The Winter Prince (The Lion Hunters:01)(63)

“So ruthlessly cruel in truth,” I finished, whispering.

Now tears began to glitter cold and hopeless across his face.

I turned his hand over and broke the brittle ice easily across his palm. There was hardly anything for him to feel: a touch of chill through his glove, then shattered crystals melting to nothing on his open hand. “It’s only water, Lleu,” I said quietly. “If I held such a thing to your sunlit face for much longer than two moments it would dissolve into air.” I brushed my fingertips across his cheek and smeared the tears there. He sank to his knees in the snow. The sunlsnoomeight was cold through the bare trees, and the ground was frozen and desolate. “Lleu,” I said softly, and reached for his hands to help him back to his feet.

“I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t, I can’t.”

I knelt beside him. “Lleu, get up. You’ve no cloak. You’ll freeze.”

“You’re going to kill me, anyway,” he whispered, too tired to raise his voice.

I shook my head, speechless, desperate with remorse and self-hatred. He did not notice. Holding him steady with one hand, I undid the clasp at my shoulder and took off my cloak, spreading its soft folds over my knees and the bright snow around us. I drew him close; and too frozen and exhausted to object, Lleu collapsed onto the warm wool and leaned against my chest, folded in my arms. He began to cry in earnest, sobbing with his face buried in my jacket, then crying uncontrollably in breathless, shrieking gasps that tore through his entire body. “Don’t,” I whispered. “Don’t.”

When his sobs began to sound less like screams I rested one cheek against his hair and bent over him, cradling him like a child. He clutched at my jacket with cold, clenched, tear-wet fingers. I laughed a little. “You cling to me so—do you still trust me, after all this?”

He said in a low, broken voice, “I have always trusted you.”

Then of a sudden he stopped crying. He twisted around in my arms so that he could see me. “If you would kill me,” he said, “kill me now.”

Having said that, his voice grew stronger. “Do it. Do it! Stab me and leave my body to whatever creatures roam this wood, and no one will ever know. No one will ever blame you.”

I whispered, “I could not butcher you.”

He was guessing, daring, with his life forfeit if he were wrong. But he knew he was right. “Then leave me here,” he said. “I can’t walk. I don’t know where I am. I would be dead of cold by evening, and again you could escape blame.” He choked, half weeping still, and burst forth, “I am your brother! You are my friend! You are the single person I have most admired and imitated and envied my entire life! If you hate me so for my heritage, then I do not want it, I cannot bear your hatred. So leave me here! Kill me!”

“I can’t,” I gasped. “I can’t. I can’t kill you. I love you.”

You see what it took to make me know this.

I held Lleu fiercely, shaking, my face turned away, and lashed myself with degrading epithets: serpent, seducer, defiling deceiver, corrupted outcast, traitor and toad. But to revile myself did nothing to help Lleu. He sobbed a while longer, frustrated in his exhaustion, though he had triumphed over me in a way he could never have planned. His unconditional trust and love were prizes I never knew I coveted, infinitely more powerful and more healing than the fear I had tried to exact from him. He whispered at last, yawning, “You are not evil, but you are so torn! What drives you? If I became high king you’d have more power than any man in Britain, but you choose to follow Morgause.”

“She taught me all I know of cruelty, that’s true,” I said. “But Lleu, you brought on the fury that drove me to attempt such a thing. When you’re unwilling to do as your father tells you, does he invoke his power as high king and say that it is not within your riwitove me ght to disobey him?”

“Do I do that?”

“You have told me I have not so much as the right to object if you choose to insult me! Even the queen of the Orcades grants me that!”

“That was childish of me. I tried to apologize.”

I sighed. “I know you did. But I had my mother’s hatred to strengthen my own. Now she has made me hate myself more than I ever hated you. I will be free.”

Lleu sighed and closed his eyes. “Maybe you will. But she still triumphs. I’ll die anyway; I have no strength to make the journey home.”