She raised her eyebrows.
“Tell me why you wanted to kill your ex-husband.”
Charlotte turned on her back, looked at the ceiling, and sighed. “Turnabout is fair play?”
“Yes.”
“I was taken to the College when I was seven. It’s the only life I knew until I was twenty-seven years old. I’ve read books about adventures and love. I flirted. I even made out with boys.”
“Shocking.”
“Oh, it was. In the last years of my being there, I couldn’t wait to escape. I was going to travel. I would have all the adventures I could possibly want.” She sighed again. “At twenty-seven, I received my land grant, my house, and my noble title for my decade of service. I moved in, and soon I realized that I had no idea how big the world really was. I was going to travel, I really was, but the house needed work and the garden needed to be tended, and there were good books . . .”
She made big eyes at him.
“You were scared,” he guessed.
She nodded. “I had all the training and confidence I would ever need, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do anything with it. And then Elvei Leremine walked into my life. He was a blueblood, flawless, handsome . . .”
“I hate him already,” he said.
Charlotte smiled, a sad parting of lips without humor. “I was besotted with the idea of falling in love and having a family. Here was my prince, so considerate, so together. The whole thing seemed like a perfect shortcut to happiness. Instead of combing through men and dealing with rejection, I found the ideal husband right away, and I married him because I was so utterly stupid. He stood in line to inherit his family’s lands, but until then we decided it would be best if he came to live with me. He started speaking of children right away. We tried for six months, and he grew more and more alarmed when I didn’t conceive. Then, finally, I went to be diagnosed. For another year and a half I denied the inevitable. I went to the best healers I knew. I underwent procedure after procedure—the memories still give me nightmares. I refused to give up. I was always taught that if you strive hard enough, you will achieve what you desire. I’d read all those romantic books, where a woman can’t conceive, then she meets the right man, and the power of love or his magic virility or what have you overcomes her problems, and she has gorgeous triplets. My magic cure was just around the corner, I was sure of it.”
She turned to look at him. “I’m barren, Richard. Irreversibly. I will never have a child. There is no cure.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She hesitated. “Does it matter to you? I can never give you a child.”
She was thinking of staying with him. Don’t read too much into it, he warned himself. They came from completely different worlds. She was a blueblood, and he was a fraud, with hardly anything to his name.
“There are sixteen adults in my family, all that remains of over fifty, and almost twenty children, most of them with one dead parent or both,” he told her. “I have many children to take care of. My worth isn’t tied to having one specifically my own.”
Charlotte sighed and caressed his cheek. Her finger traced his lips. “Funny, had you asked me that before I’d married Elvei, I would’ve told you the same thing. But somehow the quest to have a child became the most important thing in my life. I felt deficient. Almost as if I were somehow not female if I couldn’t conceive. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I realized that Elvei required a child so he could inherit the family estate. He was in competition with his younger brother, and he was trying to race to the finish line and produce a bouncing baby to claim his land, house, and leadership of the family with it.”
“He sounds like an idiot.” Who the hell would care about the lands and house when he had her?
Charlotte gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I was very naive. And my blinders were firmly in place. Elvei was always attentive. He came with me on some of my procedures. This journey toward getting a child was something we took together. It was a quest we had in common, and I thought it would bring us closer. Really, we were both at fault. He should’ve made his position clear before the wedding, and I shouldn’t have mistaken his courtesy and attention for love. I think it took a toll on him as well. He’d grown obsessive. We had to have sex in a specific position because someone had told him it was most likely to result in conception. He’d help me chart my ovulation. It was a kind of insanity that took over both of us. Looking back at it, all of that seems . . . creepy.”
Richard stared at her, speechless. Her husband was an ass. He wanted to find him and skin him alive. Saying it out loud, however, probably wasn’t the best strategy.
“In the end, when all options were exhausted, I came to him with the news. I had expected him to hug me and tell me it would all be fine and that he loved me anyway. He presented me with an annulment.”
Charlotte laughed bitterly. “My world had collapsed. I wanted to hurt him, and I almost did. I came this close.” She held her index finger and thumb a hair apart.
“What stopped you?” he asked.
“It was wrong,” she said simply. “I was a healer. I was meant to heal people, not to hurt them because they crushed my heart.”
And that’s why she would always be the ray of light in his darkness. He had to hold on to her. He couldn’t let her go. He had to not screw this up.
Charlotte closed her eyes. “We, the healers, have two sides to our power: one prolongs life, the other cuts it short. We’re conditioned to use only one. It’s repeated so often, you have it chiseled in your mind by the time you reach your teens: do no harm. Healing is hard work. You feel the magic leaving you. But doing harm is easy. You feel powerful and strong. It’s almost euphoric. You don’t realize how much magic you’ve spent until it’s gone, and you collapse dramatically and make a complete fool of yourself.”
“You may swoon as you wish. I’ll always be there to catch you.”
She laughed.
He grinned.
Charlotte turned on her side and looked at him. “Two things can happen when a healer stops being a healer. One, they drain themselves of all of their magic and die. And two . . .”
She hesitated.
“Two?” Richard prompted.
“They become a walking plague. They spend their magic, realize they require more, and began to feed on those around them, converting other lives into fuel for further killing. They cease to become human. The first time I killed, when I infected Voshak and his slavers, I wasn’t sure I had enough power to kill them all. So I fed on them. You have no idea how wonderful it felt.”
Her voice shook.
“You’re terrified of it,” he guessed. Alarm wailed in the back of his head. He was certain he read an article describing something very similar a few years back. The book claimed it was a death sentence to the magic user.
“Yes. Since then I haven’t done it. Once you start, the temptation to keep going is too strong. In the bookkeeper’s mansion, when I was near my limit, I felt you. I could sense your life force. It made me hungry.” She touched his face. “Are you scared?”
“No.” He wasn’t afraid of her; he was afraid for her.
She cleared her throat. Her voice was quiet. “Some people think they are better than others at what they do. I don’t think, I know. I’m the most powerful healer of my generation. I wouldn’t become a plaguebringer, I would unleash a pandemic on this world. I’d become a living death. I would rather spend all of my magic and die than kill thousands of people.”
She closed her eyes. “I shouldn’t have ever done it. You have to understand, back at the clearing I saw you in the cage, battered and bruised, and they were lounging about as if they were on some picnic. It made me so angry. Draining them seemed like the only way, and I did it. I knew the risks, I just didn’t realize how strong the pull of the magic is.”
“You were in shock,” he told her. “Trust me, I was there. I saw your face.”
“It’s not an excuse. A lot of healers disappear after a few years. I always thought it was because they burn out. Maybe they don’t. Maybe they succumb instead and have to be put down like rabid dogs.”