Sheriya turned the colour of a ripe tomato in approximately one second.
"L-love?" She stuttered the word as though I had said something deeply scandalous, and then buried her face in both hands.
"Is that what this is?" she murmured, barely audible, to her own palms.
My hearing caught it anyway.
"Tell me what you feel," I said, "and I'll give you a diagnosis."
The smile on my face was impossible to fully suppress. Young love was, objectively, the most endearing thing in the world, and I was not going to apologise for finding it so.
Sheriya lowered her hands with the visible effort of someone deciding to be brave about something.
"Well," she began, somewhat cautiously. "My heart beats faster when he's nearby. My stomach does something — I don't know how else to describe it except that it feels like I swallowed a great many butterflies simultaneously. And when I look into his eyes I tend to lose track of where I was in whatever I was doing." She described all of this with the absolute seriousness of someone submitting symptoms to a physician, which made the impulse to laugh almost physically painful to suppress.
'She is completely in love.'
"Go on," I said, keeping my voice even.
"But it isn't only that." She folded her hands in her lap, thinking. "When I'm with him I feel more comfortable than anywhere else. I can tell him things I wouldn't say to anyone — things I keep quiet about because I don't know how others would receive them. He doesn't judge. He always takes my side, even when he probably shouldn't." A pause. "And he keeps his promises. He has never once said he would do something and then failed to do it."
This was no longer the flutter of a crush. This was something considerably more settled — the particular quality of love that has had time to grow roots.
I was genuinely glad I had not laughed.
"How did you meet?" I asked.
She was quiet for a moment, considering whether to tell it. I watched her decide in favour of it, and waited.
"A long while ago, when I was very young, I lived in a forest with my mother. My mother was human — she had fallen in love with a snake shifter, my father, and had followed him into the forest to be with him. But his interest in her didn't last. He left eventually, not long after I was born, and she was alone in the forest with an infant and nowhere she wanted to go back to. She stayed. The other shifters who lived there helped her out of something between pity and respect for her determination, and she adapted — perhaps more completely than anyone expected her to." A small pause. "That's where I met Phoenix. His father was a fox shifter, one of the families that had made the forest their home. We were young children and we became friends the way young children do, quickly and without reasoning. There were many of us back then. The shifters had large families and the forest was full."
The gloomy quality arrived in her expression like a cloud crossing the sun.
"My mother had never told anyone where she came from," she continued. "What she hadn't told anyone was that she was a nobleman's daughter, betrothed to a prince before she ever ran away. The prince wanted her back. He was willing to go to considerable lengths to achieve that." She paused. "The forest was protected — a magical boundary that refused entry to anyone carrying ill intent toward it or its inhabitants. He couldn't get in. So he set it on fire from outside and waited for people to come out."
The fire came into her voice as a quality more than a description — a particular flatness that people develop when they are recounting something they have had to live inside.
"It rained fire from the sky. Many shifters died in the burning before they could reach the boundary. The ones who made it out were met by the prince's army." She closed her eyes briefly. "It was a massacre. When my mother finally fled with me and Phoenix — his entire family had died in the fire — we were caught. The prince's soldiers separated my mother from us and were preparing to kill us where we stood."
She stopped.
"I can still hear her voice," she said. "The way she sounded in that moment, knowing that everything that had happened had begun with her, and now her child was going to die in front of her because of it. We believed it too. Phoenix and I held onto each other and waited."
She took a breath.
"And then our rescuer arrived. Prince Zaren."
I stilled.
"He was twelve years old," she said. "The crown prince of Furha had not yet been named, so he still used his royal title. He had enough magic already to melt the blade that was about to come down on us." A small, wondering pause, even now. "He just looked at the prince — his brother — and said, very calmly: 'Brother, please don't kill them. I want them as my playmates.' And the prince laughed and ruffled his hair and said, 'as you wish.' And that was that."
She looked down at her hands.
"He took us to the palace and we grew up there alongside him. Olga was his nanny then. Ivanna was a small girl the same age as the rest of us — we were all seven. I was allowed to see my mother occasionally. And Phoenix—" she stopped, and something complicated moved through her expression. "I was afraid, once I was old enough to understand what had happened, that he would resent me. That knowing what my mother's disappearance had caused would make him hate me, even a little. I couldn't have blamed him." She shook her head. "When I asked him, he looked at me with complete confusion and said: 'What does that have to do with you?' And he didn't leave, when he could have. He has never left." She turned to look at me again. "We have known each other since we were seven years old. Is it so strange that I love him?"
It was not strange at all. It was, if anything, one of the most natural things I had heard.
But the shape of the story had left something sitting in me that had not been there before — a slow, specific anger, the kind that comes from hearing about something unjust that has gone unaddressed.
Sheriya apparently read it in my face before I arranged my expression.
She let out a quiet sigh.
"He never paid for it," she said, before I could ask. Her voice had a flatness to it that spoke of long acceptance of an answer she had never wanted. "The prince who burned the forest and murdered those people. He was named crown prince of Furha. He rules it now. My mother is his consort." She looked at the fire rather than at me. The resentment in her face was old and familiar, the specific look of someone who has carried something a long time without finding anywhere to put it down.
The crown prince of Furha.
The next king of Furha.
I sat with that, and with the precise thought that followed it, which I chose not to say aloud — but which was clear and simple and required very little additional consideration.
That man needed to die. And if no one else was going to attend to the matter, I was prepared to consider it a personal errand.