Page 213 of The Crown's Awakening
She nods and receives it without doing anything to it at all, and that is the thing, he realizes, that is the thing he has never had before. Someone who takes what is true and simply holds it.
They talk for a long time after that, about nothing and everything the way children do when they have accidentally found someone who speaks the same language, and at some point he becomes aware that he is laughing at something she said, genuinely laughing, and he cannot remember the last time that happened without something else underneath it.
Eventually she goes quiet.
"I may forget you," she says. "Every day new dark memories are made in the life I live now. And although meeting you has been lovely, losing you is just as dark as everything else." Apause. "But just because I forget doesn't mean you don't mean something."
"I'm a feeder," he says. "I forget nothing. I cannot."
She is quiet at that, and he wonders what her life looks like that forgetting would be a mercy.
She reaches for the small knife at her hip. "Let us carve an X," she says, and before he can ask what she means she has pressed the blade lightly to her ankle and made the mark.
She holds the knife out to him.
He takes it and makes the same mark on his own ankle, and they look at each other's and then at each other and neither of them laughs because it has become something more serious than they intended.
"I may still forget," she says.
"Why would you forget?"
"Because everything that hurts I try to forget." Her voice is soft. "And saying goodbye in a moment will hurt."
He looks at her for a long moment, at the white veil and the mark on her ankle and the way she has spent this entire afternoon simply being honest with him as though it costs nothing.
"What if I promise to help you remember?" he says.
Something in her goes quiet in a good way.
"I always keep my promises," he continues. "One day I will be a great king."
He pauses. The feeling moving through him is enormous and entirely new, built from an afternoon of kindness and laughter and the particular lightness of being with someone who required nothing from him. He has no experience with any of it. He does not know where to put it.
"Nothing has ever made my heart as soft as you," he says quietly.
She does not answer that, and he is glad, because some things are better received in silence. “No one has ever made a promise and kept it,” she says. Her voice is quiet, barely above a whisper.
Her words hollow something in his chest.
She goes first. Her white veil moves through the trees and disappears and the mountain is immediately different for her absence, heavier, the air returning to its ordinary weight as though it had only ever been held back by her being in it.
He stays by the spring for a long time.
He does not know her name. He does not know which family brought her here or which kingdom she will go back to.
He knows the mark on his ankle. He knows the sound of her laugh. He knows that she said saying goodbye will hurt and meant it, and he knows that she was right, because he is sitting beside a spring on a mountain feeling something he has no word for yet, something that has gotten into him and will not come out.
He turns and walks back toward the path.
He gets into the carriage as the procession reforms, the adults settling back into their roles and their silence, and as it begins to move he looks out the window and sees, at the edge of the road, a young girl in a white veil being struck by a man he assumesis her father, her small body flinching with each blow while the procession moves past as though it is not happening.
His chest tightens hard. He looks away.
And then, almost immediately, he feels the particular ugly relief of knowing it is not her. That whoever that girl is, she is not the one he just left by the spring. He holds that feeling and hates himself for it in equal measure. The carriage moves on. He keeps the mark on his ankle. He keeps the promise too, though he does not yet know who he made it to.
He returns to himself without warning.
The room closes back in around him, the letter still open on the table, the strand of hair where he left it. His hand is still braced against the wood. It is cracked beneath his grip.
