A movement of shadow beside a shapely cedar startled Karigan, and she discerned a Weapon there, standing in a watchful posture. It meant the king must be nearby, and eagerly she searched the garden with her gaze, only to be disappointed.

“I wonder what—” she began.

Estora, who had also started to speak at the same time, said, “I’ve had—”

They glanced at one another and laughed.

When the laughter subsided, Estora indicated that Karigan should speak first. Karigan nodded toward the Weapon and said, “I was just wondering what he was guarding. I don’t see the king nearby.”

Estora’s buoyancy faltered. “He is not assigned to the king.”

“A tomb guard then? What would he be doing here?”

Estora turned in her seat to face Karigan directly. “He is not a tomb guard. He has been assigned to—to watch me.” Her words flowed now in a freshet. “The king has agreed to my father’s contract of marriage. I’m to be King Zachary’s queen.”

Karigan could only stare at her. Her world narrowed to just the two of them and the patch of garden they sat in. Everything else vanished, failed to exist.

Already burdened by other revelations, Karigan had to turn Estora’s words over in her mind until she comprehended their meaning. When she did so, everything she thought she understood about herself in relationship to the king tilted off balance like a foundering ship in a gale, and she had to grab hold of the edge of the bench lest she slide off.

Estora was to be King Zachary’s queen.

A cargo hold of dreams and possibilities tore loose of their anchorings and rammed into her, and she found herself incredulous—not so much over Estora’s announcement, though it in itself was stunning—but by the dawning realization that her feelings for King Zachary had sometime, somehow, surpassed mere admiration and attraction.

I . . . am I in love with him? She had hidden it from even herself, made it a secret, a secret she had not wished to admit, for she knew it was an impossible situation to love one like him, one who was a king and so far out of reach for a mere commoner. How could she not have seen it?

And how could she not have seen how it made perfect sense that Estora would become Zachary’s wife? It was like a piece of a puzzle fitting neatly into its space. Lord Coutre wanted to marry off his daughter as advantageously as possible. At the same time, the nobles were exerting pressure on King Zachary to marry and provide the realm with a heir. Politically? It was the perfect situation, the proper fit. Only Karigan’s heart did not work in such political or logical ways.

Somewhere in that secret place in the back of her mind, she had hoped, despite it all, there would be a way that her commoner status could be overlooked, that the breach of rank wouldn’t divide her and King Zachary after all. She almost laughed at herself, a cruel laugh, at how childish it all now seemed. How did she even know the king was interested in her in that way?

“King Zachary is a good man,” Estora said. “He is a good man, but it shall not be a marriage made of love.” She shook her head and looked down, the liquid gold that was her hair flowing down her shoulders. “I’ve loved only F’ryan, and having known love . . . it is hard. This marriage, it is to fulfill a contract only.”

Not a marriage made of love . . .

Unreasonably, hope surged anew in Karigan’s breast, that there might still be a chance for her. She fought with it, wrestled it down. Emotions of every kind pummeled her and she felt as if she might drown in stormy seas.

The lilting call of a chickadee, absurdly cheerful under the circumstances, brought Karigan back to herself in time to hear what Estora had to say next.

“I envy you.”

Karigan almost laughed out loud. What was there to envy? Her evil heritage? The battles and deaths of companions? Wounds that scarred her flesh and mind? Who was Estora to speak of envy? She led the life of a lady with servants to see to her every comfort. Her life was genteel, and lacked hard labor and danger, while Karigan’s meant blood, sweat, and calluses.

And Lady Estora was going to marry King Zachary.

“I envy you,” Estora continued, “because you are free—free to choose what you will do with your life; free to marry whom you will. But I must live a narrow life only to further the honor of my clan. I must obey the will of my father. It’s what I was born to do.”

Free? Karigan wanted to scream at Estora, tell her how she’d been forced into the life of a Green Rider, that because she was bound by magic, she wasn’t free at all.

“How can you . . .” Karigan began, but her throat was so constricted it came out as a croak. “How can you have known F’ryan and say that to a Green Rider?”

But Estora’s sad eyes pleaded for understanding. She had once loved a Green Rider, an affair forbidden because she was a noblewoman and he was a commoner. Had they been discovered, Estora would have been cast out by her clan and forced to fend for herself in the wide world, something her upbringing had not equipped her to do.

Yet in the end, there had been a far greater sacrifice, the death of F’ryan Coblebay, her one great love taken from her by two black arrows in his back. Because of Karigan’s connection to F’ryan it seemed Estora tried to reach him through her, seeking comfort, and maybe forgiveness.

Estora gazed off into the distance, a tear in the corner of her eye. “He was more free of spirit than anyone I knew. He embraced the bonds placed on him, then broke them.”