His hands dropped from her arms as he stared at her in wild shock, the realization hitting him like a sledge.
She rallied her courage. “But, Fallon, that is not the only reason I must reject you. It gives me great pain to tell you this, but I do not trust you. Not fully. There are events happening underground, things that you yourself have hinted at. The secrets between us are not only mine. I want to trust you, but you’ve shaken my faith in you. For so long you’ve hungered for glory. Know you not that trust is earned instance by instance, moment by moment? And it can be broken so easily. You flirt with danger like it means nothing.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “You are untrustworthy, Fallon. It pains me to say it, but I couldn’t marry someone who treats his integrity so casually.”
His look changed to one of outrage in an instant. “You have no ken what I have done to protect my brother-in-law the king. None at all. One day you’ll regret saying that you did not trust me.”
“Think on what I’ve told you,” she pleaded miserably. “I did not mean any unkindness by it. Our parents once loved each other.” Her voice throbbed with grief. “Perhaps we are doomed to repeat the same painful love. If so, we should both look to them as an example. Our lives, even if they must be spent apart, will turn out better than how it feels right now.”
She tried to reach for his arm, to comfort him with her touch, but he brushed her hand aside as if it would burn him.
“I can never accept that!” he said in anguish. The look in his eyes showed the depth of how much she’d hurt him. He was pale, his humor slit open and spilled. “I can’t believe that you and I are meant to repeat their story. We are different.”
Without another word, he whirled and stormed away from her, trampling the grass with his stride. He stalked off quickly, vanishing from the garden in moments.
She watched him go, and once he was gone, she finally released the tears that were lingering on her lashes. The sobs hurt, but there was a feeling of profound relief too, like drawing a sharp splinter trapped beneath the skin. She might have lost Fallon’s love and his friendship forever. It was possible his grief would drive him to someone else, someone like Morwenna, in retaliation. She had to prepare herself for such a possibility. But she believed she had done the right thing, despite how broken she felt.
She decided she could never go back into that garden again.
Trynne and her mother stood on the beach full of sea glass, watching the sun set. Trynne held her own slippers as well as her mother’s while Gannon knelt in the moist sand, sorting the different colors of pebbled glass as the breeze tousled his hair. The smell of the air was delicious and fragrant, a soothing balm. She had found her mother’s slippers at the foot of the steps leading down from the rock wall. It was her mother’s place of solitude and comfort. But it was also full of ghosts.
“Did I do the right thing in how I rejected him?” Trynne asked her mother, giving her a sidelong look.
Sinia smiled as she put her arm around Trynne’s back and squeezed her shoulders. She kissed Trynne’s hair. “Most people are afraid to tell others the truth about their foibles and weaknesses. We fear to offend, and for good reason. Most people are so easily offended. But you did the right thing, Tryneowy. And I’m proud of you. Fallon needed to hear it, even if he didn’t want to.”
Trynne put her arms around her mother’s waist and pressed her cheek against her bosom. “Men prefer to be flattered, I think.”
Sinia laughed softly. “’Tis true. But people generally despise where they flatter. And I don’t think you despise Fallon.”
“Not at all,” Trynne said. “He probably despises me now. But someone needed to tell him the truth about himself.”
“Indeed. Your father and I have had many discussions about this,” she said as they enjoyed the sound of the crashing surf. “He was always thinking about discernment because of Ankarette, you know. How can you learn to trust someone? We all have weaknesses. Some we know about ourselves, and they are obvious to others too. Then we have faults that we are blind to ourselves, but are plain to everyone else. Some weaknesses we deliberately conceal from others. But the most rare are the ones that are both invisible to us and to others. Those we are blind to. They may be our greatest weakness of all.”
Trynne turned her head and looked up at her mother. “But how can you find out about those, Mother? I’ve never thought of that before.”
Sinia stared at the sea, her gaze a little distant. “Your father said these were the greatest threat to happiness. The blind weaknesses. We agreed when we first wed that we would be honest and helpful to each other. That we’d help each other learn to see our own weaknesses. Like me forgetting my shoes,” she added with a tender smile. “But there is only one way we can ever discover the blind ones.”