They stood in silence for a moment before he motioned for her to follow him again. This time she didn’t take his hand, nor did he offer it. He led her to one of the tall spires still intact and shrouded in a green veil of ivy. Cededa wrenched the warped door open, snapping brittle hinges with his efforts.

He took her hand, and they climbed a stone staircase that spiraled endlessly upward. When they finally stopped, Imogen leaned against the wall and tried not to breathe in great gulps of dusty air.

“What are we doing?” she wheezed on a thin note. She scowled to see Cededa hadn’t even broken a sweat from the arduous climb.

He opened another door. Light poured into the stairwell’s gloom, along with fresh air. Imogen followed him out onto a balcony and gasped at the sight before her.

Tineroth lay in the afternoon sun, a relic of broken splendor awash in the pale, filtered light of a cloudy sky. From her rooftop view, she saw the green crown of the surrounding forest with its strange trees and hidden occupants. Beyond the woods, the deep crevasse with its ribbon of river.

As if he heard her unspoken question, Cededa spoke. “Once I took back the key, the bridge disappeared. When you return home, I’ll summon it again so you can cross.”

Despair rose inside her at his words. Imogen tried to brush it away and failed. She should be glad to leave. She’d be free of her bane and could return to a world populated by others, where there was noise and market days and festivals, rainstorms and changes of seasons and the renewed hope of a normal life.

None of that seemed to matter as much at the moment. The king who’d become her savior and her lover wouldn’t accompany her into that new life.

“Why did you bring me to your chambers yesterday, Sire?”

He stayed quiet so long, she didn’t think he’d answer. “So that one living person might know I was once a man. Flawed and incomplete, but still a man like any other. I bled; I loved; I warred; I married and sired children. I am more than just the Undying King of Tineroth. I am also less.

“When I take you back across the bridge and leave you on the other side, I hope I will leave a woman with a knowledge beyond the stories told, even beyond the intimacy we now share between us.”

His words brought tears to her eyes, and she wiped them away. “Why are we here now?”

His measuring gaze held her in place. “You tell me, Imogen.”

She looked back over the city, its silent streets and empty courtyards. “So that I might see the beauty that once was.” A broken city, abandoned, empty and still regal. “Tineroth is your true wife.”