Page 40 of Honey Cut
“It would kill you because you love the king too,” I say, and we shouldn’t stop here, Tristan’s torch will have already been seen, but I need Tristan to know. “You would die if you were sundered from him. You think you love me, but you’re only loving him through me.”
“Is that really what you think?”
I turn to gesture for him to start walking again, but the look on his face quells me.
“Isolde, do you know what you are?Howyou are? You demand love just by existing.”
He sounds like a hero in one of the songs he sang at my father’s court, all tragic longing and haunting harp notes.
“You don’t know me,” I say, and it is the grim truth.No oneknows me. “You love what you think you see. A princess forced to marry a stranger.”
“I love that you pray alone in the dark where no one can see, because you do it only for God and not to show off how pious you are. I love that you keep your chin lifted to the wind, even when your hands are shaking with fear. I love that it is hard to make you laugh, and when I do, I feel like I’ve snatched a treasure from a dragon’s nest.”
My lips part.
His voice goes quiet and rough. “I love that you hurt yourself when you pray. I understand why it makes you feel better, cleaner,good.”
I have no idea what to say to that, no idea that anyone had ever seen me do that. No idea that anyone else could ever understand. I duck my head. “Tristan.” It’s a whisper. A plea.
“I don’t need you to love me back. I know that I love too…strangely. Too quickly. I know that if you face the choice between yourself and others, you will never choose yourself. But I need you to know thatIwould choose you. And, yes, I love my king, I love him like” —his voice breaks a little here—“like a wife would. Like the wife you will be for him. But that is my own pain to bear, and the pain of being away from him…can’t you see I will feel it anyway, after you’re married? Please. If you won’t leave with me, at least know that I’m asking you to.”
There is no moon tonight, only the stars above and the torches below, and I take his torch and toss it into the wet grass, where it hisses and spits a long death. There’s no time for this, and it is dangerous, but I can’t not steal this one last thing for myself, this one thing that is not for my family or for Ireland or for God, only for me.
“We’re not real in the dark,” I whisper and find his soft mouth with mine.
He groans between the velvet slides of our kisses.
“It is not fair that a king can keep his bed warmed with whomever he likes but a queen cannot even warm her heart with someone else,” I murmur. “Perhaps he will not exact so much fidelity from us. Perhaps he will never notice.”
Tristan pulls back to look at me. “You don’t know him.”
“So he is cruel, then? Jealous?”
Tristan huffs out a laugh and steps away. “Yes, he is cruel. Yes, he is jealous. How can I explain to you that his cruelty feels better than the softest whispers from anyone else? And that his jealousy is more intoxicating than wine? To be with him is to be in the middle of a storm, helpless and also so alive it makes your bones hurt.”
I don’t respond. I’m not sure what all of that portends for a foreign wife whose loyalties remain with her country. I will have to be very careful here.
“Let’s go,” Tristan says, and his bard’s voice is wooden now. “They’ll be wondering why we stopped.”
When Tristan and I enter the circle of crooked gray stones, I see only a small handful of people. Goran, Dinas, and Andret. The slim valet named Sedge. A woman with bright hair to match Mark’s—his twin sister. There is another woman who stands next to a fallen stone in the center of the circle with a length of braided cord in her hand. She has pale skin and dark, silver-streaked hair. I don’t recognize her, but she regards me with an air of sadness.
My feet come to a stop when I see the king beside her.
It is not my first time seeing him, of course—I saw him today in Tintagel’s lofty hall as the marriage contracts were signed and our union was blessed by the resident priest. He’d looked at me twice in all that time.
But seeing him tonight, surrounded by fire and stone and stars, a golden torc glinting from around his neck, is something completely different.
And the way he looks at me now…
It is still cold, still terrifying. But the way my stomach swoops as he holds out his hand to me can’t only be from fear.
“Thank you for agreeing to come, princess,” the king says. “I know not everyone is favorable to the old ways.”
“Some practice them still in Ireland, my lord.”
“All the same, I am grateful.” He sounds too aloof to be grateful, too powerful, and I remember that they call him the Hound of the Sea. The only king able to beat my uncle back on the waves. “I have a gift for you.”
From somewhere in his robes, he withdraws a slender torc to match the one around his neck. Hammered gold. “My queen should wear the collar of her station.”
