Catherine

As it turns out, Mattias had discovered where I was because they’d capture Will. After much pleading, Will had told them where I was in exchange for freedom if I was willing to give it to him, which, of course, I was. But even when they unchained him and he embraced me tightly, I was on the verge of tears. I didn’t think it possible to mourn for someone hated. I hated Seth. I hated him for being different from all the other men I’d come across. I hated him for being so absolutely perfect sometimes that he made me feel flawed. I hated him for making me fall in love with him then leaving me so suddenly. Seeing the pain…not being able to…Seth…

I wouldn’t let myself cry in front of Will. He didn’t know. I kept my face clear. But he didn’t let me mourn for Seth in peace.

“What happened to Seth, Catherine?” He’d waited until we were on the Meridan ship to confront me, but I could tell that my silence was making him nervous and he wanted to know the answer to this bottled up question.

I took a deep breath, hoping that it would keep my voice from cracking. It didn’t. “He’s…he was…the soldiers…they hurt him…I don’t know…” I curled in on myself, pulling my knees up to my chest, and Will took the hint that I wanted to be left alone. I hadn’t let him hold me too close or kiss me since he’d been released, even though I knew that he would begin to understand why as soon as he discovered what really happened to Seth. There was only one thing that could have made me close up like that and push him away, and that was the son of the Magistrate.

Will left the dark corner that I’d situated myself in to seek out Mattias, probably, and find out just what happened inside the house, since he hadn’t been there, while my uncle had.

As soon as he was gone, I let myself cry. I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I wept even harder than I had after reading my mother’s book, and this time I couldn’t even imagine Seth holding me, which made me cry more. After all the times I’d told myself that I wasn’t like my mother, after going through everything that made us different, we were exactly the same. My life was following the same path that hers had, for I was doomed to be with one man when I loved another. And that other, the very reason for my existence, was now gone forever, just like Lik.

Mattias joined me an hour or so later, after I’d spent all my tears, and he found me lying on the damp floor with my face pressed against it. Not much had changed since the last time I’d sailed and I felt awful, not only because of the rocking waves. My uncle sat himself down next to me after closing the door of my little chamber and he stroked my hair lightly. I guessed he was trying to think of the right thing to say to me after seeing the condition I was in, but there was nothing he could say that would make me feel better.

“Catherine…” He began but was unable to continue until he’d thought for a minute more. “That wasn’t supposed to happen…to the boy in the house, I mean.”

I stayed silent, a fresh wave of images of Seth flowing through my exhausted mind.

“There was no way that we could have known that he was a friend… Although, he was the son of the Magistrate in Equatin, so we might have done ourselves a favor…” Always the militaristic mind, my uncle.

“He is the son of the Magistrate,” I whispered. I hoped that if I told myself that he was still alive enough I would begin to actually believe it. But seeing the pain on his face and the dark blood flowing through his fingers, there was absolutely no way… “Mattias, you were in my mother’s story, you know what happened.” I looked up at him, hoping that he could understand my meaning.

When my bodyguard saw my face he became very pale. “Oh no,” he murmured, touching his chin with his hand. “You mean to say that…?”

I closed my eyes and laid my head back onto the wood beneath me. So now Mattias knew. The only person left to tell was Will, and I wasn’t sure if I could do it.

“Catherine, I am so sorry. Had I but known…” My uncle sighed and I heard him get to his feet. “Hear me now, young one. I will do everything in my power to set this right.” I could tell that he meant what he said, but he, too, believed that my Seth was dead. He left the room then, leaving me to sink deeper into my sorrow.

---

For three days, life felt like it was blurring past me so rapidly that I hardly knew what was happening half the time. When we arrived on the shore of Meridan it looked like the entire country was waiting to greet me. Will took me by the hand and led me onto land, passing through the huge throngs of people that all said things to me, though I barely understood what most of them said. I was so used to the accents of those in Equatin that my own people sounded strange.

“Welcome home, child!”

