My fears were proven incorrect - to a point.
As I languished in Pynti-Peldot, resting against the journey ahead, I saw my love. He lived! He breathed! He was safe! My joy was short-lived, however. In his time apart from me, he has grown cold and spiteful.
We spoke. I recall the anger in his eyes vivdly as I put forth the hypothetical suggestion that I had betrayed him by kissing Davick. That idea did not sit well with him at all. Yet, he did not deny that he had, indeed, betrayed me with the very woman who had almost killed me some weeks prior and had made it impossible for me to escape when Mordevin had decided it would be fun to flay the flesh from my back. In fact, he very cruelly and coldly stated that it had happened.
I had been ready for the possibility and had told myself all along that if it be true, I would turn my back and leave him, but standing there with him, seeing him face-to-face, I could not do so. Bedamnable soft heart! Bedamnable love of mine!
Instead, I challenged him. I asked him to kiss me one final time. He would not, but the hesitation in his voice when he said so, the look in his eyes, told me that he wished to. I pressed the matter until he at last turned away. I told him then that he must speak his choice to me: she or I. He could not do so. He avoided answering in every possible manner, eventually walking away entirely.
That has left me with some modicum of doubt as to the truth of his heart in this, but what does that matter now? He betrayed me with Rosabur. He still chose her over me, if not in words then in deeds. After everything that has happened, after all we have been through, after what I have suffered because of him, he chose her.
I left, then, making my way back toward Kauppa-Khota. In the ice tunnel, when finally I was in perfect solitude, I allowed myself to break down and cry. Misfortune have it that the three came across me along the passage, but they passed on in short order, leaving me to my tears.
It was when I finally reached that last little village in the ice that everything changed.
A letter, it seems, had followed me all the way from Bree-land, out across the lands and finally come to rest here, awaiting my return from the tundra. Surprised, I read it. Then I read it again. Then I read it for a third time.
Can it be true? Were the words upon that page an explanation for it all?
There being only one way to find out, I set Arantha to a gallop as soon as we made our way clear of the ice. Stopping only in Ost Forod to purchase some provisions, I took to saddle once more, speeding away to the east. I have to go there. I have to know.
I have to speak to this Vaeshiva.
