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“I wouldn’t be breaking it. I promised that I would marry you, but not when.”
“You agreed to winter solstice. Only hours ago.”
“Yes, but you said that agreements between you and me like that no longer held the same binding force of a bargain.” Loopholes had saved me before.
“Gwynn—” He started up the next step.
“No. Stay there. I don’t want you touching me. I—I’m very unhappy with you.” Though the words were mild, my voice shook with the force of the emotion behind it. “There’s a saying among my people that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.”
“Meaning?” he inquired in a stiff, formal tone.
“Meaning that we keep coming to agreements and then you revert to type, every time. You pretend that we’re equal partners and then you go autocratic and treat me like an idiot that you need to manage.”
“What you did was idiotic,” he insisted.
“You think I don’t know that? I’m grateful you dragged me back, that you saved my miserable life, yet again.”
“I didn’t.” He bit out the words. “I couldn’t. Where you’d gone, how you’d done it—I couldn’t reach you. I thought I’d lost you forever.” His desperate terror glinted like a flash of a raven’s wing, tossed in the ocean and submerged again.
“Then how?”
“You grabbedmeand pulled yourself back, through the connection to Titania, so far as I can tell. You couldn’t come straight to me, so you went through her. It shouldn’t have been possible.”
No wonder I felt sick, coated with her mental slime. “It scared me too. She’s nearly healed. I saw her. And, in that place, I saw her ties going into you and from you into me, working their way to the baby. She can get to us through you. It’s not healthy for us to be connected to you.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I want out. I can’t do this. I can’t be your wife. Live in this place. Let’s do whatever ritual we need to do to cut the ties. I’ll hide somewhere, have the baby and we can work out some kind of joint custody.”
“And go into the desert alone?”
“So unfair of you to use that.”
“I’m not using it.” With a heavy sigh, he set his back against the curved wall and slid down to sit a few steps below me. “I can’t apologize for being angry, but I regret that it upset you. It came from a place of fear. I’m not accustomed to feeling that way.”
“That doesn’t excuse anything and it doesn’t change my mind.”
“Sometimes we are going to disagree. Even fight with each other, stubborn Gwynn.”
“That’s not it.” I didn’t think it was. “I think marrying you would be a mistake.”
There. I said it. The words echoed cold and heavy between us.
“Be that as it may, the cords cannot be cut. You’re welcome to try, as you no doubt will since there appears to be nothing you won’t attempt, but you will not succeed.”
“Till death do us part then. Meaning mine.”
“Not even that.”
Ominous. “What it that supposed to mean?”
“I found out what Fafnir’s plan is—just now, so don’t be angry I didn’t tell you sooner. It appears Cecily’s spirit remains tied to him. He believes their child might still be alive.”
A changeling in my world? “Then he does want to reanimate her corpse.”
“He hoped to study you and your connections to our child, then use her flesh to…find them.”
The implications of that rippled through me. Like the Catholic version of the soul, confined in purgatory. This did make me feel better.
