“Verity is … is no longer here to protect his queen, his child, or his father,” I said reasonably. “So, for this time, I must put them ahead of my own life. Ahead of everything I hold dear. Not because I love them more but …” I floundered uselessly after words. “I am a King’s Man,” I said helplessly.

“I am my own woman.” Molly made it the loneliest statement in the world. “I will take care of myself.”

“Not forever,” I protested. “Someday we will be free. Free to wed, to do—”

“Whatever your king asks you to do,” she finished for me. “No, Fitz.” There was finality in her voice. Pain. She pushed away from me, stepped past me on the staircase. When she was two steps away and all of winter seemed to be blowing between us, she spoke.

“I have to tell you something,” she said, almost gently. “There is another in my life now. One who is for me what your king is for you. One who comes before my own life, who comes ahead of all else I hold dear. By your own words, you cannot fault me.” She looked back up at me.

I do not know what I looked like, only that she looked aside as if she could not bear it.

“For the sake of that one, I am going away,” she told me. “To a safer place than this.”

“Molly, please, he cannot love you as I do,” I begged.

She did not look at me. “Nor can your king love you as I … used to. But. It is not a matter of what he feels for me,” she said slowly. “It is what I feel for him. He must be first in my life. He needs that from me. Understand this. It is not that I no longer care for you. It is that I cannot put that feeling ahead of what is best for him.” She went down two more steps. “Good-bye, Newboy.” She no more than breathed those final words, but they sank into my heart as if branded there.

I stood on the steps, watching her go. And suddenly that feeling was too familiar, the pain too well-known. I flung myself down the steps after her, I seized her arm, I pulled her under the loft stairs into the darkness there. “Molly,” I said, “please.”

She said nothing. She did not even resist my grip on her arm.

“What can I give you, what can I tell you to make you understand what you are to me? I can’t just let you go!”

“No more can you make me stay,” she pointed out in a low voice. I felt something go out of her. Some anger, some spirit, some will. I have no word for it. “Please,” she said, and the word hurt me, because she begged. “Just let me go. Don’t make it hard. Don’t make me cry.”

I let go of her arm, but she did not leave.

“A long time ago,” she said carefully, “I told you that you were like Burrich.”

I nodded in the darkness, not caring that she could not see me.

“In some ways you are. In others you are not. I decide for us, now, as he once decided for Patience and himself. There is no future for us. Someone already fills your heart. And the gap between our stations is too great for any love to bridge. I know that you love me. But your love is … different from mine. I wanted us to share all our lives. You wish to keep me in a box, separate from your life. I cannot be someone you come to when you have nothing more important to do. I don’t even know what it is that you do when you are not with me. You have never even shared that much with me.”

“You wouldn’t like it,” I told her. “You don’t really want to know.”

“Don’t tell me that,” she whispered angrily. “Don’t you see that that is what I cannot live with, that you do not let me even decide that for myself? You cannot make that decision for me. You have no right! If you cannot even tell me that, how can I believe you love me?”

“I kill people,” I heard myself say. “For my king. I’m an assassin, Molly.”

“I don’t believe you!” she whispered. She spoke too quickly. The horror in her voice was as great as the contempt. A part of her knew I had spoken the truth to her. Finally. A terrible silence, brief but so cold, grew between us as she waited for me to admit a lie. A lie she knew was truth. At last she denied it for me. “You, a killer? You couldn’t even run past the guard that day to see why I was crying! You didn’t have the courage to defy them for me! But you want me to believe you kill people for the King.” She made a choking sound, of anger and despair. “Why do you say such things now? Why now, of all times? To impress me?”

“If I had thought it would impress you, I probably would have told you a long time ago,” I confessed. And it was true. My ability to keep my secrets had been soundly based on my fear that telling Molly would mean losing her. I was right.