Chapter 42 #2
She didn’t meet my gaze like the little sister who’d spent sixteen years trusting me to fix everything in her dangerous little world, who’d accepted my reassurances and believed my fabrications without a single question; rather, she looked at me a like a young woman who was sick of being lied to.
My numbed mind caught up too slowly.
Months spent on her own at an enemy court.
Months of keeping herself alive, of playing her own damn game with her own damn pieces.
I’d feared to find a broken version of the little girl I loved in some mouldy cell, and only now, meeting that unflinching violet glare, did I realise the opposite was sitting before me – still my very own Muri, but sharper, older, having risen to the challenge with a grit I hadn’t dared to hope for.
You can go to hell, that furious look said, and for a long, desperate second, even the gnawing cold of Niflheim seemed vastly preferable to whatever might come out of her mouth next.
Vile fucking liar.
‘What’s going on, Dur?’ she said tightly.
I closed my eye, saw gauntleted fingers close around slender upper arms again. ‘Could we please leave this for—’
‘No, we can’t.’ The tack of a mug hitting the table. ‘Not if you’re being this strange about everything. Who are they, this runewitch of yours? How did you get them into Mount Garnot in the first place?’
A small hand in my hand. A thumb brushing my skin.
Deal.
‘I made a bargain with her’, I said – not daring to open my eye, because the flat tone of my voice would be useless if she could catch even a glimpse of my memories in my gaze.
Thraga, letting out the smallest moan as she bit into a plump red strawberry.
Thraga, blind and deaf to the world as her fingers spun through formula after formula, face coming alight with focus.
‘The details of which aren’t necessarily—’
She scoffed. ‘Don’t be like that. Did she want you to revive someone?’
Of course she’d guess.
She was deathmade too, for hell’s sake. She knew what happened when people saw our scars – her own dress buttoned high, as always, to hide the single crystalline slash of Nal’s knife across her throat.
‘More or less’, I forced out, rubbing a finger over my smarting temples.
Half-truths, then. The part of the story she would need to hear sooner or later anyway, Father planting a spy at Mount Estien, her own drawings unravelling Estridson’s scheme.
‘She changed her mind over the course of our journey. About wanting him back, that is. So—’
‘Oh, so you didn’t really do anything wrong by shoving her into Lesceron’s hands?’ A biting sneer, hitting straight to the heart the way only siblings could. ‘Yes, that makes so much sense, of course. Flawless ethics, Dur.’
‘That is not what I meant.’ Too sharp again; I heard it and didn’t seem able to do anything about it. Thraga, standing on the edge of a cliff, laughter whipping out of her. Thraga, gasping against my mouth. ‘As I said, it’s a long story, and—’
‘Then tell me the bloody story’, she snapped. ‘And stop looking away from me, you fool. It’s not helping your case in the slightest.’
Flames alive.
I knew how to handle little Muri Averre, who treated the world like a game I would always win for her.
This version of her – this sharp-eyed girl who understood the price of those victories and would not pay it happily – wasn’t an opponent I had faced before, and how in the world was I going to get out of this conversation without cracking into a thousand pieces?
Did I have to?
I opened my eye.
‘You really look like a mess’, she informed me, peering at me like a physician investigating an ailing patient.
An edge of concern in her voice – but no fear.
No doubt. ‘I want to know what happened here, Dur. Your witch didn’t want her loved one back, and then what?
Did she take the beacon with her into Mount Garnot? ’
That mist-cursed vial, burning a hole in my bag. ‘No. Still have it.’
‘Then use it!’
‘What? No.’ The stutter of my heart caught in my voice – a mindless, pathetic show of weakness.
Anger, most of it. Envy, a small and far less honourable part; worst of all, the knowledge I wasn’t any better than Leif bloody Estridson with his cruel bloody games.
‘I said she didn’t want him back, didn’t you hear?
We made another deal. I’m not going to drag the bastard back to life as some useless compensation for—’
She stiffened. ‘The bastard?’
Fuck.
Sharp eyes, sharp ears. I should know; I’d been the one who’d taught her how to keep herself alive at court.
‘Another long sto—’
‘Oh, is it?’ Her nose wrinkled again, as if she could smell the words I wasn’t speaking. ‘Were you jealous of him, Dur?’
I felt my lips part.
I felt the gaping, damning emptiness on my tongue, the absence of every effortless denial that ought to tumble out. This should have come to me easily. Before Thraga, it would have. Now—
Don’t you dare lie, she’d said.
And even here, miles and so many unforgivable mistakes away, I felt the weight of those striking green eyes on my face.
