Page 124 of These Divided Shores
“You cannot justgo to him,” Gunnar snapped. “Benat, have you lost your mind?”
“It isn’t a true surrender. We have to force his hand.”
“No.” Gunnar shook his head. “Not like this. Not—”
“I’m going to face Elazar,” Ben stated. “It was the reason you kept me locked in that cell! Why have you changed your mind? Because the situation isn’t exactly to your liking?”
“No situation would be to my liking,” Gunnar said.
“Excuse me?”
The midday sun shoved through the dingy curtains over the small window, throwing speckles of orange on Gunnar’s face. He cast his eyes to the side, his stance slackening so he looked timid; that timidness crept over Ben’s spine, a distracting itch.
Obstinate to vulnerable. Protective to apologetic.
Holding Ben back in the Tuncian raider cell, then encouraging him to speak to the protesting refugee. He felt as though Gunnar had two hands on him, pushing him, pulling him.
“You have no right,” Ben said, low. “No right to distract me like this. I thought you were going tohelp me.”
Gunnar looked at him, sheepish. “I am helping you. I just—” He struggled, face pinching. “You are—”
“What?” Ben insisted, hands curling. “What am I?”
Gunnar slammed his fists to his temples. “Stop. I cannot—I can’tthinkwith you.”
“You owe me an explanation,” Ben spat. “As your prince, I—”
Ben stopped. Gunnar ripped his fists away from his head, his eyes flaring open.
“I am not your soldier,” he said slowly. “You do not command me.”
He looked liable to shove Ben aside and stomp from the room. And he could do just that—Ben had no sway over him. They could go into the coming battle with this back-and-forth rift widening until it swallowed them whole.
Ben didn’t want that. He wanted the connection he and Gunnar had had in the prison, how they could look at each other and know some thought or plea. How they would whisper to each other, that one phrase, Thaid fuilor mauth, and it said a hundred things. He needed that, going into this battle.
Vex was gone. Lu had told Ben why, but it still stung that his cousin wouldn’t be there for the final attack. This army of raiders hated Ben. Lu would be with Kari.
Ben would be alone.
Terror drove a jagged rod through his chest. He needed Gunnar. He needed him more than he could put words to.
“No,” Ben said. “You aren’t my soldier. You aren’t bound to me by loyalty or blood. You’re here because of that oath we took. What did it even really mean? Do you regretswearing yourself to me—is that why your advice wavers? Are you only still with me because you fear the Visjorn’s wrath?”
Or are you here because you want to be?
Gunnar’s face washed with predatory anger in the way his neck tensed. “Do not mock the Visjorn,” he said. A pause, and his anger softened—was he blushing? “Or my commitment to you. Since we were in the prison, when I think of you hurt, when I remember what it was to see fear on your face, I come unhinged. There is no situation safe enough. No plan I would hear and think,That is all right, Benat will be in only moderate danger.Any danger is too much. If your father touches you—”
Gunnar’s skin seemed to glow, the scalding red-orange of a heated iron brand, and the temperature of the room flared high.
Ben felt as if he was on a cliff, staring into an abyss of shock. Gunnar’s words were painfully intimate, enhanced by the visceral rage in his eyes and a spreading redness across his cheeks.
“You—” Ben stammered, feeling immensely stupid. “You care about me.”
Gunnar’s jaw worked. He didn’t dignify Ben with a response.
“If I released you from the oath we took,” Ben kept on, “you wouldn’t leave?”
That earned a screwed-up look of confusion. “A Visjornoath cannot be released or broken. But of course I would not leave you.”
