. She was on her feet, stumbling for the door before she was even aware of what she was doing. She threw it open to see Gavril on his bed, his hand over his mouth as he curled in on himself, shaking.

She could turn around. Pretend she heard nothing. Go back to the horrors in her own head.

Taking a single step forward was only going to get her hurt when she watched the love in Gavril’s eyes turn into horror after she kidnapped Nikias. If she even ever saw him again.

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