“I could have trusted him,” Raisa said. “Now he’s going to question everything. He’s going to think that everything—everything was a lie.”

“How do you know what his intentions were?” Amon said, blunt as always. “He has a reputation in Ragmarket, you know.”

Raisa hesitated, unsure whether to go forward. “It’s hard to explain—my memory is so jumbled. But when he healed me, it was like he opened up to me. Like he had no secrets. Like I got to know him in a way that…” She trailed off, taking in Amon’s pained expression.

“He is a wizard, Rai,” Amon said. “Remember that.”

Raisa nodded, straightening, blotting at her eyes. “I’ll remember,” she said, recalling Althea’s warning: You must not allow yourself to be ensnared as Marianna was. “Anyway. What’s done is done. I should have been there for my mother, but I wasn’t. I should have died in the canyon, but I didn’t. In a way, this is a new beginning. We have to put all these regrets behind us and look ahead. We can’t spend energy on what might have been. If we do, our enemies will eat us alive.”

She looked up at Amon hopefully. “We can’t change the past, but we can shape the future.”

And as she said it, she realized that it applied to more than politics.

She’d spent the past year yearning for Amon Byrne, agonizing over what would never be between them, immersed in regret. She’d pushed the issue in ways that were unfair to both of them.

She remembered what Edon Byrne had told her, with the authority of someone who knew what it was to sacrifice love to duty.

You serve, he’d said. You find happiness where you can. In love or not, you find a way to continue the line.

She loved Amon Byrne; some part of her would love him all her life. But the way she’d handled it had prevented her from enjoying what she could have with him. He was her very best friend—had always been her very best friend.

And she needed friends more than ever now.

They slept side by side that night, arms wrapped around each other, as they had a hundred times as children. They were two wounded people—new orphans cut loose and lonely, and they needed each other.

The magical barrier between captain and queen never interfered.

C H A P T E R  F O U R T E E N

WORD GAMES

Han had slept in the Matriarch Lodge at Marisa Pines Camp nearly every summer of his life. The sounds and smells seeped into his pores, they soothed him, and had made him feel safe in a way he’d never felt at home.