Page 210 of The Crown’s Temptation

I continued toward the Darkway.

For the first time since waking in Morrath I found myself wondering what else had been taken from me when I was born.

Fiersa was in my chambers when I returned.

She looked up from the basin where she had been arranging something and stopped when she saw the blood and scrapes on me. She did not gasp. She did not step back.

"Sit," she said. "You look like you had a rough journey back from the tunnels.”

I obeyed but did not answer.

She did not probe. She brought water and set it on the table in front of me and then stood with her hands folded and waited for me to drink it, which I did, and then waited for me to say whatever I had come back here to say.

I looked at her across the room.

I thought about the first day she had walked into my room and gotten rid of Teorin with a nonexistent tailor. About how she had just accompanied me, without question, for an impromptu wedding to a man she already knew me to be married to. She had not asked where we were going or why the place was hidden behind a ward or what it was called. She had simply trusted me. I thought about every morning she had been here when I woke up, every night she had been here when I came back, every question she had not asked when she could have.

She had stayed. She had not been asked to stay and she had stayed anyway.

"Fiersa," I said.

"My lady."

"When I leave here," I said, "I need you to go to Veynar."

She looked at me calmly. "When do you leave here?”

"Soon.”

"And you cannot tell me more than that?”

"No. Not yet."

She was quiet. She looked at the window and then back at me and I watched her work through whatever she was working through.

"My brother lives there,” she said finally.

"I know."

She nodded once. “He is supposed to come tonight. I will return to Veynar with him and wait for you there,” she said.

I gave a small nod then stood and put my hand briefly on her arm, then I left her there and walked down the corridor toward Teorin's chambers.

It was time for breakfast.

Teorin was already at the table when I arrived.

He looked better than he had in weeks. Color in his face. His eyes clear. He had tied his hair back and buttoned his shirt all the way up and there was something different about him that I could not immediately name.

I sat across from him and the creature brought food and I ate and he ate and for a while neither of us said anything.

“You are late,” he said simply.

I felt it then. The same call, the same pull I had felt when Nox had said the words be careful and attempted to pull something from me.

An attempt at control, clearly. I wondered what the mechanics were. I briefly wondered if Teorin was aware of it at all. He had no reason to attempt it right now. I pushed the thought away.

But something nagged at me. Back when he was Arven and I was hungry and alone, he had always told me I was late for our trainings, even when I wasn’t. When he tried to kiss me here in Morrath and my brain had felt foggy, he had used those same words.