Chapter 27
Rosabel La Rouge
I knew that ceiling well. Perfectly white, perfectly perfect in every line and every corner. There was no other like it, I was sure, and it was the ceiling of my bedroom at Madeline Rogan’s mansion, exactly as I saw it every morning when I woke up, and every night before my eyes closed to sleep.
I was in the mansion, and this time, when I tried to move, I could.
This time, when I made to sit up, I did.
The ringing in my ears intensified. Block dots in my vision but the faster I blinked the more they faded, until I could actually see light coming through the windows.
It was my bedroom, all right. And the sun was shining outside, the sky was blue, and I was in my bed, naked, and… not alone.
Every inch of my body froze in place again when I realized that the figures against the walls in all four corners of my room weren’t furniture—they were soldiers.
Soldiers of the Delaetus Army with their eyes closed and their hands loose at their sides. Eyes that opened the second I considered screaming until my lungs burned.
They were alive. Four of them were alive, and they were somehow in my room and I was somehow in my room and?—
I screamed. Taland was in bed with me.
It took me a good moment to gather myself, to stop shaking, stop crying, clear my eyes of the tears and finally reach out a hand to touch his skin. Warm. He lay on his back, eyes closed, a lot of dried blood on his body—but no wounds. Not a single wound or scar or mark was anywhere on him, and he was most definitely breathing. He was breathing steadily and when I put my hand over his chest, his heart beat just as it should against my palm, and I about died of relief all over again.
What the hell had happened? How had we ended up here? Was I dreaming? How?—
“Not a dream. We brought you to safety, Mistress.”
The way I jumped out of my bed would have been funny to anybody watching.
I jumped and moved back and I eventually hit the wall, I thought, because I didn’t fall when I should have. I didn’t fall to the floor so I could close my eyes and urge myself to wake up.
“What…what…what…” The words wouldn’t come. Someone had to answer me because someone just did—in my head, and I needed to make sense of this before I started screaming again, this time to never stop.
We brought you to safety, Mistress.
Those same words—except nobody said them. Not out loud. They just…popped into my head, at the center of my mind, in that voice—that same voice I’d heard before. That same voice that I was sure I’d heard for a long time now, every single day.
But I hadn’t, not really.
I shook my head as my mouth opened and closed a million times, and I looked at the soldiers, all four of them around me. They were speaking to me. They were speaking right into my mind. They were here, right here, in my chest, under my skin, inside my skull.
They were?—
Another scream ripped out of me when my view shifted, when something dragged me through a tunnel, and then I was looking at me.
Yes, I was looking at me from all four corners of my room. I was seeing myself, naked and covered in blood just like Taland, and my eyes…
Goddess, my eyes were white.
My legs gave up on me and I hit the floor on all fours, and the views disappeared. It was just the floor in front of me now and this urge to throw up, except I couldn’t because I had nothing in my stomach.
Footfalls.
Don’t!
They stopped.
Don’t come near me. Get back!
They did.
Meanwhile my heart all but beat out of my chest.
I somehow managed to fall back and sit on the hardwood floor, press my back against the wall, wrap my arms around my knees, pull them to my chest. I was shaking, though I was too shocked to cry.
I was shaking because I remembered, because I knew exactly what the hell was going on.
A promise . I’d made a promise.
An arrangement, said the voice in my head—a single voice that belonged to them. To all of them.
My eyes closed and it was so difficult to let go of this breath. So difficult to allow my muscles to relax. So difficult to allow myself to feel.
All of them. Sixty-one souls, their light as bright as it had been in that darkness. Eleven of them alive. Around me. Four in my room, another seven outside in the hallway. Just behind that door.
And they were connected to me. They were my limbs. My thoughts.
My… responsibility.
“An arrangement,” I whispered because it was too scary to think the words and know that they heard them. Too scary still to talk to them without making a single sound.
An arrangement. You promised to find a way to set us free without condemning us to destruction, in exchange for our service until the day that you do, said the voice. Our silent service.
Silent, he said—or was it they? Same difference, I thought. But he was right, it was silent in my head. It hadn’t been, not when I was in that dark. It had been so, so loud…all those screams and those pleadings, all the cries and the stories and the images…
It was silent now in my head.
