Inkmistress (Of Fire and Stars 0.5)(89)

Perhaps the time had come to forgive Hal for what he’d done. Did his recent loyalty outweigh one betrayal? Was there even such a thing as anyone who was truly honest?

“Asra . . . I think we should talk about what happened,” Hal began. “I should have told you the truth from the beginning. You have to understand that I grew up here in the city. On the streets you can’t afford to trust strangers. It can get you killed.”

I almost laughed. Trusting strangers—including Hal—had certainly come close to getting me killed every step of the way since leaving home. “Truer words may never have been spoken.”

He nodded. The only acknowledgment of my jab was the flicker of hurt in his eyes, but he soldiered on. “The only person I could trust was my sister, who protected me from the time I was young. She was my hero. She could do no wrong. I didn’t understand until recently that her protectiveness wouldn’t extend to people I cared about. And . . . there was never someone I had feelings for like the ones I have for you.” His expression was so raw, so vulnerable. The wrong reaction from me would surely break him.

Seeing him unbox his heart crumbled the walls I’d tried so hard to maintain. All I wanted now was to cradle his cheek in my hand, lean into his embrace, seek out the familiar planes of his body and find safety there. Most of all, I wanted to take what he was offering me and protect it with all the fierceness I had.

When I didn’t say anything, he kept going. “If I had your gift and could do it without harming others, I would rewrite the history of us. I wish I could give us another beginning, one in which I had told you the truth from the moment we met,” he said, his voice firm.

“Oh, Hal . . . ,” I whispered.

“I wish I could rewrite taking you to Orzai. I wish we could have taken the Moth and flown past there. I wish we could keep going forever. See the world. Us, Iman, and the open sky.”

“I understand that wish.” If it hadn’t been for the sorrow I’d left behind in Amalska, the fear driving me forward, and the knives always at my back, traveling with him might have been the happiest time of my life—until he betrayed me.

“I knew when I heard you sing those vespers that they would change my life. I just never knew how much.” His voice was so tender it broke my heart.

“I knew when I heard you sing ‘The Tavern Lamb’ that you were the most ridiculous person I’d ever met,” I said, teasing.

He smiled, the slightest upturn of his lips.

I missed that mouth. I missed that smile.

“I just . . . I never expected . . . you,” Hal said. “I didn’t expect how special you are.”

I leaned on the railing of the bridge, burying my face in my hands. Heat rose in my cheeks, and I wanted to push it back down. The compliment was so bittersweet.

“Special is why your sister took my blood,” I said. “Special is why the king keeps me close and puts up with me having a girl and two babies in my room. I would give anything to not be special. I would give anything to be just like you or, better yet, to be human. Even one without a manifest. Someone simple. Uncomplicated. Someone who hasn’t been chased across half a kingdom for the power that runs in her veins.” Now that I knew what the world would do with someone like me, I longed to be something, anything, other than myself.

“I didn’t mean anything to do with your abilities. I meant the way you watched over me when I was unconscious in the Tamers’ forest. Mukira said you never left my side. I meant the way you look at Iman like he means the world to you, like he’s your own. I meant the way you’ve kept fighting even when it seems like all is lost. Even now. Most people aren’t like that. That’s what makes you special. Not your blood.”

Hal reached for my left hand, and I jerked it away before he could touch me. Letting him touch the broken part of me was still too intimate, still too much.

“How is your arm?” he asked quietly.

“There are some things magic cannot repair.” I tried to close my hand and was rewarded with the usual stab of pain through my wrist.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it will never be enough, but I am so, so sorry.”

“If it had been my writing hand, perhaps Nismae would have done me a favor,” I said bitterly.

“No. There is no light in which it was a favor,” he said.

“It’s fine. It’s just more damage to someone who was already broken, and a lesson in whom not to trust.” I couldn’t stop lashing out at him. The pain was too much.

“You aren’t broken, Asra.”

“I don’t need you to tell me what I am!” I said.

“You’re right, you don’t, but I wish you could see yourself the way I do. You are all goodness and light. You’re as bright and beautiful as a star—one I feel like I’ve been searching the sky for my whole life. I felt pulled to you from the very first time I heard you singing.” He could have used his compulsion to try to make the words more moving, but he didn’t. They were delivered raw and unpolished, simple as an ugly truth.

“Feelings are a terrible reason to do anything,” I said, but the fight was starting to seep out of me. I tried to cling to the knowledge that feelings were what had started the avalanche of disaster that got me here. It had started the moment I put pen to paper to help Ina find her manifest, and that had been about nothing if not feelings. Selfish, stupid feelings.