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he
wouldn’t understand. Probably he wouldn’t, but it rankled
nonetheless. “Sufficeto say Yar did not find a match in Bára. With
so many of our priestesses lost in the battle with, well, with your
people…” She took a breath, and he understood the feeling. The
memories of that night pained him, too. He’d been the one to kill
most of those priestesses, and their blood still soaked his
nightmares. Oria had seen him with that blood on his hands. No
wonder she didn’t want them and those stains of murder on her
unsullied skin.
    “There are far fewer candidate priestesses in
Bára now, and none satisfied the requirements for Yar, so he’s
casting his net wider,” Oria said more briskly. “I’ve received my
mask recently, so I’ve only just begun testing, but I face the same
scarcity with so many of our priests fallen in battle. So far the
results are not promising, which surprises nobody at all even with
a reduced pool, because I’m …”
    “A princess?” He filled in, when she
didn’t—but she shook her head.
    “Unusually sensitive, let’s say.” A wealth of
feeling crawled beneath her dry tone. Interesting.
    “But even if Yar is counting on that,” he
said when she didn’t continue, “on you taking longer to find a
match, why risk it if the throne is at stake, something he clearly does have his ambitions set on? Why not settle for the
second- or third-best pick?” As Oria was doing in proposing to him,
it suddenly hit him. A far less savory realization. The honey
wasn’t enough to keep the bread from going dry in his mouth.
    Oria stopped in front of him, twisting her
fingers together again, and he viciously wished he could see her
face, read her expression. Although he supposed he didn’t need to
see her to know he wouldn’t like her answer. “Just tell me, Oria.
Truth is best.”
    Though he wasn’t entirely sure of that.
    “A mate who’s a good fit is … ideal.”
She settled on the word with a frustrated lifting of her hands. “A
temple-blessed marriage trumps one that isn’t. Were Yar and I both
to marry, whichever of us has the best suited partnership—as the
temple evaluates such things—would be crowned.”
    “So not only do you need to be married first,
you need to be married and crowned before Yar can return with a
supposedly better marriage.”
    “Yes, exactly.” She sounded relieved that he
understood—and maybe that she’d gotten away with not telling him
everything about why the Bárans sought these purportedly perfect
matches. Knowing them, it had to do with power and status. And
magic, more than likely. Something he did not and would never
have.
    He pondered letting it lie there. Couldn’t.
“Why haven’t you stepped up your own search, gone to these other
cities to find your match?”
    “I was considering it,” she admitted, “before
you arrived. But in the first place it’s much easier for men to go
beyond the walls than it is for women, for complex reasons I can’t
explain, but they’re the same ones that would make it difficult for
me to go to Dru. That same … syndrome will also cause Yar
delays in bringing a bride back to Bára from her home city, so that
gives me breathing room.”
    “And in the second place?”
    “I don’t have the influence he does. Because
I refuse to be part of trafficking stolen water.”
    She said it simply, but the bald integrity of
her statement touched him in an odd way—more than any of Natly’s
declarations of love had. It hadn’t been that long ago that Lonen
had sat on Oria’s rooftop terrace and scorned her for not knowing
whose life’s blood kept her lush garden alive.
    “Thank you for that,” he told her gravely,
meaning it. She might be playing a game of omission and
half-truths, but he could count on that about her, at least.
    She shrugged that off, pacing away and
seeming uncomfortable. He wanted to ask more about what an ideal
mate for her would be, but likely it would only cause him pain to
hear all