She also bought gifts for Rell and Chay’s daughters, and spent many enjoyable evenings with the women who had loved her even better than her own family had. Rell was wise, and the girls were loving, and Kit felt at ease with them as she felt with few people in the world. Not that she told them anything of her recent adventures. Not that she told them of Jex, or Nolan, or Chay. What Rell knew, Chay had told her, and the guldwoman would want to learn nothing important from any other source. So they talked of clothing, and the girls’ prospects for marriage, and the changes that new construction had brought to Gold Mountain, and the hours passed peacefully.

Kit had no desire to see Chay, and he did not send for her.

She knew he was recovering, because Rell told her so, tears of happiness running down her fair cheeks. Once Kit would have cried like that, too, so joyous she could not express her emotion any other way, but not now. Not for Chay Zanlan. Not for the man who would have sacrificed someone he loved deeply merely to gain an edge with his enemy.

Or perhaps he had never loved her. How was it ever possible to tell when emotion was genuine, when it was false, and when it was summoned for a convenient purpose? It wasn’t just Chay whose feelings she doubted. Her own had been in such severe flux for so many weeks that she questioned the authenticity of any surge of passion.

Her love for Jex Zanlan, which had consumed her for so many years, had burned itself out in the inferno of horror. She could remember every contour of his body, every timbre of his voice. She could call up with an almost sensual detail the way her heart had reacted the first time he kissed her mouth. She had forgotten nothing, she would deny nothing; this was a man she had adored. But no more. That white-hot fever had charred itself to ashes. There was nothing left to rekindle.

Her love for Chay, always such a powerful, comforting thing, had chilled overnight to frost and shadows. He had deliberately risked her, and not to save himself, not to save anyone, merely to hurt someone else. He had always been a superb tactician—that had been his great strength as a leader—but she had not realized until recently how ruthless that had made him. She guessed now that, when he had been in the city making deals with Ariana Bayless, he had been willing to sacrifice his son to the communal goals, and that realization froze her soul even more. She could not live like that; she could not love like that; she could not forgive such calculated betrayals.