For as long as it took the sun to set behind the horizon, I just sat there and looked at nothing and I tried to process what had happened.
Taland. The fight. The Council. The look in Helen Paine’s eyes. The rage in Radock’s. The blood on Taland. His screams— my screams.
The way those lights had faded from existence, swallowed by that dark forever.
Fifty-nine souls lost as if they’d never existed. I mourned them, Goddess help me, as if they’d always been mine. I mourned them and I felt the void their destruction had left in me as clearly as I felt the cold wall I leaned on. It was a trap indeed, that curse, in every sense of the word. There was no way out of it, unless you ceased to exist. Both the master and the soldiers.
“I made you a promise,” I said to the room. “I will keep it. I will set you free as you deserve, or I will die trying.” My voice shook, but I thought the words, too, and so I knew they all heard them. I knew they would all know that I meant them with my whole being.
These men had not only endured the unbearable, but they’d come back and had helped us defeat the Council, without any of us meeting our end. Not a single civilian or soldier. No deaths but theirs. None.
The cruelty of a man had brought them here, but I had faith that there was a way around it. I had faith that I would find it, and I had no doubt that Taland would help.
So, I stood up. The wall held me, offered its support like an old friend. My legs shook until I made it to my bed, to the red satin robe that I always kept there. I put it on, not because I was embarrassed or shy. These men had seen my soul, had seen me naked in the full sense of the word.
“Who healed us?” I asked, thinking they’d tell me it was them.
Madeline Rogan, the Mistress’s grandmother, they said instead.
And that certainly surprised me. “She’s here?”
Yes, Mistress. Waiting. She healed you, then we brought you to your safety, as requested.
Except I didn’t request shit. This room was the only place I really knew, but that’s what they’d seen. The image of it—that’s what they’d seen in my mind.
“Can you not call me that?” I said, because that name made me feel like I wasn’t… me. “And what about Taland?”
Two of them who stood on the other side of the room stepped forward. Shall we awaken him?
“Goddess, no,” I breathed, raising my hand on instinct. “No, I?—”
The bracelet was around my wrist. Cold and heavy and fitting me exactly right.
I lowered it again, brought it to my chest. “Let him rest,” I whispered. “Stay with him while I clean myself up.”
Yes, Mistress, the voices said, and I, pretending that I knew what I was doing, that I was strong enough to handle all of this, went for the bathroom door that was right next to where the soldier was standing by the wall.
I looked at him, and his name was Lind , and I thought, Don’t call me that, Lind, this time only in my mind.
He said nothing.
I didn’t dare look in the mirror or anywhere near it in the bathroom. I’d already seen more than enough through eyes that weren’t mine. The water of the shower fell on my head and it was like a touch caressing my skin as it washed away the blood and dirt. I kept my eyes on my feet, on the pale pink tiles while the water went down the drain. But by the end, that same water that comforted me became too heavy on my shoulders, each drop a reminder of all those memories in my head that weren’t mine.
It was over. Everything was already over. The memory of the look in Helen Paine’s eyes said so. The pain that had sliced through Taland’s body and mine said so, yet I still couldn’t convince myself of it. It was going to take a while.
In the closet, I avoided the mirror again, eyes on my feet until I got dressed in my own clothes that felt as foreign to me now as every other thing I’d ever put on that didn’t belong to me. But when I went back into the room, nothing had changed. The soldiers were still there and Taland was still sleeping, and I don’t know why there were tears in my eyes, warm and stinging.
Those, too, I ignored when I grabbed towels and a small bucket from the bathroom, filled it with water, and went to sit at the corner of the bed to clean his face, at least. I don’t know how long I did it, but eventually my hands stopped shaking every time I wiped the blood off his cheeks and forehead and cleaned his neck and chest. Eventually those tears I was pretending didn’t exist stopped falling, and the more I focused on his steady breathing, the more grounded I felt.
Then I wondered where Madeline was and what she thought of this whole thing, if she was going to?—
Outside, Mistress.
The voices that popped into my head brought all my other thoughts to a halt, and that wasn’t all. Suddenly I was being dragged down that tunnel again, violently. I stopped breathing and suddenly I saw a lot more than what was in front of me.
