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Aotrou curses himself as he flees the forest.
The witch, the fae witch who has tricked him and used him, and who has only been able to do so because of Aotrou’s own mistakes, laughs behind him. Her laughter fills the air and echoes between the trees as he rides, driving him to ever more desperate lengths until finally he hears the church bells ringing.
He does not know how long it has been since he last stepped foot in his lands - a week? A month? He does not allow him to think of any more doubts, as his wife comes flying down the steps, skirt lifted into her hands as she runs.
She would not have done that if he had only been gone a week, he knows.
He catches her as she trips, and through her tears learns the truth. He has been gone ten months, and she had feared he was gone forever.
The fae’s laughter still echoes in his ears as she leads him up the steps to where their children sleep in cradles by their bed.
He delays telling her the truth of where he has been gone, until finally she looks at him and he cannot lie anymore.
The story comes out in fits and broken starts, until finally she is crying at the news of what he had done for their children to be born. He has not yet broken the news of where he has been and what price he has paid, and he can only expect her reaction to that will be even worse.
For how could she forgive such, which she has forsaken his vow to her to return to her?
But she only turns white, white as one destinied for the grave, and again he fears that this has been too much, that she will leave him alone.
Itroun turns instead, and asks him with a shaking voice if he only had lain with this fae witch, or if there is more that he must tell her as well.
He takes a breath, hearing the fae’s cackling over the sound of Itroun’s breath. Then he tells her of how he had been kept in the cave until the bastard born son of the fae and he had been born.
Itroun rants and raves at him, and for a second he fears the witch was right. But Itroun proves herself better than the fae thought, and better than Aotrou can now admit he deserves, and her rant turns more to questions and then to worries of how they can protect their children - and how, she asks at last, do they tell them of their half-fae brother so that he cannot be used against them, and them against him?
All he can think as he stares into Itroun’s eyes, as their son and daughter babble away in their cradles, is that he can no longer hear the fae’s cold laughter at those words.
Perhaps he has not lost everything, after all.