Page 19
The first line gutted him.
Blaidd,
There are words I have pressed into my chest for years. Perhaps I never spoke them aloud because I knew they would fall into the same abyss where everything else I offered you disappeared.
Some people are lucky. You were lucky once…with Isolde. To find that kind of love, that kind of certainty; a lifemate who saw you fully, and whom you saw in return.
Others are not so fortunate.
Some of us find ourselves bound by a connection that was never meant to be salvation, only endurance. A bond that does not warm, but constricts like a noose until I struggled to breathe. One that spells not love, but a slow, grinding kind of doom.
As a girl, I watched my parents, my uncles. I grew up listening to the ease of true lifemates—the way they moved together without effort, the way laughter travelled through the open doorways of their homes. When Lisna and Maxen found each other, I believed without question that my life was going to be the same.
At school, I studied the Bók Meyjunnar—the Book of the Maiden. Page after page of virtues required of a wife. Patience in the face of anger. Sacrifice for the greater good. Silence to keep the pairing. Poise when all you want to do is scream.
I remember being confused even then. There was no book for my brother, no ledger of virtues demanded of the male.
I was not a very happy girl.
Stubbornly, I wrote my own once, half in defiance, half in hope. I called it Maka-bók—the Book of the Male. Perhaps I already understood what it would take years for my stupid, slow heart to accept—that virtues must exist on both sides for a bond to be worthy of survival.
I am sorry you lost Isolde. I truly am.
But she is dead.
While I am alive—trapped in an existence not very different from death.
For eight years, I have mourned the loss of a dream. I cried until there were no tears left, until my grief has turned into nothingness. And now I finally accept that my situation will never change unless I changed it myself. Even though our separation might kill me, it is preferable to the limbo we are both fated to live out.
I am leaving to follow another dream—one that had to replace the old one. I have let go of the hope of a lifemate who sees only me. Of children who love me without suspicion or contempt. Of stories told by the fire. Of grandchildren who would beg to hear how their grandmother once shielded their grandfather in a challenge.
I am not ashamed to admit that there were moments—dark, shameful moments—when I wished you had followed Isolde into death. That you had given me at least the chance of some small happiness with someone else.
This wall of indifference took years to build. The rune on your arm was the final brick that broke my back at long last.
I wondered then if there was something defective in me. Why was I not even allowed to bear a child who would be mine alone—one soul in this world that belonged to me without condition.
But make no mistake, Blaidd, I have done my best.
Have you done yours?
Your children, who once clung to me, now look at me as though I am something unnatural. A creature sent to serve, not belong. In their eyes, I rank lower than a feral wolf.
I will return—because I do not yet know what distance will do to our bond. My hope is that it will destroy what little remains of it. Perhaps these foreign lands will show me a way to break it forever, so that you may go your way, and I may go mine.
I am not fond of pain. But I have borne it for years, each time you left me behind like a slave purchased at market with the expectation that I would tend to the needs of you and yours without question.
Your body no longer calls to me; your scent no longer pulls. I no longer think of your children as mine.
I will not serve your would-be mistress—though I understand that the physical side of this betrayal may be impossible to act upon until the bond is muted or broken.
I am not running away.
I am trying to find my way back to myself.
Because a life alone is better than a life lived beside you.
You win and so does Isolde. I concede.
