He took a mental step back, regaining control of his temper with effort. They didn’t like each other. So be it. He didn’t care if she understood him. Gray was stupid in love with her, and there was nothing he could do about it. He had to tolerate her as best he could because Gray and that damn contract with Sadi chained him to her.

“Are we going to town or not?” he asked.

Cassidy looked away. “Yes. Give me a few minutes to change clothes.”

“I’ll get the pony cart and meet you at the front door.” Because he needed air and open space.

Because standing here in her suite, he had the odd sense that something delicate was being weighed down by their words and feelings—and was about to break.

I survived. A lot of men didn’t.

The words circled round and round in her mind.

Cassidy didn’t want to get into a serious discussion, and Theran’s stiff posture as he drove the pony cart into town didn’t invite small talk. So she kept silent and absorbed the look and feel of the land during the short ride into town.

I survived. A lot of men didn’t.

Those few words told her more about Theran Grayhaven than she’d learned in the past few weeks.

No, he didn’t want pity. He wasn’t the only boy who had been taken into the mountains to be trained to fight. He wasn’t the only boy who had been hidden from the Queens who had been corrupted by Dorothea SaDiablo. And there had been other boys who had suffered far more than he had.

Gray, for instance.

But she saw his quest for a Queen differently because of those words. It hadn’t been as simple as having a Queen who knew Protocol and the Old Ways of the Blood. It had been about having a Queen who could dazzle, who could restore the heart in men weary of fighting—men who might be asked to fight some more in order to restore Dena Nehele and then keep it safe from the Blood in the rest of Terreille.

The Queen was the heart of a land, its moral center.

Theran had needed a heart he could believe in without reservation. He hadn’t found that. Not in her.

That was something she was going to have to think about. But not today. Today she would be a visitor from Kaeleer who was being given a tour of her host’s home village. Today she would be Cassidy instead of a Queen.

Tomorrow was soon enough to think about who she would be in the days ahead.