You know what I intended."
"I want to hear you say it."
I look at him. "Does it matter? You stopped me."
"It matters," he says, "because what happens next depends on how honest you are willing to be right now. With me and with yourself."
I look at the wall. The stone is old and cold and grey and very certain of itself, the way stone always is, and I think about how long I have been in this palace moving through corridors like this one and wanting things I could not have and making plans that produced outcomes I did not intend and ending up here, in this corridor, with Varder looking at me and the knife on the table inside and my sister alive in her bed.
"I was going to hurt her," I say. To the wall. "I was going to — I don't know how far I would have gone. I don't know if I—" I stop. "I don't know.
"You don't know," he repeats.
