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thought. It was still her kingdom. As much as it belonged to any of the citizens of Tyralt. She had a right to see her country. She had always wanted this. It wasn’t pointless. It wasn’t.
    But after dark, it was harder to believe. With the cold chill seeping into her bones and the silence illuminating the emptiness around her—inside her—there was nothing that could stop the pain from ripping through her chest and draining her mind.
    Only tonight something was different.
    She stood, took a half dozen steps to the tent opening, and lifted the flap. A chill wind rushed in to battle her hair.
    You’re drunk, she told herself.
    Of course she was, and despite others’ claims about the effects of alcohol, she was neither happy nor out of her head. Only hurting. And sad. And unwilling to put up with it when one of the solutions to her problems was only a matter of courage.
    What courage? came her taunting conscience. You’re running away.
    She was running. She knew that. And she ought to feel bad about giving up her right to the throne and with it the promise that one day she would be able to help her people, but Aurelia had learned that that promise was a sham. She had never been in line to inherit that type of power. She had been expected to marry according to her father’s wishes and to one day let her husband take on the real power. The future of Tyralt had never been within her grasp.
    And she was too wounded and too tired to fight that stark reality. She wanted a future. She wanted love. And those, she was quite certain, had nothing to do with political power.
    But they had everything to do with the young man in the tent less than fifty feet away.
     
    She looked, Robert thought, like he felt. Her hair was tangled and ... damp, for some reason, the strands in the front clinging to her face. Her cheeks and nose were red in the candlelight, and her clothes, the same she had been wearing all day, were crumpled and creased. Which meant that she, unlike he, might have slept, though clearly she was not rested. She stood, clinging to the sides of the tent flap as if she might collapse.
    “Why?” she demanded, the hoarseness of her voice matching her disheveled appearance. “Why won’t you talk to me?”
    He moved toward her, but she sliced out with her hand as if thrusting him away.
    “Why are you ignoring me, Robert? Not just this week, but before that. I know I’ve done something, but—why?” Her fingers slid off the canvas, and she slipped down.
    He caught her elbow, but she pushed him back, standing up on her own.
    Her breath reeked of alcohol.
    “Aurelia”—he started to tell her she was drunk and should not be there.
    But she interrupted him. “I’m sorry.” She was choking now, falling once again, this time to her knees.
    An apology? He had not expected that. Not when he had been the one to start the fight, and he had been the one sulking like a child for the past week. Her next words flattened him like a violent wind.
    “I killed him. I know you can’t forgive me because I killed him.”
    What? His heart wrapped around a tent pole and wrung itself dry. Was that what she thought? That he blamed her for defending herself against an assassin? It was himself he blamed, his fault she had had to defend herself.
    “You didn’t kill anyone.” He sank to his knees and reached for her shoulders.
    But she lashed out at him. “I did!” She choked, and only now did he realize the wetness on her face was caused by tears. “I chose ... I chose to kill Gregory. I saw him with the gun, and I chose.”
    He could have kicked himself for his own stupidity. He should have guessed—should have known she was coming apart inside. Especially tonight when she had suggested drinking, and he had been so certain she was testing him to see if he would try to stop her. She had a right to fall apart after all she’d been through.
    “You had no choice,” Robert told her. “He would have killed you.”
    “You