Chapter 19: Not Like This

Brogan had rehearsed it for two hours at that window, and it still came out wrong.

"I will not take your Grace," he said.

Sorcha sat up in the bed with the sheet held to her chest.

"What?"

"Whatever the Chronicle asks of you. The standing beside me. The light." He kept his eyes on the courtyard. "I will not take it. Not this way."

"What way?"

"The way it is now."

She stared at him for a long moment.

Then she laughed, short and disbelieving.

"You came down a mountain half dead. You killed thirty wolves. You knelt on a stone floor. All of it for the cure, and now you're telling me no?"

"I did not do those things for the cure."

"Then why?"

He turned from the window.

She looked small in the big bed, with the bandage on her side and her braid half undone. His chest hurt looking at her.

"I did them for you," he said.

"That's what a man says who wants something."

"I know it is."

He crossed the room and stopped a pace from the bed.

"That is the whole trouble. Last night your side was cut, your old mate had just been dragged off, and I had knelt for you."

"You were grateful. You were frightened. You were angry at everyone."

"Brogan."

"If you give me your Grace today, I will never know which of those it was."

"You think I can't tell my own mind."

"I think you have been lied to by every person who ever needed something from you."

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