“Oh, poor dear, you look traumatized. Are you all right?”

“We’ve been sore afraid that you’d been hurt. It’s a relief to see you well.”

I just clung to Will’s arm, drawing away from anyone that reached out to pat my arm or bow to me. I was glad that Will recognized my distress and hurried our short walk to the carriage that waited for us so I could breathe evenly and close my eyes again. He watched me during the entire ride, but instead of being self-conscious I rested my head against the carriage wall and waited for the moment when I could be completely alone in my own room. Arriving at the palace was almost as bad as when we had gotten to the beach, for the entire courtyard was filled with my father’s soldiers and all the palace workers, each waiting to smile at me and feign gladness at my return. The servants had never liked me, probably because I’d used their services without any signs of gratitude at all. I didn’t focus on them because of that, and neither did I look at any of the soldiers. My eyes were focused only on the woman that stood at the foot of the stairs leading up to the doors of my home.

My mother appeared calm, waiting patiently for me to ascend the steps, but I walked without breaking eye contact with her, and I could see her glistening eyes and trembling lip. I reached the top of the stairs and stood a foot from her, just looking at her. We stayed motionless for only a few seconds and then, as if with one heart and one mind, we embraced each other. That was the last thing I remember from that day; letting my mother hold me, sharing the unspoken bond between us. I kept that embrace strong in my mind until I woke up the next morning in my enormous feather bed, dressed in the finest of linens.

There was a note on the table next to me from Will, saying something about meeting him downstairs in the dining hall whenever I was ready. That probably meant for when I was ready to eat, but I took it as when I was ready to live again. I curled back up in bed, pulling the covers up over my face. Then I laid there for two days, neither recognizing anyone that came in to check on me nor eating or drinking anything that was brought to me.

---

“Catherine, this has got to stop!”

“Alad, don’t be so harsh.”

“But you told me to be forceful.”

“Dearest, I love you, but you’re not very good at this.”

“Then you do it, Lanna, because obviously I can’t raise our daughter your way unless you help me along.”

“I’ll take care of this. Go be a king.”

“I’m always a king, Lanna.”

“Well, go act like one for once.”

“That’s harsher than what I said to Catherine!”

“Yes, but you’re my husband, so I have the right to be mean to you. You should have learned that years ago.”

“You know, it’s a good thing you’re my queen. Otherwise the kingdom would have fallen apart as soon as I took the throne.”

“You’re so right, dearest. Now, can you leave me alone with my daughter?”

“Our daughter.”

The door closed and the room was silent. I almost willed myself to fall back asleep and pretend like I hadn’t heard anything my parents had said to each other, but then my mother started speaking to me, completely aware that I was fully awake.

“That Will that you brought back is quite a souvenir, isn’t he? He seems to adore you. Did you know that he’s been sitting outside your door since he brought you here? He’s a very devoted companion and quite handsome at that, but nothing compared to your father. No one can be better than your father, wouldn’t you agree?”

“What about Lik?” I whispered, slowly sliding my blankets off my head so I could look at her. I knew Mattias would have explained to her why I was so beside myself with grief.

She was quietly crying at the foot of my bed, the tears sliding down her cheeks unchecked. It was probably the first time I’d seen my mother cry… It was as if she’d already been thinking about Lik even before I’d asked about him. “You know,” she said, “not a day goes by that I don’t miss that stable boy. Sometimes it annoys your father, when I’m so lost in my thoughts that I hardly notice him.”

“He’s never angry about it?” I thought about how Will would react if he knew about Seth.

My mother smiled and shook her head, still crying. “Not really. He understands… Our marriage was arranged after all.”

My association with Will wasn’t arrangement. I’d fallen in love with him on my own. But would he understand if I loved him only because Seth was gone? “What am I going to do?” I asked my mother, crawling forward on the bed so she could take my head in her arms and hold me close. “I loved him!”

