Arc 3: Chapter 28: The Headsman and The Queen
Rosanna didn’t reply at once. I couldn’t read her, couldn’t tell what emotion turned the well-ordered gears behind those gem green eyes.
When we’d been young, when I’d been a novice fighter pretending to be a bastard noble and she a runaway princess fleeing her family’s killers, I hadn’t realized just how calculating she could be, how ambitious.
I knew then, in that fortress by the sea, in that quiet study where we stood together for the first time in seven years.
Had this all been her? Had it been her will behind Lias all along, pulling me back into this world of intrigue and conspiracy?
I opened my mouth to speak, then shut it. I felt the anger, long swallowed, boil up. I should have known this would be another of Rosanna’s schemes. I was to be a pawn again, another piece on her board. Resentment and unspoken words stored up through long, bloody years filled my insides like buzzing flies and I tried to work myself up to spill it all into that silent space between us.
I’d held onto it all too long. It crammed in my throat, all that hurt, and wouldn’t come out. I thought I might choke on it.
Then she did something I did not expect and never after forgot. That queen, that empress, that wellspring of strength and royal will, stepped forward with tears in her eyes and threw her arms around me.
I didn’t return the embrace at first. Stunned, I just stood there dumbly, stiff as a tree and unsure what to do with my arms. Rosanna’s nose barely came above my lower ribs as she buried her face in my chest. No matter that she was dressed in enough rich finery to buy a small realm, and I hadn’t washed or changed clothes in weeks. I probably smelled like a sty.
She held me tightly anyway, and might have been trembling.
“Alken,” she said, voice tight with emotion. Not disdain or anger as I’d expected, but warmth colored by grief.
I did return the embrace then, though not without awkwardness. I didn’t know what else to do. All my bitter words fled me, all that time I’d spent alone and believing my friends of old didn’t care whether I lived or died forgotten.