Read Online The Mage of Trelian by Michelle Knudsen - Free Book Online Page B

soldier now, she supposed — but as he wasn’t in her own company, she didn’t know very much about what he did or where. There were a lot of other things she wanted to ask about what had happened, but she didn’t ask them. Like her, Wilem had obviously come here looking for solitude, not someone to pester him with questions.
    He leaned back against the stone wall, and they were quiet for a time. His presence didn’t exactly help her to not-think, but at least he was a distraction from her other concerns.
    Wilem’s situation had changed a great deal since he was first taken in as a prisoner. He was permitted to move freely about the castle grounds and no longer had guards placed at his door, although Meg knew they all still kept an eye on him, out of habit if nothing else. Her parents had decided that he’d earned these additional freedoms through his efforts to help rescue Maurel from his mother and his request to join the soldiers who were fighting to protect the kingdom from Lourin and its allies. He wasn’t exactly
not
a prisoner, but he’d reached some strange in-between status that everyone had just slowly begun to accept and eventually take for granted. He didn’t seem to mind not being able to leave. And really, Meg wasn’t sure where he would go if he could — his mother was dead, and she had been his only remaining family. He’d grown up in Kragnir and probably had friends there, or former friends, but he might not be welcome back there after what he and Sen Eva had done. He’d betrayed Kragnir as well as Trelian, after all. At least here, a lot of people knew what he’d done to try to atone for his crimes, and some had seen firsthand his realization that his mother had deceived him in order to gain his cooperation. They’d also seen his subsequent voluntary surrender.
    Perhaps someday, if he were permitted, he’d prefer to go somewhere where no one knew him or his past at all.
    Meg was still trying to sort out how she felt about him. She’d gone from swooning over him like an idiot to hating him for his betrayal to . . . wherever she was now. She didn’t think she could quite say she’d
forgiven
him — could you ever forgive someone for plotting to kill your sister, whatever he thought his reasons were? — but his actions since then had been consistently selfless and admirable. He’d been willing to sacrifice himself to save Maurel, and now he was actively helping in the fight against Lourin. She no longer suspected that he was waiting to turn on them again.
    Not-hate. That’s what she was feeling, she decided. At least, that was the part of what she was feeling that she could be certain of.
    “How is your not-thinking going?” he asked after a while.
    “Still not very well, I’m afraid.” She paused, then added, “And it’s probably not what I should be doing, anyway. Not-thinking, I mean. But I was tired of trying to think and failing at that, too. It is very frustrating to realize that some problems cannot be solved by thinking. That no matter how much you think about them, you cannot . . .” She trailed off, shaking her head.
    After a moment, Wilem said, “I think some problems are too big for any of us to solve on our own. But I also believe that we must —”
    “Please don’t say that we must be patient. I cannot bear to hear that one more time.”
    He smiled. “I was going to say that we must be hopeful. The one sure way to fail is to let ourselves lose hope.”
    “Oh.” Meg thought about that for a bit. “I suppose that’s very true. Although not always easy.”
    “No,” Wilem agreed.
    “And I wish being hopeful didn’t necessarily involve so much waiting!”
    “Have you — have you had any word from Calen?”
    “No. We don’t know where he is. And if he’s tried to contact us, he hasn’t succeeded.”
    “I know that I don’t know him very well, but from everything I’ve seen — I believe he’ll find a way. He seems very resourceful. And