Her reply was simple but it was better than any answer I’d tried to give myself. “Just keep living,” she whispered into my ear. “As long as you have something to keep the sadness at bay, you can survive. And trust me, I know.” She smiled, running her fingers through my hair. “And it helps to talk about him, it really does.” I looked up at her with skepticism and she licked her lips, preparing to explain. “Catherine, when I lost Lik, I thought I’d never be the same. Truthfully, I never was. But Mattias was there for me when no one else could understand. He listened to me as I told him about the love I felt for the stable boy, even though it was useless. It couldn’t bring him back. But it was nice to share the burden a bit.”

I could tell that she expected me to start talking about Seth, but I wasn’t ready. Not even close… I was still trying to deal with the knowledge that I’d never even gotten the chance to kiss him. I’d never be able to, either. “Mother, I can’t. Not yet.”

She nodded, understanding. “When you’re ready, I’ll be here. I’ll help you through this Catherine.” She got up to leave, give my arm one last squeeze.

“Could you…” I began to ask, stopping her steps. “Could you ask Will to come in here? There’s something I have to do.”

My mother smiled and nodded. But I saw the worry in her eyes and felt her distress. She knew what I was about to do. I only wished that I knew…

“Catherine!” Will was beaming as he entered my chamber, coming to a halt at the foot of my bed, resting near me. “I’ve been so worried about you.” He was hesitant to touch me, unsure of my wishes, whether they were similar to what I’d wanted while on the voyage back here or back to when I’d loved him completely. This was good. It would be easier.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, both in answer to his comment and as an apology for what I was about to tell him.

Somehow, as if by a sixth sense, he caught both meanings and took a step backward. He looked so young, younger than I’d ever seen him before, and he reminded me of a child that was about to be told about the death of a pet or that he wasn’t able to go outside that day. Seeing him like this made it that much harder to continue.

“Will…”

He shook his head and stepped back again, his face revealing all the emotion that he didn’t show through words.

I felt tears coming to my eyes again. My voice broke as I repeated his name, still trying to find the right words. “Will, I—”

“You were in love with Seth.” Will turned away from me then, staring out the window. But before he’d hidden his face, I’d seen all the anguish that he was feeling flicker in his eyes. “It was only a matter of time.”

He’d expected me to fall for Seth? “What?” I gasped. Even I hadn’t thought I could fall in love with someone like the Magistrate’s son, so how could he? I looked down at my fingers, trying to figure this out.

“Honestly, Catherine!” At the sound of his angry voice I looked up and he turned his head to stare at me with those eyes of pain. “One only needs to look at him to…” He blinked, gazing upon me, then sighed and looked back out the window. “You’d never find a better—”

“That wasn’t why—”

“Yes, it was,” Will argued. He was forced to look at me again and I could see that it was killing him to do so. “At least at first. You wouldn’t have given him a second glance if he hadn’t looked the way he had.”

I couldn’t argue with this, mostly because it had been true. Maybe not now but then I never would have paid attention to Seth had he not been as gorgeous as he was.

“And Seth…he was just too good of a person for you to hate him for long. I knew that but…I just couldn’t see you…” He clenched his fists and pressed them against his eyes, like he was trying to squeeze the pain out…

I didn’t know how I could continue on with Will hurting like this. “Will, I’m so sorry.” And I really was, but it was impossible to say it sincerely with only those few words. I hadn’t expected to love Seth. In fact, it had been far from my mind up until I’d read my mother’s story and imagined him comforting me. I had never wanted to hurt Will. “If you could only understand…” I gave up, closing my eyes. There was no way to say it. Then I felt a finger wiping my tears and I looked up, finding Will sitting on the edge of the bed and smiling slightly.

His fingers caressed my face gently and he sighed. “You don’t have to explain yourself, Catherine. You fell for him just as I fell for you; without reason or thinking about it. Things like that just happen. And how could he not love you in return?”

I actually had a response to this. “Because I’m an awful person…”

I think my answer made him angry because his reply was a touch louder than before. “Oh, please, Catherine!” he said. “How is it that you are the only one that cannot see how perfect you are?”

