Dream of Me/Believe in Me

she had even been born and raised there. It was certainly the only home Kiirla had known. Now they were both to be cast out, forced to start over in a place where they would be looked down upon and where no one would have reason to offer them anything beyond the bare minimum needed for survival.
    And all because she, the Lady of Holyhood, had not known how to win over her husband's people.
    Cymbra straightened her shoulders. Through the open doors of the great hall, she saw the first gray rim of light above the horizon. There was very little time left.
    “I am also to blame,” she said quietly. “If I had better known how to—”
    “Yes, you are.”
    Her husband's prompt agreement in the matter of her guilt brought Cymbra up short. She had thought to have to explain it to him, even persuade him to it, but it seemed that was not necessary after all.
    “Your fault lay in your refusal to tell me the truth of the matter from the beginning.” He came closer, looking at her, his voice emotionless. “I am master here. When all is said and done, nothing matters save my will. You thought to hold yourself apart from that.”
    “No!” She could not let him make that charge against her, for of that she was truly innocent. “I only wanted to be a good wife, to manage my duties for myself without troubling you.”
    Wolf was at a loss to understand why she had tried to keep the problem from him. Had he not been supremely gentle and patient with her, beyond any measure he would ever have thought himself capable of achieving? Was he not the very model of a kind, tolerant, even indulgent husband, whom she should have approached at the very first sign of difficulty? Well, no, apparently he wasn't, and that stung, making him wonder as it did what really went on behind those remarkable eyes as blue as the tranquil sea, yet hiding unknowable depths. What did she truly think of him, of their marriage, and, most important, of the crisis that would inevitably occur when her husband and her brother stood face to face for the first time? Would that meeting come over locked swords or raised drinking horns? The answer lay buried within her heart, as well shielded as the most impenetrable stronghold.
    Spurred by such thoughts, he raised an eyebrow, silently reminding her of the trouble she had brought by not being troubling. “I think,” he said consideringly, “you are too proud.”
    “Proud? Me? I am not—” That was outrageous. It was other people always appealing to her pride, telling her of her beauty and her skill, praising her to the skies until she had to fight back the urge to scream that she was only a woman like all the rest, frail as any other human.
    “It is your pride that drives you to not want to disappoint people. To live up to what you imagine their expectations to be, whether those are at all realistic or not.”
    She stared at him, dumbfounded. A strange, undefined sense sparked within her, grew stronger, threatened to overtake her. She recognized it then, a sense of being invaded, as though he had reached straight into her mind. It was what she had seen him do with the others in the hall but far more so.
    With a shock, she realized that he
knew
her. Thatwasn't possible. She had kept too much hidden for too long. And besides, she was the one who knew what others felt, who could sometimes even sense fragments of their thoughts. Never was she the
known.
Until now.
    Her mouth was dry. She had no idea how to respond to this, no experience in dealing with it. Slowly, she said, “It is proudful to care about duty?”
    “Your duty is to me. To
me
.” The emphasis was all the clearer for being so quietly uttered. “I require your absolute obedience and loyalty. I thought I'd made that clear.”
    Perhaps he was right and she was proudful, for she couldn't merely accept this. “I was neither disobedient nor disloyal when I tried to manage a purely domestic matter—a matter of women—by myself.”
    He leaned against his high-backed chair, seemingly at his ease, and regarded her steadily. “How did you try to manage it? What did you do?”
    She hated this, hated feeling so exposed and having to defend herself to him. Nothing in her life had prepared her for it. But then the Scourge of the Saxons had provided her with so many new experiences.
    “I thought it best to wait, to give Marta and the other women time to come to know and accept me. Under the circumstances, taking into consideration the surprise of our