Page 182 of The Crown’s Temptation

I thought of my mother. Loyalty and selfishness.

Neither of us said anything after that.

Eventually I stood and pulled my cloak around my shoulders.

"Same time tomorrow?" I said.

"Aye," he said quietly.

I left him with the dying fire and walked back through the dark toward the tunnels and Colsar waiting on the other side of them.

The tunnels were quiet tonight.

I moved through them quickly, my legs steady, the treatment doing what it had been doing all week. By the time I reached the ward the lamp on the other side was still lit.

He was awake.

He was sitting at the small table he had brought in, not eating, just sitting with his hands flat on the table looking at nothing in particular. When I came through the ward he looked up and the expression on his face lasted only a second before he put it away.

"You went to see him,” he said.

Not an accusation. Just a fact he was naming.

"Yes," I said.

He nodded once and looked back at the table.

I sat across from him. "He told me about the amulet. What it does. What happens if the wrong person gets it." I paused. "I needed to know before I came to you."

He was quiet.

"Colsar."

"I know," he said. "I know why you went. I know what he is doing for you and I know what it costs him and I—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "I know."

"Then say what you actually want to say."

He looked at me. "I do not like it."

"I know you do not."

"He is in love with you."

"You have said that."

"It bears repeating."

I reached across the table and put my hand over his. He looked down at it.

"I am here," I said. "I came through the ward and I am sitting across from you and I am telling you everything he told me because there are no secrets between us. There have never been secrets between us." I paused. "That is not nothing."

He turned his hand over and closed his fingers around mine.

"No," he said quietly. "It is not nothing."

We sat like that for a long time. The lamp burned low between us. Outside the room the children slept in their bassinets and Saurin dozed in her chair and the world was very small and very quiet and entirely ours.

"The amulet," I said finally. “Dali plans to take it, and I won’t be able to stop her. But once she has it, we cannot let her keep it.”