Chapter 42
Durlain
Liar.
The world passed in a blur around me.
Soldiers. Horses. Gazes of Garnot courtiers, burning on the edges of my sight.
Muri – Muri – whole and alive in my arms, sobbing against my shoulder – a victory, yet not even the sound of her voice or the tickle of her hair in my face could drag my mind away from those last glimpses, those last words.
You vile fucking liar …
An undeniable truth.
I’d thought I made peace with the fact years ago – but right here, right now, the black, festering thing in my chest was pumping those same four words through my veins like a septic infection, set to kill me all over again.
Muri was with me, though. Muri was looking at me with questions in those violet eyes, the way she’d looked at me sixteen years ago, standing by our mother’s blood-soaked bed with her little hand in mine …
and so I did what I’d done that day and every next one since.
Smiled, even if my lips felt like coarse old rope stuck onto my face.
Held her tighter, even if the sensation of touch made me want to strip the skin off my hell-cursed bones.
Bit back every scream scratching with bloody claws at the walls of my windpipe, every animal howl brewing in my guts, and muttered in that soft, light voice that sounded almost like my own, ‘We’ll be alright, Mouse. You’re safe now, I promise.’
Usually, I somehow made it true.
This time, Thraga spat in the back of my mind, Liar.
The inn was too close to Mount Garnot. I knew it in my bones – knew I couldn’t trust Lesceron to keep his word and leave us alone as he’d bargained – and yet I couldn’t bring myself to ride a single step farther from the palace when sunset finally spread in a sickly green haze across the sky behind us.
Perhaps I could still turn back tomorrow.
Perhaps I’d think of a rescue plan if I just gave myself a minute to rest. Numb thoughts, turning over and over in my mind as Muri rattled about guards and cells and servants-turned-friends – perhaps I could fix this, perhaps I could still undo what I’d done, perhaps …
Oh, merciful flames.
Who was I trying to fool?
That’s the nature of the game, Durlain, Father had told me, with that kind smile I’d learned to fear before I could walk on my own two legs.
Kneeling before me on the dais. Pressing a bandage to the black hole of agony where my left eye had been, then the twist of a knife.
Every action has its consequences. This is an important lesson, my boy.
The consequences had arrived hours ago.
There was no undoing them, only a desperate hope of making them slightly less horrifying, and yet I steered Smudge towards that bloody inn – yet I fended off Muri’s sensible questions with an easy excuse about hunger and warmth.
Within these four walls, at least I knew what to do.
Mask. Horses, room, dinner. Familiar routine, tried-and-tested lies; I moved through them feeling like an empty husk, the court-forged exterior of lies and half-truths I’d begun to believe was all that was left of me.
If not for Thraga—
Stop trying to make me hate you.
Words throbbing without pause behind my temples.
I’m not so sure you aren’t a good person …
Glaring green eyes. Fingers curling around mine.
A death blade hovering inches from my throat in an Elenon inn – memories more painful than the stinging ache of my scars or the poison air still itching on my skin as I forced myself to smile, eat, not throw up.
Thraga hurtling a blade at Belloc’s face.
Thraga clinging to my arms around her small, incomprehensibly tough body. I don’t think I’m scared of your pain.
‘… and then I said, well, having you as a grandfather must have been such a comfort to her in those last weeks …’ Muri was saying, chewing vigorously on her hazelnut cake on the other side of the table.
I laughed.
A hollow shell, that laugh. Vile fucking liar.
Was she even still alive right now? Was she fighting back?
Did she need my help at all, or would she save herself more easily than I could ever dream to do – would she single-handedly blow up Mount Garnot, run a knife through Lesceron’s heart, then come after me to take the revenge she’d promised me in that Dorraven inn?
I might as well end up hurting you, and fuck, I’d never wished so desperately for a blade to the gut …
‘… so that’s when I heard Ancelet was at the court as well!
’ Muri, still talking – cake finished, a single crumb of honey-covered hazelnut sticking to her cheek as she gesticulated vigorously.
‘And of course those men told me they weren’t going to pass on any messages, but I think if I’d had a few more weeks … ’
Mount Garnot was a fortress, though. A burrow built to keep inside everything it contained, and even Thraga Gunnsdottir and her fascinating, wickedly puzzling mind had their limits.
The bastards had probably taken her knives, too, and if I hadn’t felt sick to the bottom of my stomach yet, that thought would have—
‘Dur?’
My head snapped up.
