Mircea’s hand moved up to my head, smoothing down the curls there. They were everywhere, now that he’d made me grow it out. “I know it is lonely for you here,” he told me. “I can only promise that we will not be here forever.”
I put my chin on his chest and looked up at him. This was the first I’d heard of it. “Where will we go?”
“That is yet to be determined. But I will not always be weak. And every time I gain in power, my bargaining position improves.”
“To do what?”
“Many things. Someday, I will be able to make servants—”
I groaned in mock horror. “Not more Horatius!”
He smiled. “There is only one Horatiu. But there will be people who can help us. Give us the means to go away.”
“But I like it here.”
“You will like other places, as well. Beautiful places. Safe places.”
“Places with sweets?”
Mircea laughed. “Yes. Yes, many sweets, which you may eat until you don’t have a tooth left in your head!”
“I don’t think I would look very good with no teeth.”
Mircea kissed the side of my head. “You will always be beautiful. And you will always be safe. I swear it.”
I frowned, because his tone had been weird when he said that last. “Why wouldn’t we be? What can hurt—”
The scene suddenly froze, exactly like a movie somebody had paused. I blinked, coming back to myself but waiting for it to continue. Only it didn’t.
“Start!” I told it stupidly, wiping away even stupider tears.
I didn’t know why I was crying. I didn’t know this scene—not any of it. Not the room, not the painting, not the sights and sounds and smells of a city that, as far as I was concerned, I’d visited for the first time several hundred years later. And hadn’t been all that impressed by.
I hadn’t walked through that marketplace or run past those canals. I hadn’t looked for that house, to see if it still stood, or searched for that bridge. Or eaten the sweets that I’d seemed so obsessed with.
Because I hadn’t remembered any of it.
“Start!” I yelled, furious and desperate. But it didn’t. The little girl remained looking up at her father, loose-limbed and comfortable in his grasp, brown curls falling over a plain white shift, naked toes peeking out from under the hem, black eyes mischievous and adoring and—
And when the hell had I looked like that? I’d never fucking looked like that! Only I had.
I had and I’d lost it, I realized, as something sliced across the scene. Like talons through a movie screen, it shredded the delicate image, cutting it to pieces. Like the memories she’d stolen from me. Like everything she’d ever touched.
Bring it, bitch, I thought savagely, right before a crushing blow sent me flying.
Chapter Thirty-five
I hit the ground on my back outside the rift, skidded, flipped—and was hit again before I even got back to my feet. And again. And again. I snarled and grabbed for a dark shadow darting to the left, but clutched only air.
I wasn’t sure if I’d missed or if there hadn’t been anything there in the first place. I couldn’t tell because the fog was getting worse. It was head-high out here now, too, with only puzzle pieces of the harbor visible behind filmy veils. Everything else was billowing clouds lit up by the searchlight illumination of the rift, with the fog giving the beams a nearly solid appearance.
Like the heavy-booted foot slashing out at me.
It would have cracked my jaw, judging by the explosion of air that hit my face as it passed by, but I’d dodged back just in time. Only to have my feet swept out from under me a second later, dumping me on the ground again. And into the middle of a barrage that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
It was a relentless, impossible-to-meet pounding, that had me rolling around the path and still only half avoiding the blows. And reminding me of a small fact that I’d forgotten—I had never been the stronger. Saner, yes, maybe. Most of the time. But our strength…that had always come from her.
It was why the temporary block that the fey wine had created had cost me so much in battle. I’d still been better than average—I didn’t owe everything to her. But the split-second reactions, the knife-edge balance, the sheer power of berserker rage…those I had lost.