He is more angry than I have ever seen him, and a part of me quails at the fury on his face and on his tongue. No one had yelled at me in such a fashion since I was a small girl, and I wasn't sure how to feel. A part of me felt like her again - small and vulnerable and helpless - but I had not been her for a very long time. I had been a mother for far longer. A Mira for longer still. And a wife before all of that. As much as I felt ill-equipped for the role, parts of me no longer knew how to be anything else.

He scolds me without restraint for naming Nyimara, and I take the abuse. I could have named a dozen other mares - hopefuls that had come to the Sadim with stars in their eyes and Antares' face in their dreams - but Nyimara had been closest, and most poignant. He is right to remind me how unfit Nyimara is, but it does not change the admiration I'd seen in his gaze, nor the way the brothers had lusted after her when she went racing over the dunetops.

You shackled me? I shackled myself. The words sear themselves across my heart as though they were a brand, echoing the fears I'd held since the very early days. That our coming together had not been a blessing sent by our gods, but happenstance, a reminder of who and what we were and who and what we were supposed to become. A punishment for running from what had been decreed as our future. I listen silently to the rest of his argument, weighing his assertions of fealty to me against the words he'd spoken first. I shackled myself. I shackled myself.

He hadn't needed to add the final words, we both knew what they were: with you.

Still he continues, and while I can feel in my hear that he means them to be victorious affirmations of his love to me, all I can hear is my guilt. That it was me that forced him to turn away from the other women, my weakness and my jealousy over an act that had taken place untold numbers of times before. "I am not fair to you, my Sheik." I answer quietly, the tears brimming in my eyes. I did not back away from him as he came near, and though my voice quakes with the ferociousness of my tangled emotions, I do not remain silent this time. "If I had not held you back, if you had shared in the joy of a larger household as your brothers do, perhaps you would see-"

I did not know how to finish that line. I knew the words that wanted to rise to my lips - that he would see that I alone was not enough - but I also knew he would rage even harder against that truth.

Even with the painful realizations I'd come to, it burns to hear him even imply that we are done. He is still my soul sewn, the other half of my heart. No amount of distance can ever change that for me, but no amount of love seems able to make me strong enough for him. For what he needs, even if he cannot see it.

"I don't want to leave." The words are quiet, hardly more than a whisper slipped between us like a note beneath a closed door. Silence follows, in which I do not know what to say, how to make him understand. "I don't know what else to do. You need someone stronger than me - they all do. I... I have not led anyone in a long time, Antares. I don't even know how to be a Wife to you in the way that you deserve. You are not happy, and I do not know how to fix it. Is it so strange for me to think that perhaps I am not the answer? That you deserve..." I fumbled for the word I need, gesturing to the world around us. To everything else. "... more? That Nashira, deserves more? I have spent all of her life comparing her to a sister she has never met - might never," my voice cracked on the possibility, no matter how true, "meet. It is fair to neither of you."