Chapter Text
Numair hadn't slept more than an hour the whole night.
It had been a few months since their momentous (and disastrous) trip to Carthak. After a few interminable weeks of telling and re-telling their stories for the disapproving scribes and bureaucrats of the court, Daine and Numair had been set free at last at the behest of the Duke of Tarmal, who requested their help investigating a series of spidren attacks on his easternmost fort. Eager to leave the contemptuous atmosphere of the Capital at last, Daine and Numair had happily adapted back into their old role of traveler-companions, riding by day and camping at night as they began the two-week journey to Tarmal.
Now they were camped on the side of a lake at the far Eastern edge of the realm. It was a night like any other, except that when a rogue squirrel scavenging through her bedroll for crumbs woke Daine at dawn, and she turned on her side to greet the new friend, she realized that her two-legged companion was gone.
She rose and walked to find him sitting by the edge of the lake, staring out at the horizon.
"Numair?"
He seemed distant; she doubted he wanted anything but to be alone with his thoughts. She sat down cross-legged next to him.
"I'm here when you're ready."
His gaze flashed over to her, and he smiled sadly. "You can go back to sleep, magelet. I'm fine."
"You don't look fine," the girl retorted. She took his hand in hers. "You can talk to me, you know. With all the questioning, we still haven't had a chance to talk directly since Car..."
He sighed.
"since all of it."
Numair looked down at his lap, and Daine felt the guilt of knowing that had started in the aviary begin to creep up her spine again. It was an itch, and she was tired of dealing with it.
"Numair..." she began. "You should know that I know."
That got his attention—to some extent. Distractedly, he asked, "What do you know?"
"I have an idea about you and Ozorne."
He turned to her. "An idea?"
"I'm attuned to these things, Numair. You know the quarrels I heard about, living with my mother. The women who came to her for advice. I know when someone is hurting in love."
His body tensed all at once—and then, just as quickly, she watched his muscles relax a shade too far, as if he was trying for normalcy. He said nothing.
"I imagine you loved him when you were in school. Two powerful mages, your powers keeping you apart from the rest of your class, close together. And then when he...changed....you didn't know how to stop loving him."
Numair's eyes were glazed over, staring fixedly at a spot on the lake where a few dragonflies overhung a cattail.
"What I can't figure out is if he ever loved you."
The man turned to the girl at his side, and his voice came out more shakily than he meant it to, false-stolid. "I'm not sure what led you to that conclusion."
Now it was Daine's turn to sigh. Again she placed her fingers on his wrist.
He hated when she touched him like this. Or, maybe "hated" was the wrong word. It made his stomach dip, and he knew the right thing to do would be to move away from her touch, and yet he never did.
She felt him tense again. "Numair, you don't need to keep this from me. I already know."
He turned fully to face her. The glaze in his eyes had faded away in favor of something else—an alarm continually ringing behind closed doors, an ongoing silent panic.
"You've been years and years without letting anyone in on this. Don't you think you deserve a break? It might be good for you to have this all told."
He lifted his head to catch her gaze, his eyes unreadable.
"Who knows, besides you?"
She squeezed his wrist and hand. "Just me. No one else saw it. I promise."
His voice still shook. "You're sure."
"I'm sure. If they knew, you would have heard of it by now."
In an instant he knew she was right. If Alanna or Duke Baird had figured out his secret, they would have accosted him before the boats had sailed a furlong from the Carthaki shores. But Daine alone had left him a month to gather his thoughts, only addressing the subject when she saw him rise from a nightmare, pulling away from their camp, to contemplate his past alongside the dragonflies by the lake at dawn. Gods, he was grateful to have her. And gods, what he wouldn’t give to have this new creeping feeling he felt around her, like that old adolescent infatuation, leave his body before it saw the light of day. Nothing good would come of this; nothing ever had.
He looked back at his lap, thankful of the wards around the camp that would stop his voice from carrying. In this moment it was only the two of them. Ceding to her assumptions, he asked, "So what do you know?"
"I know you loved him. I know you still...I imagine he knew it then, and now. But I don't know him enough to know how he felt. Were you and Ozorne truly involved, back then?
Numair's eyes were glassy now. He squeezed her hand, still looking determinedly at his lap. "He put you in a cage."
"We're not talking about me."
Numair lifted his gaze to hold hers, and with a breath he let it out at last. "I did love him. It was ill-advised.”
Daine kept silent, her hand holding his.
“We were lovers. The two of us...We were barely teenagers when we met. We were captivated by the spells we read about; we spent nights researching all of the obscure olden magic, ancient spells we might bring back to life.
"With Varice, we worked to open the throne for him. But meanwhile it was always him and I, late in the night, exploring the magic...One night I was—coy, I asked him if I could try an anti-inhibition spell. We let our guards down, and he kissed me, and he—"
Numair shifted, uncomfortable. “I've never told anyone before."
Daine nodded. "I know."
Numair was reddening—a strange sight for the swarthy, usually confident older man.
Daine relaxed her grip on his hand. "You don't have to tell me what you don't want.”
Numair crossed his legs as well, and fixed his gaze on the patch of grass at his feet. "I loved him. I loved him, I felt about him a way I hadn't felt about anyone before then. But we knew we couldn't let anyone know. He was….adamant, that it all had to stay between us. Everything we did was behind wards and closed doors. Obsessive. If anyone had found out……we had worked for years to for him to be the heir to the throne. To restore his family to their rightful place. If anyone knew what we were doing—how we were with each other—that all would have been taken away. And it would have been catastrophic for us; Carthak isn’t...permissive on those sorts of things. And so he became more and more paranoid.”
Numair looked up, and held Daine’s gaze.
“He didn’t want me to drink at parties, in case I let anything slip. He told me to date other women for show—and I turned half-heartedly to Varice, who deserved better than that—to distract attention from our closeness. He hated that I was attracted to women, too, while he couldn’t imagine a life with one, even when holding the Throne would require it. That jealousy ate at him, the knowledge that I could live a normal life with a woman, pretend women were all I ever cared for, when he couldn’t. And loving him was good, for the first few years—revelatory, and new, and raw, and powerful, but by the end….It was like Onua and her husband, without the hitting. Abuse with words, with feelings, rather than physical strength.”
Daine watched his face, absorbing, blue-grey eyes filled with compassion.
“When we were to graduate, I asked him what he expected.” Numair looked out at the lake once more. “Was I to be his personal mage, his secret, his concubine, while he ruled the nation? By then I knew the relationship wasn’t healthy. I told him it was over, and he took it poorly, of course. He worried I would spill out his secret. And you know the rest.”
She did. The rest was Thaki dungeons, guards and torture, ropes and chains that left Numair with marks on his torso and nightmares to this day. And now she knew that the pain went deeper than the physical—that everything had been done to him on his former lover’s orders.
“I’ve never told anyone that.” Finally, he looked into her eyes. Searched them.
“It couldn’t have been easy.” She squeezed his hand. Then, on a whim, she scooted over, leaning in to put her head on shoulder, and wrapped her arms around his neck. She nuzzled into his collarbone and held him still.
“Thank you for telling me.”
Numair looked down, breathing heavily, and, after a moment, pressed his nose into her hair and kissed her head as lightly as he could.
“Thank you for seeing it.”