Muri sat peering at me on the other side of our dinner table – quiet, for the first time since we’d entered this wood-and-velvet room.
Graphite-stained fingers wrapped around a mug of honey mead.
Dark hair a mess of curls around her shoulders.
Every inch the little sister I knew, the little sister for whose sake I’d gladly brave hell a hundred times over – and yet, in the ever-shifting firelight, something about her gaze was suddenly different.
There weren’t just questions in it.
Instead – suspicions of answers.
‘Hmm?’ the shallow husk of me said, the lie of that calm, light tone bitter on my tongue.
‘I’m just wondering.’ That was a lie too, of course – because if she were just wondering, she’d already have asked her question. Just wondering was the start of an interrogation. ‘You’re very much not telling me anything about what you’ve been up to, aren’t you?’
Fuck.
‘No’, I admitted, because it would be a lost cause to argue that part. ‘No, I figured—’
‘Did you do it?’
I stared at her.
She seemed equally shocked by the sudden vehemence of that question – flushing slightly on the other side of the table, lips clamping together as if to deny the sharpness of her words.
But she didn’t avert her gaze. Narrowed, inquisitive eyes, fixed on my face – and no explanations or elaborations followed, nothing to blunt the sharpest edges of that blow.
It.
It didn’t matter how hot the fire burned, how warm the coat around my shoulders was. Something colder than hell itself was drawing up my guts, my lungs, my throat.
‘Beg your pardon?’ I enquired, mildly, as if there was any question of what she was talking about.
‘Lesceron.’ Her nose wrinkled in disgust. ‘He told me about the deal he made with you. Did you bring him a runewitch like he asked, Dur?’
Liar.
I didn’t wince. I didn’t scream.
I sat, still and placid, even as my heart tore itself to tattered shreds behind the flimsy shield of my ribs.
They weren’t for her to see, my hurts and fears – the only rule I’d never, never broken in the sixteen long years since Mother’s death.
She had to be safe. She had to know she was safe.
And if that meant I couldn’t break, couldn’t fold, couldn’t waver, then I wouldn’t; if that meant turning myself into a shield of lifeless, bloodless stone, then hell below, so be it.
It was fine. Or at least it had been fine, and then Thraga—
Fuck.
‘I did, yes.’ As if I was back at court, reporting to Father in my coldest, blandest tones. Did you kill Pollara, Durlain? ‘It was the easiest solution to the situation, everything taken into account.’
Limp-dicked wife-murderer, Thraga hissed in the back of my mind.
Muri just stared at me, with wide, incredulous eyes – lips parted a fraction, but not moving, not speaking.
‘Don’t worry about it, Mouse.’ Old, tired words, never so laughable before. ‘The important thing is that you’re out of there, alright? As long as—’
‘Don’t worry?’ she sputtered, her voice too high. ‘You left someone in that hell-cursed place because of me, and now you’re telling me not to worry?’
‘It’s not your fault. None of it is your fault.’ It was a struggle to get the words out the way they ought to – calm, reassuring, untainted by the raw misery roaring behind. ‘Let’s talk about this tomorrow, alright? You should—’
She snorted impressively, hands going white around her mug. ‘You always say that when you’re not going to talk about it at all.’
‘Muri—’
‘Do you even know what Lesceron wanted a witch for in the first place?’ A flicker of a pause; she must have read the answer on my face, because her voice grew explosively louder. ‘What if he feeds them to the Maw? Or to the lava? Or maybe he wants to experiment on their bones the way he does with—’
‘Muri, stop it!’
She froze.
The silence was suddenly absolute.
I’d—
Fuck. I’d raised my voice?
I hadn’t meant to. I never did. But the words had torn from my throat like shards of glass, and I heard them echo now in the paralysis between us – that, and the mind-numbing horror of her last words.
The image of Lesceron sliding knives into thorn mark and scarred skin, dissecting my murderous little miracle like an aberration to be studied and discarded …
My hands were shaking.
When had they started shaking?
‘Dur?’ Muri said.
‘It’s been a long day.’ An easy lie, yet it did not come easily – my lips and tongue fighting the words as I pushed them out.
Something was cracking. It might be my mask; it might be my sorry excuse for a heart.
‘This really isn’t the best moment to talk about these things. You should take a bath and—’
‘Oh, shut up about my baths’, she said sharply, and if the loudness of my own voice had been a surprise, the tone of hers was even more so – because she did not sound scared.
She barely even sounded shocked.