‘You’re not serious,’ Muri said, voice low with horror and disbelief. ‘You actually liked her? You ran into the first person you’ve been able to stand since you died, and then you went ahead and delivered her into Uncle Lesceron’s greedy hands? Oh, you absolute—'
‘Muri, stop. Please.’ Cracks in the shield, deepening and widening, and I no longer knew how to stop them from spreading – how to keep the putrid rot within from seeping out.
There had been nothing to spill for so very long.
Now Thraga had dug her nails into places I'd thought safely buried, places I’d no longer remembered I had buried, and all of me was bleeding out at once. ‘None of this is relevant to you, and—’
‘Every secret is relevant. You told me that.’ Muri’s narrowed eyes clung like fishhooks to my face. ‘Is this why you’re not using that beacon now?’
‘For hell’s sake – no.’ The lies and truths were closing in on me. Like a spider trapped in its own web, thrashing against its own silk threads. ‘As I told you, she didn’t want—’
‘Yes,’ Muri admitted slowly, pensively, gaze not releasing me. ‘Yes, you said that. That’s pretty convenient for you, though, isn’t it?’
It hung between us like syrupy poison, and suddenly the world was no longer spinning.
Suddenly, everything was perfectly, cuttingly clear.
The deadly implications. The undiluted distrust. The girl who’d been dragged into Lesceron’s dungeons months ago had believed in me, and the young woman whose freedom I’d bought at the cost of my own blackened heart no longer did – not in spite of all I’d tried to do for her, but because of it.
If you end up betraying me, Thraga had told me, chin jutted forward in that way that made me want to kiss her and never let go, I don’t think I’ll be the only one suffering.
Dead and living hearts, I should have heeded that warning.
‘Muri …’ It felt like treading on broken glass.
Like picking out the salvageable pieces of my life from between the shards and finding none of them were left untainted.
‘Please. I’m not lying to you. I’ll tell you the whole story later, when we have more time – but this is all true, alright? I swear it is.’
She squinted at me a moment longer, then abruptly tore away her gaze and downed her entire mug of mead at once.
Before I could recover, she shot to her feet, snatched the toiletry bag I’d bought her from the corner of the table, and clutched it in her fist as if she was fighting not to punch someone with them.
‘The problem is,’ she said, her voice a little choked as she turned towards the bathroom, ‘that you lie to everyone, Dur. So how can I possibly believe you?’
The click was barely audible.
I woke unsure whether I’d even heard it at all, whether it hadn’t just been another figment of my feverish half-dreaming mind – conjuring up memories of Thraga slipping into my room at the Dawn House, of a warm, whip-strong body beneath my own.
But my nerves were on edge even with my mind still emerging into the conscious world, and my instincts rarely betrayed me … so I lay motionless in the dark room, keeping my breathing shallow, listening for the faintest sound to give away the threat.
There was nothing. No footsteps. No rustle of cloth. No breath or—
No breath.
I shot upright in the blankets, fire flaring in my palm.
There was no one to be seen in the spacious bedroom, no armed intruders sneaking up on me or burglars rifling through our luggage.
No Thraga. But against the far wall stood the bed into which my little sister had burrowed a few hours ago, in which she should still have been sleeping the rosy sleep of the innocent … and it was empty.
Muri’s bed.
Empty.
I stared at it for a breathless second as months of lingering fright grabbed me by the throat all over again, slamming the seventeen worst options into my mind at once.
Had Lesceron’s people come after us? Had someone broken in, dragged her out of the room by force? But the sound of a struggle would have woken me, and there was no visible sign of a fight – so if she wasn’t here, if only that soft little click had woken me …
Had she snuck out on her own?
But why? To order another drink downstairs, soothe her own restless mind? Old Muri wouldn’t have, but hell knew what else might have changed in these last few months. If she—
My eye caught on the coatrack.
My thoughts froze all over again.
Because her grey felt cloak was no longer there, slung over the wooden arm with characteristic carelessness. Her low black boots beside the door – gone. My own sweater, the one she’d worn as we fled from Mount Garnot – gone, gone, gone.
Suspicion rose in me, colder than the moonlight streaking over the floorboards.
‘Fuck,’ I breathed into the silence, and then I was moving, lunging out of the bed with flames crackling on my fingers.
My bag. Where was my damn bag? There, where I’d left it by the table – except that the small pouch on the side was unbuttoned now, and I sure as hell hadn’t left it open last night.
Oh, Muri, Muri, no.
I already knew what I wouldn’t find while I was falling to my knees. Already knew while I rummaged furiously through that little compartment, heart pounding in my fingertips – keys, ring, locket, but not the one item I needed desperately to still be there …
Then use it, she’d said.
And the vial with Leif’s blood was gone.