He wishes he could tell her now. He'd been so blinded by rage, by hopelessness, and he'd simply lashed out at her. But over the lonely days that followed, the truth, whispered somewhere in the absence of her laugh, her smile, the soft rustle of her skirts against her stockened calves, had settled in him as certain and sure as the setting of the sun. She loved him. He was right - it was a trick, but she had loved him. The trick lay elsewhere, in the soul of another, a black and bloodless thing that smiled prettily and plotted cunningly.
And in way, in the end, he had let that black and bloodless thing win.
So he sits at his spinning wheel. The now torturous sunlight tumbles through the window, warming his back, teasing him in a way much crueler and colder than she used to (so full of playful scoffs and quirked eyebrows and sweetly narrowed eyes). He watches the wheel and turns straw into straw, too tired to spin anything of worth. He spins nothing into nothing and he can't bring himself to care. And it does nothing to help him forget, not even for a moment.
He should have just told her the truth. His power did mean more to him than her, but only because it was the one thing keeping him - them - safe. The one thing that will keep them safe. He can't see the future - not clearly - but he has already felt the gears set in motion. He knows the war is coming, hot and panting and vicious. He has already taken steps, great pains, to insure that he has a measure of control over how it begins. Over what form it takes.
Over how it will end.
And how it will end depends on him. Everything depends on him and that magic thrumming through his skin, dancing at his fingertips. On the slow, half-sleeping power that lurks in his lungs, in his heart, his bones.
And if he told her this, if he had reached into his chest, broken apart the cold bars of his ribcage, and pulled out his heart for her, offered it to her still and dry but warm - offered it to her with all its truth and ugliness and sparks of dark magic that barely keep it alive - he knows.
She would have understood.
And she would have stayed.