Page 30 of Fate's Bane
I stepped toward her, hand raised. “Hadhnri? You’re alive! Are you all right?”
She straightened and reached for the seax at her hip. “Agnir? Truly?”
I halted and held the hilt of my own dagger. “Hadhnri, it’s me.”
What had she seen in the darkness to make her doubt? Or was it always her plan to ambush me in the cursed dark?
“How did I get the scar on my lip?” she asked, advancing one careful step.
“I gave it to you,” I said, smug in the memory despite my wariness. “You have a slow guard from the left. Or at least, you did.”
“Agnir.” Hadhnri dropped her hand to her side and closed the space between us.
I didn’t know whether to run into her arms or keep her at a distance. I had forgotten neither the scalding of her anger nor my own.
Instead of choosing, I cocked my head. “Is that the spring?”
The gurgle of water was an easier thing to seize upon than the whip-tail of my feelings. With ginger, sidelong steps, I led the way down the tumble of forest litter to where the sound was loudest.
The small clearing let in the moon’s sick-yellow light, and I could see a pool of water, its slow trickle. The spring was different now, and I struggled to recall how it looked when we were children. I could only remember how it felt: the pleasant coolness in the hot weather, on our sweaty skin. The sweetness of the clean water, more pure than anything I’d drunk before or since.
The call of the fates-bane was silent.
“It looks different,” Hadhnri said, stopping beside me.Her body was warm in the summer night. Sunstead was a month gone, and Ha’night seemed an age away. Still, the night was brisk and the pool frigid. Instead of refreshing, it put me in mind of the cold of a corpse.
“We shouldn’t be here.” I stepped back but bumped into her.
She steadied me even as I tried to pull away. Before I could march back the way I came, she tightened her hand on my arm and said, “Please, Agnir. Will you not stay a moment with me?”
In the moonlight, her face was carved in anguish.
“Please. I don’t want to go to war with you.”
The war had gone from my mind. It seemed a silly thing, in the clutches of the fates-bane, but now the anger of the past month boiled in me, even damped by the darkness.
“My brother would still be alive if you had kept your word to me, Hadhnri Clan Aradoc.”
“And my own brother would be dead, or my father.” Hadhnri glared down at me. I felt the surge of her rage in the rise and fall of her chest. “Or do you still claim that no one in Clan Fein snuck to our bedrolls in the night? A tryst gone wrong, was it?”
“Willyoupretend your father isn’t planning to give our lands away to some woman who has never even seen them?” I growled into her face. “For what? What will he gain? Clan Fein, exterminated? Cleared out like vermin by her heralds and their soldiers?”
Hadhnri closed her eyes. She had not released my arm. We were so close that I could feel the cool breath of her resignation.
“I am sorry your brother is dead, Agnir,” Hadhnri said, her voice thick, “but I cannot—” She shook her head. “I cannot lie to you and say I wish it were otherwise. I— Gunni—Gunni has a daughter now—”
“Stop. Please, stop.” Salt laced my lips. How could I hate her when her truth was my own? I sagged into her chest and she caught me, held me in her strength while I wept.
“Agnir, sweet Agnir,” she whispered in my ear, over and over. “Sweet Agnir, my love.”
“Do not marry the prince,” I sobbed against her chest.
“Sit with me. Talk with me.”
Hadhnri slid her hand down my arm to my own hand, and when I didn’t pull away, she led me to the stones beside the spring. There was the cold I remembered. I shivered in my sleeveless tunic. Only then did I notice that Hadhnri carried a pack, and from it, she pulled a blanket and draped it over my shoulders. She held the ends of it on either side of my shoulders and searched my face. Her eyes found my lips.
I turned away, as if I hadn’t craved that kiss these last long years.
“How do we stop this war?” I huddled deeper into the wool.
