Page 60 of A Thousand Burning Ravens

“You know you could not do the job half as well as I can,” Bryar taunts, repeating the motion again and again until she is on the brink of igniting.

Then, something at his fingertip’s fizzles and Myla yelps in pain as he sears her. She is inclined to giggle and keep going, but Bryar pushes her off of him.

“Myla, stop I—”

Myla freezes, slightly horrified. “It is alright,” she insists. “What happened?” She swallows hard, meeting his tense gaze. “Are you ok?” She looks at the wound on his ribcage and then steps out of the bath.

Bryar stands, drying himself quickly before stepping into his trousers. He then turns to face her. His features are unreadable, stone-cold stoicism with a hint of suppressed deflation as he looks down at his hands, which seem to still burn with passion. With an angry sigh, he dries his hair in a towel and pulls a tunic over his head before speaking. “Do you know what today is?”

His question stops her in her tracks, her brain frantically sifting through any important dates that pop into her head, trying to understand what could be causing his sudden rush of anxiety.

“No, Bryar,” she responds uncomfortably, wrapping her arms around her chest. “I do not know what today is.”

He nods slowly, biting his lower lip in frustration. “Myla. Today is the day, six years ago, that I watched you walk down the aisle to Caius.”

Myla flinches, the memory hitting her like a wall. She briefly wonders how she could have forgotten, but that question is quickly replaced by another. “And that is causing this? This response?”

He shakes his head. “Not exactly. I have tried to ignore the gnawing for hours now, and the thought I can not shake is this: when I help you win your kingdom back, and everything goes back to normal, where does that leave me? Does it leave me just your captain again, and the man you welcome to your bed under the cover of night? Am I to return to the barracks and lie to my friends when they ask where I was, because I can not even tell them that I am in love with the queen? Will I inevitably be pushed to the side when you remarry a titled man? Will I stand guard by your chambers then still? While I want to ignore it all and just enjoy simplicity with you here, for now, I am afraid we are setting ourselves up to repeat history.”

Stunned, Myla stands silent and dripping wet on the floor, her wet hair clinging to her face. Raw emotions bared naked in the space between them, Myla finds her words tangled together in the mess of questions she feels unequipped to handle. She opens her mouth to speak but no answer arrives, only confusion. Confusion and hurt.

“I can not do it again, Myla.” His eyes narrow and lines form across his brow in hopelessness. “Do you know what the guard on duty who stood by your door the night of your wedding came downstairs and told us at breakfast?”

Myla swallows hard, dreading his answer. Her eyes glisten with tears, hoping he will not say it aloud, but knowing their silence and dancing around the topic for years has led to this moment. She has known at some point, he would say something. Men like Bryar always say something.

“He told us: ‘I do not think the new queen had a good first night.’ I could hardly hide the horror on my face, Myla. All these men, who had no idea we had a history before you arrived at the palace, looking at me, wondering why I threw a tumbler of ale across the room!” His shoulders shake suddenly and his voice breaks with the following words: “I stood guard by your door night after night, as was my duty, and I listened to you cry as he raped you, and no amount of asking Elsa to talk to you could drag the truth from you.”

There it is.

The word she has avoided.

The one she has renamed as betrayal or duty. Myla lets out a sob, covering her mouth and shaking her head fiercely. “Do not say that word, Bryar. Do not say that word! That is not what happened.”

He steps closer, his eyes gleaming with tears and his mouth set in a firm line, fighting a rush of emotions. “Why will you not talk about it? Why will you not admit what really happened? You spend so much time defending his memory, but I knew the whole time. And I would be lying if I said I did not sigh a breath of relief the day he died because I knew he was done hurting you.

“Elsa felt the same way, you know. I once had to stop her from slipping poison into the king’s nightcap.”

His hands close around her shoulders, pulling her shaking body against his. “I can not do that ever again, Myla. If you tell me, at the end of this, you will return to that palace, and I will simply be your lover again—I can not continue like this. It is not fair to you, and it is not fair to me. I would rather love you from a distance than lose myself in a half-truth.”

Myla looks up at him, raising a hand to his face to wipe a tear with her thumb. “I will not remarry, Bryar. I may not be able to marry you; that would start an entirely different war. But I will not marry anyone. I will always be only yours.”

Her hand lingers and brushes against the stubble of his cheek. Words she has ached to tell him for years finally fall from her lips. “I love you.”

Words which have been absent in the space between them for so long, though quenching, fix nothing.

The room stills and for an agonizing stretch of time, Bryar holding her against him in what feels like a final embrace. “I love you.” His following words are soft whispers, as though he is afraid of what damage they will do if spoken at full volume. “Myla . . . I am not content to live half a life anymore. I wish I still had that in me, but I feel there is more to my life than supporting yours in secret. I will always be your greatest advocate. I will always be the person watching you succeed and smiling when you do, because to me, that is happiness. But I will not do it in shadows, afraid of someone seeing me smile too much when you are near, afraid that my eyes will linger too long on a woman who is not mine and that will be noticed.” He swallows, his throat bobbing as he puts his emotions away.

“I will help you win this war. I promised to keep you alive and see this through until the end, but when it is all done, when I have seen you restored to your throne, I will resign as your Captain of the Queen’s Guard, and I will be coming to seek my full potential here.”

Myla stiffens, pulling away from him slowly, not daring to meet his gaze for the blinding tears that drip freely down her cheeks, burning what feels like eternal trails of grief into her skin. Instead, she wipes the tears with her palms, breathing deeply to steady her pulse.

“I never talked about what Caius did, because I thought if I did not say the words aloud, then it would stay tucked neatly behind closed doors. It would not be real. Because those are the only times I ever felt unsafe with him, and in truth, I understood where his desperation came from. I could rationalize it away, until I convinced myself what he did was not truly wrong. I could even smile at him when we were not in his bedroom. The Caius who wanted an heir was a different person than the Caius who walked the gardens or shared a meal with me. He was good to me in daylight. He made me feel like I had a friend in him, until it was time for bed . . . time to make an heir.

“I did not want to be seen as the poor girl forced to marry a cruel king, Bryar. I had already lost so much; my own self-respect was too much to sacrifice because he was desperate.” She touches her belly, thankful something good and pure and innocent will come of his abuse.

“If this is your final choice, Bryar, I respect it, and I will love you from afar, as you will me. But I will not spend another day holding you back.” She meets his gaze now, a trembling across her body screaming at her to say anything but this. “You have stood in this space with me long enough now. It is time for you to live for you.”

Myla presses her lips closed in finality and turns her back, allowing him to exit the room without a further word before she erupts in a shudder of sobs. Sobs for the life she feels her father robbed her from with Bryar, and sobs for the life she experienced within the palace.