Not once—not in eighteen years—had anyone sincerely told me I was perfect. I’d been told so hundreds of times by complete strangers that knew nothing about me, so I doubted that they actually meant it. And I had told myself the same thing countless times without believing it. Yet here was a man whom I’d hurt, almost to the point of never being able to heal again, who thought I was perfect. And he really did think so because Will never lied. Not like this. It was one of those things that had made me love him.

“You…you think I’m perfect?” It was still too difficult to truly believe that he felt that way, especially since I was so far from perfection that it was almost funny.

Will chuckled. “Absolutely.”

“Will, will you forgive me?” I closed my eyes again and waited for the sting of his negative response, for I knew that no one could possibly forgive me for what I’d done.

“Catherine, there’s nothing to forgive. So you fell in love with someone else. I can’t stop that and neither can you. It’s just a part of life that no one can avoid. Besides, it was only a matter of time before you realized how worthless I am.” His hands left my face and I heard his boots crossing the room.

“Will, wait!” I couldn’t end it like this. He turned and watched me expectantly. “You were my rain.” I watched his eyebrows draw together as he became confused, so I found a better way to say this. “Like that book in your house says, you gave me hope. Without you, I never would have broken through the clouds and brought my soul to life.”

Then he smiled a genuine grin, bowed slightly, and left the room, forever out of my life.

---

It took me a further four days to adjust back to palace life without breaking down into tears whenever I saw a male of any kind. Another five days after that, though, I could pass even the dark-haired servants with only a minor skip in my heart which quickly set itself right. And yet, when I wandered the halls, my mind would travel back across the ocean to Equatin. There was a house there with a book that had a page marked.

I’d found my mother’s book in my room and quickly flipped to that page that Seth had been about to read and I read it a hundred times. Sometimes it was the only thing that could get me out of bed in the morning and convince me to face another day. I wasn’t really sure why it helped me, but perhaps it was because I’d never been able to tell Seth that I loved him. And after reading the short passage from ‘Simplicity’ so many times that I’d memorized it, I changed the words to fit my own life and spoke them aloud through my tears, wishing I had said them to Seth before… “From the moment I first saw you in the tent, struggling to find a way to survive, I was absolutely enraptured. You’re not like Meridan men, not at all, and you’re not like the people I’ve met here, either. Seth, you’re absolutely perfect and I have never met anyone like you. Seth, I love you.” Saying this to myself made me realize, somehow, that I needed to talk about him. So I summoned my mother to join me in the garden, where’d I’d placed myself in an effort to distract my mind. Though it hadn’t worked, I felt better in the fresh air than in the stuffy palace.

“I knew you’d be ready,” my mother whispered to me as she approached where I sat on the ground in the midst of a hundred pale blue forget-me-nots, the exact same color as Seth’s eyes. She knelt next to me gracefully and smiled.

I picked up a flower and spun it in my fingers. “You know,” I muttered, “I hated him. I almost killed him once because he made me so angry. But in some ways he was absolutely perfect. He knew when I needed to be alone or when I needed company.”

“What was his name?” my mother asked.

As I spoke, I let the flower drop into my lap. “Seth.” I smiled because it was the first time I’d been able to say his name without even a hint of a tear. I was already beginning to cope. “I think, though, he hated me, too.” I could almost hear his voice contradicting this statement.

“I never hated you,” he would have said. “You just really made me angry sometimes.”

My mother laughed. “There was a time when Lik was so angry with me for calling him a peasant that he wouldn’t even look at me.”

“I did worse,” I replied with a chuckle. “I terrified him so much that he went out and got so drunk that he could barely stand.”

In my mind, my fictitious Seth argued this, too. “You didn’t terrify me,” I imagined. “I was so annoyed by you that I needed anything to get away from you.”

