Chapter 4 #2
Even as she thought it, as she made herself look past her sister, she saw Nik edging under the lifted slab too, gripping something. Tugging.
That was when she realized where in the apartment they were—what the broken pieces of wood here represented.
The table. Her sister had been at her usual seat at Einar’s table. Which meant, if she’d been seated…
All of them. All of them were here, under this crushing slab of obsidian, six inches thick. Put in place to protect the occupants of the palace from any rogue vents or flows.
She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t move.
Had to. Had to get them out of this place, had to see if someone, somehow was still alive.
She retreated, pulling Krystiana with her, ignoring the pieces of this or that that cut into her knees, tore at her dress, sliced her palms. Her cuts and bruises she could heal easily enough with snow later.
None of that mattered now. She got her sister clear and then went back under, hefting the slab higher, higher still, so that she didn’t have to crawl.
Chiding herself for not thinking to do it sooner.
“Two over here. The prince…and I think this is his wife.” The voice of her companion sounded as strangled as she felt.
As heavy as the slab she held up—she didn’t dare shove it away entirely, onto who-knew-what.
What if Mamma had been using the washroom and was trapped and Kyrja crushed her if she tossed it elsewhere?
But…no. There was the familiar dark hair, threaded through with silver. The familiar shoulders, bowed forward. Doubled over, one hand outstretched. Kyrja reached for it, clasped her fingers.
Cold. So cold. But Mamma’s hands, gnarled with arthritis, were always cold. That didn’t mean she was gone.
Too cold though. And no reaction as Kyrja tugged, trying to free her from the jumble of broken table and splintered chair.
“Mamma.” She eased around to a different angle and wrapped her arms around her mother’s thick sweater.
“Mamma, come on. Be alive. Be all right. Please, Mamma, I’m not ready to lose you. ”
No response. Kyrja caught a sob as it tried to slip past her lips, wrestled it down, and pulled her mother out of the wreckage, toward the open space where she’d put her sister.
She knew, of course. Even as she lowered her gently to the floor, she knew there was no way fragile, aging Mamma with her brittle bones and aching joints had survived that crushing blow. Not if her daughter hadn’t. Not if her son hadn’t.
Einar. She’d somehow heard Nik’s words without processing them, but now she flew across the space under the slab, to the other side, where the stranger was pressing his ear to Einar’s chest, his fingers to his throat.
Freya already lay in the Fjordic position of final rest, her eyes closed, arms folded at the waist, body in a perfect line. As she watched, Nik moved Einar into the same pose. Taking care to arrange him perfectly, while she’d just left her mother and sister however she’d dropped them.
Guilt pierced, but it was quickly eclipsed by something softer. Gentler.
Gratitude. This stranger who didn’t know them, never met them, and clearly hadn’t wanted to—unlike his friend—took the time and care to give this dignity.
She had to pivot away before the pressure at the back of her eyes could turn to shameful tears.
So she pretended to check under the slab for anyone else, even though she knew no one else would have been at that table other than her and Fodur.
Once she’d made certain, she managed a weak, “Stand clear,” and then lowered the slab back down.
It only took her a minute to give her mother and sister the same attention the stranger had spared for her brother and sister-in-law. But her hands shook as she closed their eyes. Straightened their spines. Arranged their limbs.
They couldn’t be gone. They couldn’t—it was impossible. There was no such thing as a day without her sister’s snipping and rebuking. Without her brother’s patient instruction. Without Mamma’s eyes brimming with love. If they were gone, then surely Kyrja was too, or would be.
She didn’t know how to exist without them.
“Would anyone else have been in here? Servants?”
Jolting, she pulled her gaze from her mother’s too-still face to where Nik had come to her side. He was covered in ash and soot and sympathy, but that same determination she’d noted in him on the steps still gleamed through the grim.
The words clattered around inside a moment before resolving into sense. Of course he was concerned for more people than her people—and that was to his credit. Her family was gone, as inconceivable as that was.
But others could well be alive in this wreck of a wing, waiting for rescue.
Kyrja drew in a breath, blinked the burdensome feelings back into their places, and forced her mind to work.
“Not in here—Freya could never get accustomed to the idea of people waiting on her. But we should keep going. There are undoubtedly people injured elsewhere who we can help.”
He reached out, not even hesitating before resting a hand on her forearm—something no one from Reykstoll would ever do without her express permission. To purposefully touch a Blessed without invitation, without her reaching out first, was punishable by up to a year in prison.
His gaze was so far from malicious though that she knew he either didn’t know the law or saw her only as a person just now, not a Blessed. Not a princess. “You can stay here with them,” he said so softly she could scarcely hear him. “If you want to. I’ll do what I can elsewhere.”
“No.” In part because the idea of being left alone with the empty husks that had once been her family was as crushing as that slab of obsidian, yes.
