Somewhere underneath the snarling, the cruel words, the blood, and the defenses, was there still someone who believed they were worthy of love? A little boy who kept forgetting to grasp with one pair of hands instead of the other? Someone who heard his name spoken by a dying, filthy woman, and believed for even a moment that maybe the gods had relented, and given him someone who would look at him with affection until the end of time?

"Well, fuck," I said to my room. I knew myself well enough that if Dain was serious about being my friend, and that if those thoughts were true, that I would never be able to hold him at arm's length. I wouldn't even want to, even though the price at the end was immortality and assassins. With a groan, I planted my elbows on the table and dropped my face into my hands.

"Have a good time, your highness?" asked an amused Kamharida as she came out of her adjoining room.

"I think he might secretly not be an awful person," I said into my hands. I heard her walking over, and then the scrape of the other chair as she sat down at the table with me.

When I looked up through my fingers, she was smiling at me. "Even with Phazikai?"

"Even with Phazikai," I said with a sigh. I sat back up and slouched against my chair. "If you had a chance to go home, would you take it?" I asked. "Tomorrow, if someone offered to take you home, would you go?"

She smiled, a sorrowful expression, with a small tremble of her mouth. "No."

I don't know what my face did, but Kamharida shook her head, and put a hand over mine.

"It's been seven years, eight months, and twenty-four days," she said softly. "They have mourned. My children have become teenagers, growing into their own places. Perhaps my husband found love again, and is happy. Things have bloomed to fill the empty space, like flowers in the sunlit patch of the woods where a tree has fallen. How could I come back and destroy the gardens they've grown? That's not love."

"Can I ask what you do want, then?" I asked. "If you could have anything, any happiness. What would you choose?"

Kamharida squeezed my hand. "To be an ancestor to them," she said. "To smooth their way in life—send them money, or put people in their way who will help them. I want them to have good lives, and to know that their lives are good. I wouldn't ever want to step back into my old life, but if I could have a new one in Nigeria, where I could watch over my loved ones? I would take it in a heartbeat."

I swallowed, then licked my lips. "What if it would cost someone else their chance at happiness?"