“Falhart,” she said, her vision blurring as she took a quick step forward.

Falhart grunted and folded his arms across his chest.

Hurt, Aralorn stopped and adopted his pose, waiting for him to speak.

“Ten years is a long time, Aralorn. Is Sianim so far that you could not visit?”

Aralorn met his eyes. “I wrote nearly every month.” She stopped to clear the defensiveness out of her voice. “I don’t belong here, Hart. Not anymore.”

His black eyebrows rose to meet his brick red hair. “This is your home—of course you belong here. Irrenna has kept your room just the way you left it, hoping you’d visit. Allyn’s toadflax, you’d think we were Darranians the way you—” He stopped abruptly, having been watching her face closely. His jaw dropped for a moment, then he said in a completely different voice, “That is it, isn’t it? Nevyn got to you. Father said he thought it was something of the sort, but I thought you knew better than to listen to the half-crazed prejudices of a Darranian lordling.”

Aralorn smiled ruefully, hurt assuaged by the realization that it was anger, not rejection, that had caused his restraint. “It was more complicated than that, but Nevyn is certainly the main reason I haven’t been back.”

“You’d think that a wizard would be more tolerant,” growled Hart, “and that you would show a little more intelligence.”

That turned her smile into a grin. “He’s not all that happy about being a wizard—he just didn’t have any choice in the matter.”

“You could have won him over if you had wanted to, Aralorn.” He had not yet decided to forgive her. “The man’s not as stupid as he acts sometimes.”

“Maybe,” she conceded. “But, as I said, he wasn’t the only reason I left. I was never cut out to be a Rethian noble-woman, any more than Nevyn could have lived in Darran as a wizard. Sianim is my home now.”