I sighed. Maybe imagining him so strongly wasn’t a good thing, because now I was missing him almost as much as I had for the two days that I’d lain in bed without eating or drinking. And his voice wouldn’t stop speaking to my mind, telling me that it was okay to miss him.

“Cat, it isn’t good to cry so much. It makes your eyes turn red and then you aren’t nearly as beautiful. It’s fine to miss me, just don’t hurt yourself.”

“Catherine, I’ll see you inside for lunch, okay?” My mother got to her feet with another smile and left me alone in the garden to be tortured by these thoughts.

I grabbed a handful of flowers and started to shred them in my fingers, hardly aware that I was doing it, and my eyes started to spring the cursed tears that I’d successfully hidden away for nearly two minutes.

“Have you been crying for me this entire time?”

I almost nodded, but then I remembered that I was only asking myself this, after all, and that it was only Seth’s voice that I used. The flowers were in tiny pieces in my lap now and my fingers were green from the leaves but I didn’t care. I would just wash them before I went to lunch. And yet even when I distracted myself by thinking about what I’d have to eat, Seth continued to talk to me. Only now I wasn’t sure why I was thinking it.

“Cat, this isn’t your imagination.”

I froze. This was too far. As soon as my head realized that this wouldn’t satisfy my heart, I’d be sorry. I took a deep breath.

“Are you ever going to turn around or will I have to convince you some other way?”

I couldn’t breathe, now not sure whether this was fantasy or the actual thing. And then I felt him, sliding his hands down my arms as he pressed his face into my neck.

“You have no idea how much I’ve missed you,” he whispered into my ear.

My heart literally exploded and I spun around where I sat, throwing my arms around him. “Seth!”

“Ow!” he grunted and I could tell that he almost pushed me away, though he didn’t. I released him, though, to discover the problem, but he was smiling painfully. “Do not, whatever you do, let go of me,” he said frantically. “I could never watch you leave again. Just…try to be a little more careful.”

I exhaled quickly, which probably wasn’t smart because now I had no air in my lungs, and took his face in my hands, running my fingers along the thin scar on his cheek.. “Oh, Seth! I love you.” Having said those vital three words, I leaned forward and kissed him.

There was absolutely nothing greater in the world than that. There couldn’t be. I felt like the huge hole in my heart that had been torn there as I was dragged away from the house filled in with every passing second, like all I’d needed to have to heal me was Seth. I’d already known that, but now that he was here, everything was right. Though I had no idea how he was alive or how he’d come to be in my garden, I didn’t care. As long as he was here kissing me, nothing else mattered.

“Cat, how could…you believe that I…would die instead…of being with you?” I was making it very difficult for him to speak to me because I kept pressing my lips against his but somehow I understood.

I pulled away and stared at him. “How? Seth, you were dying. I saw it.”

“Oh, so you get to speak but I can’t?” He ignored me and kissed me again. “I’m the injured one, I should get special treatment.”

“Seth.” I placed my hand over his mouth and he raised his eyebrows. But he seemed to understand what I wanted because he waited patiently. “Please. How are you alive?”

He smiled beneath my palm and when I removed my hand he answered, “Your uncle is the most amazing man I have ever met.” He glanced over his shoulder and I followed his gaze, finding Mattias leaning against a tree watching us.

I smiled in gratitude, realizing that I’d never given my uncle the thanks he deserved for protecting me for my entire life, and he nodded slightly in reply, mouthing the words, “I promised,” before turning around and leaving us alone in the garden.

“Catherine?”

I turned my head to look at Seth and I found him gazing at me seriously, something I’d never seen him do. It actually frightened me, seeing his expression, and I felt the blood slowly start to drain from my face.

“Cat,” he whispered to me, “I can’t bear to part from you. I love you from the bottom of my heart and I always will.” The Magistrate’s son grabbed both of my hands and lifted each to his lips to kiss them. “Will you promise to be mine forever?”

I embraced him and rested my head against his chest, listening to his strong and steady heartbeat. “Forever,” I promised.