A very wrong assumption. Ankari scoffs at him. If his mouth wasn't dry he'd spit in Khoriya's off color eye for it.

"W-w, why would I ever want to return there?" he bites back with cruel bitterness, "What is left-? A fractured people I failed to protect, who would scorn me for abandoning them in their moment of need-? Their least loved prince... arranging a marriage only to disappear before the feast. No better than the other royals of my line... all dead in the mud." Where he expects Khoriya will leave him, too, the moment he's had his curiosity sated.

Ankari feels such devastation and mourning for Stilmyst. He hid that with others as best he could. Pushed the past to be out of sight and out of mind, only looking forward and charging ahead to this new life. It only works so well, the guilt haunting him at any memory of home. He was the last person who could have stood between Stilmyst and destruction, yet he ended up here before he could wed the wolf prince towering over him. A coward not even by his own choice, but dictated so by cruel fate.