Page 154 of The Ragpicker King
She hesitated before saying, almost reluctantly, “I had not known of Gremont’s association with the Malgasi until it became clear that while he did not know I was Beck, he had somehow learned IknewBeck. He demanded I arrange a meeting.”
“Did you fob him off with the same stand-in you sent to meet me, when I thought I was meeting Prosper Beck?”
“Yes,” she said. Only the one word, leaving Kel a bitter taste in the back of his throat. The bitter knowledge that she had treated him, when it came to Beck, no differently than she had treated Artal Gremont. “But Gremont came to the meeting with the Malgasi Princess. Jerrod was there. It became clear Gremont was under her thumb, completely. He would do anything she wanted. If she demanded he slit my throat in the ballroom at House Alleyne, he would have done it and not worried about exile. It was too dangerous to marry him. I had to abandon that plan.”
“I see. And then—there was the Solstice Ball. When you told Conor I wasn’t to be trusted.”
She bit her lip. “Kel—”
“Don’t,” he said. “At first, I thought you were indeed speaking to someone you believed to be Conor. Until you started listing off all the ways in which you felt I’d endangered myself for Conor’s sake. You said,He tried to pay your debts to Prosper Beck.But there was no way you would know that. No one knew that—except for Beck.”
She half closed her eyes. “Stupid,” she murmured. “So stupid—”
He took a step toward her; she didn’t move. “Do you remember in the cellar at the Roverge party? When I helped bandage your cut?” He put a hand on the swell of her hip, where the cut had been. He could feel the warmth of her through the fabric of her trousers, feel the curve of her under his hand. “You told me you’d been injured learning how to use a sword.”
“No one becomes Prosper Beck without a few injuries on the way,” she said, but her voice was a little unsteady. She looked up at him, the firelight darkening her eyes. “What about the locket?”
“Yes. You sent me to steal your own locket,” he said. “You knew I’d open it and find the grass ring there. You knew I’d torture myself over what it meant.”
She looked up at him, her eyes glittering, a little narrowed. “I never thought you’d be tortured,” she said. “I never wanted to hurt you at all—”
“I don’t believe that,” he said savagely. “I have puzzled over it and puzzled over it. What I could have done to make you so determined to strike at me—with the locket, with what you did to Conor, with the things you said to me at the Solstice Ball? If you had planned for a thousand years, you could not have come up with words that would have crushed me more—”
Antonetta had gone white. “I wastrying to get you to lie low,” she said, her voice rising above the crackle of the fire. “You stupid, stupid man. I knew you were lying to Conor, working with the Ragpicker King, doing favors for the Kutani Princess, acting as if you believed you’d never get caught. I thought if I made it clear how much danger you were really in, you might stop before you got yourselfkilled.And I knew you’d hate me for saying what I said, but I thought it would be worth it if it meant you’d live—”
She broke off. Kel stared at her. She was flushed with rage. He wanted to believe that she meant it, that she had only been thinking of his safety. But she had lied to him and lied to him, and he felt now the danger of wanting to believe in her—in her, of all people.
Antonetta threw the poker, which clattered into the fireplace. “I told you at the Roverges’ that I wanted the silk Charter,” she said. “I wanted Gremont’s Charter, too. Not for myself—I couldn’t have held it, I know that. But I could have given it to someone.”
“You would have... sold it?” Kel said. “I don’t—”
“No, you don’t,” she said furiously. “I can’t believe you came here thinking you had everything all figured out, Kel Saren. You don’t understand anything. I wanted it foryou.”
Kel caught her by the wrist. She started to twist away before turning to glare at him. “Why?” he demanded.
She took a deep breath. Desperately he searched her eyes with his own. For a moment, he thought he could see the truth of her in her eyes, see through the layers of pretense and lies and history, through the defensive wall that he himself had had a part in building up so long ago.
Tell me, Ana,he thought.Tell me the truth. Tell me what you feel.
But her gaze flicked away from his. “So you could be free of being the Sword Catcher,” she said in a flat voice that let him know that whatever her real reason was, she had no intention of revealing it. “I know what it’s like to be trapped by duty and expectation. I suppose I wanted to see power in the right hands for a change.”
Kel’s heart sank. She would never be honest with him. It was more than concealing her identity as Prosper Beck. He could have lived with that. But to know that she would never tell him what she really felt aboutanything—
“All those years ago,” he said roughly. “You shut me out. It wasn’t just your mother—though Aigon knows I blame her for many things. You are the one who told me we were not of the same class. That there was no point in closing our eyes to reality.”
Almost unconsciously, she put her hand to her throat, where her locket would usually rest. “You remember what I said?”
“Every word,” Kel said. “You put me exactly in my place. I thought you hated me. And then later, just these past months, whenI realized what a part you were playing, I thought:Perhaps she is showing her real self, only to me.It made me think I might be different in your eyes. But you have lied to me just like everyone else.”
“And you have lied to me, Sword Catcher,” she said. “You stand there so angry that I never told you I had a second life as Prosper Beck. Yet you have only ever been Kel Anjuman with me, and while I may have hidden my false self, you hid your real one. YouareKel Saren, Sword Catcher, and I had to learn that name from others.”
Kel sucked in his breath. “It was not my secret to tell,” he said. “I took an oath, a vow to protect Conor. A vow never to tell anyone that such a thing as a Sword Catcher even existed.”
She smiled almost sadly. “Jerrod knows,” she said. “Ji-An. Merren Asper. The Ragpicker King. Lin Caster—”
I never told any of them. They already knew, or found out.But did such things matter? Especially now, when he was demanding honesty from her, demanding she strip herself down to the bones of what she really was and show that self to him?
“I think I always knew, Ana,” he said, “that you were hiding some truth of yourself from me, and so I did not trust you with who I really was.”
