Page 81 of Ties of Starlight

“I will hold my tongue and be a good listener, I promise. I want to understand you, and your history with him is part of that. I won’t pretend otherwise.”

Idonea pushed past the tightness in her throat and blinked rapidly to force the tears away. Why would that make her want to cry?

Maybe this would be good for her too. She didn’t seem to understand herself lately either.

Idonea started reading, leaning back into Nyrunn so he could read over her shoulder. His hand rested on her hip as her soft voice filled the air. That feeling from Nyrunn on the other side of the bond kept humming, calm and contented, but it wasn’t exactly either of those things.

It was starting to drive her a little crazy, not being able to quantify it.

She spent that night reading to him from her third life, mostly the memories about when she realized the memories of the past two Cometa Brides were haunting her were because they were hers. Even though she warned Nyrunn he’d have to deal with Olaug being featured, she did her best to avoid passages and memories that were centered around him, at least for tonight.

Nyrunn didn’t interrupt. He just held her, listening and softly tracing his fingers over the fabric ofher skirt. The warmth of his hand seeped into her skin, nearly distracting her from turning the page when she needed to.

She read to him about the fragmented memories, about her search for answers, feeling she was losing her mind. She read to him about how when she tried to seek help, the elven healers wrote it off as her human blood and emotions, that there wasn’t anything they could do about her strange dreams. She read to him about how she knew the nightmares and memories were coming for a reason. She had this feeling deep in her soul that something was missing. There was something she needed to find for it all to make sense, and using the clues the memories of another life gave her to find it became her sole obsession.

When her voice turned hoarse, it was his hand over hers that closed the journal and she let out a soft gasp when his lips pressed into her shoulder. “It’s late, and you’ve relived enough for tonight, love.”

As they reached the last leg of the trip, Idonea reading from her journals or Nyrunn reading them himself became their routine. After they ate with Asa and Frode, they would slip away to their tent to get ready for bed, and pull out Idonea’s journals.

When she was too exhausted to keep reading, he would pull her head into his lap and run his fingers through her hair as he picked up the journal and continued where she left off. Idonea didn’t know why he was doing it.

Why he was doing anything he had been.

Well, there was one possibility she considered, but it felt outlandish even to think it.

But had Nyrunn developed genuine affection for her? Did he see her as more than just the wife he was stuck with because of Olaug abandoning her?

Even if it was true, it was probably only because she’d saved his life.

But then why would he insist he’d thought she was beautiful long before then?

She supposed it could be true, and he hadn’t just been saying it to make her feel better. If that was the case, which she couldn’t quite wrap her head around either, she supposed it made sense he would develop some affection for her if he already thought her somewhat physically appealing and was insistent she stay and be his wife.

She had no other explanation for why he would call her “love.”

He certainly seemed to want more than just “peaceable.”

But he’d yet to bring up such a change in their forced and unplanned relationship.

Still, she was grateful after that first night she’d removed a few pages from her fourth life’s journal and hidden them with her clothes. If she was right, and Nyrunn had read them, he would be furious. But even him discovering that wasn’t the most terrifying thing about all of this.

Idonea had been poisoned, kidnapped, drowned, and plenty more. She knew the moment of terror right before it, knowing what was happening but being unable to stop it, very well. It was like a second skin.

And yet those moments were nothing compared to the terror she felt now. Dying she had done before.

This?

This was new.

The way her heart leapt to see Nyrunn approach, the way she felt safer than she ever had before in his arms, the way she could not pull her eyes off his face in the early dawn before he'd woken up.

None of this had happened before.

This affection for another man who was not Olaug was foreign.

And frightening.

And the way Nyrunn treated her was also strange and startling. And apparently, the way he'd been treating her for years. Everything she'd mistaken for cruelty had always been kindness. What had she ever done to earn his kindness?

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