Traitor's Masque by Kenley Davidson

perplexed that Trystan looked up, into his eyes. They were fastened on hers, with an intensity that held her breathless. “Why do I feel like I know you?”
    The same question Trystan had asked herself. A question she had been unable to answer, through several sleepless nights. “I feel much the same,” she answered him softly, dropping her gaze, “but I suspect it is an illusion. We simply recognize ourselves when we look at one another. But we know next to nothing.”
    It struck her, then, the depth of her ignorance about even the people she knew best. What, after all, had she even known about her father? That he was kind? That he was handsome? That he loved her? Had she even truly known that? What would she ask him, now, if she had the chance?
    She looked up again, into the man’s gray eyes, and wondered. “I do not know what you love or what you fear,” she told him simply. “What moves you to hatred or to envy… I might guess at what would make you laugh, but not what might make you cry. What you live for, even what you would choose to die for…” She shook her head, trying to convey something she had not really understood before that moment.
    “I could not begin to imagine what things make you get up in the morning with hope instead of despair,” she went on. “While it pains me that I cannot know your name, in truth, that is the least of what we hide.” She had not intended to say so much, but with his eyes on hers it had not seemed possible to stop.
    “And yet,” he responded with growing intensity, “you see me anyway. No young woman has ever spoken to me as you do. All the polite conversation in the world cannot convey what you seem to understand without being told.”
    “I fear I am only beginning to see beyond myself,” Trystan admitted, with a strong sense of shame. “And my life offers few opportunities to speak plainly, or at all, really. I fear you are bearing the weight of far too many words unsaid. If I have distressed you, I apologize.”
    Without warning he caught her hand and pressed it. “No,” he said swiftly and firmly. “Not distressed. I am dismayed by your insights, but relieved, I think, by your candor. I might prefer anonymity, but to be unknown… that is not always a relief.”
    As he had done before, he so nearly echoed her own thoughts that Trystan was surprised to find she had not spoken them. “But neither is it always a comfort to be known,” she added thoughtfully. “Knowing can so quickly turn to hurting that it is little wonder how deeply we hide.”
    “I would not hurt you,” the man said quietly. “Though I know you have little reason to believe it.”
    “I believe you would not hurt me on purpose,” she answered honestly. “But I also believe we do not always get to choose who is hurt and who is not.”
    He looked sad and dropped her hand. “No,” he said, turning away. “We do not.” Catching his horse’s trailing reins, he mounted and turned toward the forest. “Ride with me?” he asked. “North and west. Without burden or expectation. Just a chance to talk, of whatever would not cause you pain.”
    Trystan nodded, her relief and joy mingling with an equal sense of apprehension. Even more than she feared being late, she now feared how strongly she wanted to tell him everything.

    They rode slowly back into the Kingswood, and at Ramsey’s prompting the girl managed to tell him a little of her apparently tempestuous childhood. She carefully confined her stories to her younger years, when her experiences would have been less specific, but she could not hide everything. Though she was careful not to give names, her artless telling revealed much about her origins.
    Her father had clearly been wealthy, and was just as clearly long gone from her life, whether by distance or death he was unsure. Her eyes twinkled merrily as she related tricks played on a long-ago governess, apparently one of the many whose presence in the house had not lasted even so