I saw the hallway outside my bedroom through the eyes of a soldier who must have been standing right in front of my doors, and I saw Madeline with two of her guards near the wall across from him, waiting.
Stop! I shouted in my head, and then I was back to seeing from my own eyes, and Taland’s clean face was there again while I breathed like I’d been racing.
Goddess, how was I ever going to live like this? How was I ever going to get used to this? Taland had made it look so easy. I’d never once heard a word of complaint.
“Wake up,” I whispered, touching his cheek gently, and I wished he would open his eyes for me, but he didn’t.
He needed rest. The thought of how he’d been torn apart, clothes and skin and flesh right in front of my eyes, terrified me. He was going to need a lot of rest.
So, I put the towels and the bucket away and I pressed my hand in the middle of his chest and I called for a healing spell, even though he looked okay. I called for a simple one, second degree, to search and mend minor damages, just in case Madeline had missed something. Highly unlikely, but I needed to feel like I’d done something .
Colorful magic rushed down my arm, slipped out of my skin and into his, heating his chest for a moment.
A deep breath later, Taland’s breathing fell in a steady rhythm again. His eyes remained closed.
I stood up and went to the door, feeling like there was no ground beneath my feet.
“Sta—” I stopped myself.
I thought, Stay with him.
Yes, Mistress, the voices responded, and I no longer wasted another thought to tell them not to call me that. I just grabbed the handle and pulled the door open.
The hallway was much brighter than my room, where I’d only had the nightstand lamps on. Ricardus, the guard whose eyes I’d seen through just now, stepped to the side, and my breath caught in my throat to find Madeline right there, exactly like I’d seen her. Red suit without a wrinkle in sight, silver hair perfectly done, red staining her lips, and those round golden earrings I didn’t think I’d even recognize her without…
She was here.
“Rosabel,” she said, and her voice echoed in the high ceiling—or maybe it was just me. I forced air down my lungs without ever giving the slightest expression, but the way she was looking at me suggested she wouldn’t have noticed even if I’d have flinched. Her focus was on my eyes, which I understood. I’d seen myself, too, through the soldiers in my room, and I knew what they looked like. White, completely white. Just like Taland’s had become. The reason why was there, scratching the surface of my brain, trying to get my attention, but I was barely coping with all these new memories and views and thoughts and senses being dumped into my brain at the same time so I was constantly blocking everything I could block on instinct.
“You healed us,” I said, and my voice sounded even worse than earlier.
“Of course,” Madeline said.
Of course, like healing me was a very normal thing, like she’d done it all the time, all my life.
“Let’s talk, shall we?” she then said, and every inch of my skin crawled.
My first instinct was to say no, to tell her to leave so I could go sit with Taland until he woke up, make sure he was safe, but…
I could. I could make sure he was safe through these soldiers, and I really, so desperately needed to know what had happened, how the fight had ended, if Selem had really taken over—I needed to know.
“In my office. You can eat there, too. Come, Rosabel.”
Eat.
Could it be that my limbs were still shaking the way they were because I needed food?
Possibly. Probably.
I looked back at the room again, at the bed, hoping maybe Taland had opened his eyes, but he was still sound asleep, his face now clean. He looked…peaceful.
I would leave most of the soldiers with him. The ones in the room, and another five outside, I thought. And I was going to think the words clearly, too, except the moment I stepped outside, two of the soldiers on each end of the line they’d made in front of my doors moved with me, while the five remained. Ricardus took his place in front of the handles again, a mountain of a man that I knew nobody could possibly get through if they tried.
I didn’t need to think the words at all—I just needed to think like I normally did for them to understand, apparently. And judging by the look of pure shock on her face, Madeline was much more surprised by the fact than me.
“Lead the way,” I said, and I noticed how her guards looked at the soldiers behind me. I noticed the one on her right, the same guy who’d smuggled me into the Iris Roe, had pushed me around to his heart’s desire.
I’d been mad at him then. I felt nothing now.
Together all six of us made our way to Madeline’s office through the empty hallways, and I found myself praying it would be over soon.