“I don’t know why I said that.” Her voice was low. “Just being here … sometimes … I think of things, I remember things I’d be better off forgetting.” She glanced over her shoulder, eyes sweeping over the Dobrian knights emerging onto the field. “They aren’t envious of you, the way they are, a little, of Mihangel. You — should talk to them.” Summer looked back up at him, but she wasn’t really seeing him; she was seeing the past, her childhood. “I’ll just — I should put up my gear.” She straightened her shoulders, glancing back again, and walked toward the castle.
”Summer — ” he calls with no intention of heading towards the other knights. “Summer!” he calls again, chewing the inside of his cheek, “wait up!”
Summer didn’t stop, or look back, but she did slow her step until he walked beside her. She was doing it again, she knew she was doing it again, but somehow always being here, with the memories breathing from every tapestry and the same faces turned in the same old way — it made her feel small, pressed back into the shell of the person she used to be. The person she’d gone to Camelot to escape.
And that person could never deserve the knight by her side. That person deserved nothing and no one, was destined to rot in Dobria until she was bargained off as goods to some old fool in an alliance, in whose castle she would then continue to rot until she died. She became aware her hand was opening and closing on the hilt of her sword, and forced herself to still.
“What is it?”