Page 98 of Stolen Songbird

“I love you, Cécile,” he said, and my breath caught. It was one thing to feel it, and quite another to hear the words from his lips.

He kissed me, gently at first, and then harder as his control vanished. My lips parted, and the kiss deepened, opening up a floodgate of heat that tore through my body. Rational thought slipped away, and all that was left was need and desire. I felt his hands on me and I tore at his coat, pulled off his shirt and dug my fingers into the hard muscles lining his back, felt his breath hot and ragged against my lips and at the plunging neckline of my dress. The air was cold against my legs as my skirts rode up, and I wrapped my ankles around him, pulling him down against me. All I wanted was him. And I wanted everything.

The hilt of his sword dug into my ribs, and I grabbed at his belt, fumbling with unpracticed hands with the buckle.

“Cécile, stop.” I barely heard him. My body felt like a wild thing, completely out of my control.

“Cécile!” He caught hold of my wrists and pinned them down against the cushions. “Enough. You overestimate my degree of self-control.”

I looked up at him, hurt and confused. “Why should you need any? We’re married. I am yours, and you,” I said, “are mine.” I struggled against his grip, but he was stronger than I was. Stronger than any human possibly could be. “Have we not sacrificed enough?”

His lips pressed down, warm and sweet. He rested his forehead against mine. “I want you. I’ve wanted this for so long.” He bit his lip. “But there could be consequences of… that.”

The chaos retreated from my mind, replaced by the cool feel of logic. “You mean a child?”

He nodded and let go of my wrists. “If we had a child, it would be as bound to this place as I am.” Smoothing back the hair from my face, he said, “Then what would you do? Stay out of obligation and give up life on the outside? Or be like your mother, and only visit when the mood strikes you?”

I jerked away from him. “Don’t say that—I’m nothing like her.”

He sat back on his heels, his face unreadable, and the combination of our emotions was a tangled web that I was having difficulty sorting through. I stared at him, and eventually it came to me: anticipation. But of what? What did he want me to say?

“You need to decide what life you want,” he said, his eyes searching mine.

I covered my face with both hands, frustrated. “I can’t do this, Tristan. I’m not like you—I can’t plan out every moment of my future, every decision I’m going to make.”

Silence.

“Of course not.” His voice was cold, but the shock of his grief stung through me like an icy spear. “After all, you never chose to come here. Never chose any of this. Who could blame you for wanting to leave? And what sort of fool am I for wishing that you would stay?”

A chill swept through me. “Tristan, that isn’t what I meant!” But he was already pulling his shirt over his head, the boat moving swiftly under an invisible force back to the tunnel entrance.

“I love you,” I pleaded, but the words sounded weak even to me. “I wouldn’t leave you here alone.”

“So you say.” His voice was emotionless, posture stiff, but the pain I had caused him made me sick. “But you’re human, Cécile, so why should I believe anything that comes out of your mouth?”

“Tristan.” I reached for him, but he turned away, moving to the front of the boat.

“We need to go back. They’ll be missing us by now.”

The boat bumped against the steps, grinding to a halt, and Tristan leapt out. It was magic, not his hands, that lifted me out of the boat, and it was magic that steadied me as I climbed the slippery steps back to the tunnel. After everything that had happened to us, it seemed that words from my own lips had done the most damage of all.

29

Tristan

Istared bleary-eyed at the trunk of the tree, absently letting my power flow without providing it much direction. “Please, just hold it up,” I mumbled. “I don’t care how you go about it, just don’t drop any rocks.” It was the wrong way to manage the magic—the structure was architecturally complex, and with the amount of activity in the earth as of late, it required my full attention. Which was rather difficult, given that Cécile was the center of my every thought. Every day, every hour, every minute. Every bloody waking breath, which was a substantial number of breaths, considering I’d rarely had more than a few consecutive hours of sleep in the time since she’d arrived.

Which had clearly caused me to lose my mind. What other explanation could there be for my hoping she would stay? We’d kidnapped her from her family and forced her to marry someone she didn’t even know. Something that wasn’t even human. I’d treated her dreadfully for nearly our entire marriage. And still she’d saved my life. Told me that she loved me.

But what did that even mean?

Cécile could lie. I’d watched her do it countless times. The tiny little mistruths she employed without any real intention of being deceitful. It wasn’t in her nature to be manipulative or devious; but it was in mine. How many secrets was I keeping from her? Layers and layers, I thought. Many were those of my people, but some were mine alone. She knew it, too. Knew that I kept her in the dark, and still she trusted me implicitly. I could see it in her eyes: a blind, unfaltering faith that I would never hurt her, despite my having done exactly that on so many occasions. She lived in the present, always running off in the heat of the moment and saying exactly what she thought, rarely considering how the things she said or the decisions she made would affect the future. I was the exact opposite. Almost every action I took or decision I made was designed to affect circumstances months, years, even decades down the road. I’d always thought it was the prudent way to live, but now I feared I would wake up one day an old man, with my past wasted and no future left to live. Loving her had changed me, pulled me into the present and made me want to give myself to her as wholly and completely as I could.

But I was who I was, and I could not let go completely. Could not trust her the way my heart wanted to, because I could see the way it would go. I would give her everything I had, love her with every breath of my being. I would have months, perhaps even a year of happiness before my other plans came to fruition. Then I would be bound by my own promise to let her go, and she would leave. Closing my eyes, I watched a specter of her future self walking down River Road and out onto the beach, never looking back. The pain was worse than a spike of iron through the heart.

My mind, always attuned to where Cécile was, sensed that she was on the move. The dull throb of her misery—misery that I had caused—was a beacon allowing me to trace her progress from the palace down into the city. I didn’t like her out and about like this—the people had mixed feelings about her. Abandoning the tree, I hurried down several flights of stairs and across a bridge into the merchant district. Though she was shorter than everyone around, I caught glimpses of red hair as she walked slowly through the crowd, her guards following a few paces behind. She didn’t seem to realize that I was following. I could think of countless instances when she’d been so lost in thought that I could have walked up and tapped her on the shoulder before she’d notice me. How many times had I followed her through the glass gardens listening to her sing? How many times, and never once did she seem to sense I was there.

Or maybe she just didn’t care.

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