Page 39 of Kept

“Then what was the problem?”

“Dams don’t last forever, Lord Varick. Eventually, the visions piled too high. The weight grew too heavy.” He folded his topmost hand over, pressing his palms flat together. “They crushed me. I saw everything again—every vision—but it was worse this time because now I knew how it felt to be free of them. And I knew I’d never be free again.”

“Your teachers knew this would happen?”

“Yes.”

Anger sparked, making my voice gruff. “Why would they be so cruel? They could have just told you no.”

He offered a small, patient smile. “No, they couldn’t. I would have never believed them. And I’m not angry at them for doing it. I was free for a time.”

But now he knew what he was missing. “Some people might prefer to have never tasted freedom at all,” I said. “Given a choice, they might prefer prison.”

“Yes,” he said simply. “They might.”

I swallowed. “Do you…see everything now?”

“I do. Possibilities. Sometimes certainties.”

We stared at each other, the unspoken hanging in the air like smoke. He saw everything—and he felt it, too. The pain of the world.

The pain of knowing.

“Did you—” Emotion closed my throat. I shook my head. “Forget it.” What did it matter if he’d seen what happened to me on the beach?

But he knew what I’d started to ask. His voice gentled. “I had not yet come into my power, Lord Varick.”

Another question leapt into my mind, but I quickly smothered it. I didn’t want to know if Jordan would have stopped my father’s men that night.

I preferred the prison. The freedom of not knowing.

I looked at the window over his shoulder. Outside, the moon rose in an inky sky. The lawn was on the other side of the manor house, which meant the wounded Lar Katerins weren’t visible. But I didn’t need to see them. The charred bodies of the townspeople would live forever in my mind.

“I don’t like magic,” I said.

“I know.”

I looked at Jordan again. “I suppose you knew that before I said it. You’ve seen it.”

“Even a blind seer could tell you dislike magic, my lord.”

I allowed myself a small smile. When my dagger embedded itself in the carpet between his feet, he didn’t flinch. Just stared up at me with steady blue eyes and the promise of a dimple in his cheek that was always there even when he wasn’t smiling.

“Do you really have three sisters?” I asked.

The dimple appeared. “Yes, I do. And the nieces and nephews to go along with them.”

“You said you’d swear another oath.”

“That still holds true.”

I gestured to the dagger. “Do it, then. Swear on your blood you won’t betray Laurent of Nor Doru.”

“You don’t wish an oath for yourself?”

“No. And I’m not going to think too hard about how this is probably pointless, since you already know the future.”

“Possibilities,” he said.

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