But it wasn’t only that. “You’ll need my help to move things and douse fires.
” Something tickled her cheek, and she swiped at it, startled to feel the wetness on her fingertips.
“Are you certain?” His hand drifted away from her arm. “You ought to remain where it’s safe, Your Highness—”
“No.” At least she sounded firm this time. “I ought to help as many as I can. That’s the whole point of the Blessing.”
“Yes, but…” He glanced past her, down. Over. “Forgive my bluntness, Highness, but you’re the only remaining heir to the throne. Your safety is of the utmost importance.”
She jumped, his words a shock as bright and piercing as lightning.
That couldn’t be. She was never supposed to be the Heir.
She was the pet, the decoration, the one with no purpose beyond giving her mother someone to coddle and cuddle.
The weight of Fjordlandi couldn’t possibly rest on her shoulders.
“That…” Denials tripped over each other, but something about his face stilled them.
The calm expectation in his green eyes. The lack of question, the acceptance, the certainty that she could be what she was—a daughter of King Isidor and Consort Andresa, as surely as her brother and sister had been.
She cleared her throat. “That is beside the point. My father is still alive and well, and I wouldn’t be worthy of my place in this family if I didn’t do all I could to help right now.
My safety is secondary. We exist to serve our people. ”
Something glinted in his eyes, softened the line of his mouth, something she’d seen so rarely she struggled to find the word for it. Even when she recognized it—approval, admiration even—she couldn’t quite accept that it was for her.
And it didn’t matter. They hadn’t time for such things. With one last sniff to get herself under control, she called up water and, with a slow move of her hand, encased each of her family members in ice to preserve and protect them.
The next hour blurred into the following, her muscles aching more with each person she helped pull from the wreckage.
Where there should have been ceiling and roof above them, open sky stretched—too open, the clouds Krystiana usually held over them breaking up and parting, letting a rare sunset paint the world in reds and golds that might have been beautiful if they didn’t echo the fires still spurting up here and there.
Wind blew in off the harbor, sending all the smoke inland.
Someone would have to regather the clouds before too much longer, or the night would bring with it a cold that could kill as surely as the blast had.
They’d found survivors. Not enough, but each set of eyes she saw blink open, each cough she heard was cause to smile.
Other workers in all manners of dress had found their way inside by that point, with Dania leading the medical help from a triage unit she’d set up just outside the palace.
They’d exchanged a nod, her friend’s eyes so full of relief that Kyrja hadn’t had to wonder what had brought the doctor dashing their way.
She’d have feared Kyrja was in the blast.
She would have been, had she not been stopped by Rafnar, who they’d also spotted a bit ago, lending his bulky muscles to the efforts underway in the servants’ quarters. More people were found alive there, anyway, farther from the central blast.
Exhaustion clawed its way onto her limbs, bit by bit. She’d have to rest soon, or at least find food or water to renew her energy enough to keep going. Adrenaline could only carry her so far.
“Valkyrja.”
Her spine snapped straight at the voice she knew better than any other, despite hearing it less than some.
She spun and saw her father striding her way, his white-and-silver clothing marred by soot, his face lined with unusual care.
A dozen members of the Vektor Guard kept pace behind him, some with the imperial silver markings of the Blessed, the others without.
All equally dirty, scraped, and bleeding.
She’d already doused her hands five times in the snow she called up to stem her own bleeding, only to reopen the wounds on the next piece of rubbish she climbed over to help the next victim.
She genuflected, which apparently cued the others nearby to do the same—though where they remained kneeling, she rose to her full height again. “Fodur.”
His eyes swept left then right, his frown carving glacial tracks in his forehead. “Where are your brother and sister? I sensed you almost immediately after the attack, but not them.”
“Attack?” Her hand lifted, settled at her throat.
His gaze settled not on her but on those behind her. “Rise, all of you. Don’t stop your work on my account.” Icy blue eyes moved to her again, somehow dismissive even as they focused on her this time. “The fires are out in the residential wing, so clearly they are at work, but I—”
“I put them out.” She could tell from the way he froze that her voice had conveyed far more than her words. “They…they were crushed, Fodur. All of them. The roof caved in, a slab of obsidian falling onto the table. Einar, Freya, Krystiana, Mamma…all of them.”
He didn’t move a muscle, didn’t so much as twitch. But she felt condemnation and accusation in his gaze.
Behind her, someone shifted. Moved closer. Nik. They’d been working in tandem for hours, his presence growing familiar even though they’d exchanged only the words necessary to coordinate their movements.
Fodur’s nostrils flared. “You were not with them?”
“I was late leaving the clinic and then stopped by a few travelers who had just arrived in the city and requested an icograph.” She motioned toward Nik. Raf wasn’t within sight at the moment. “I was still talking with them when the explosion—”
“Attack,” he said again. “This was the work of the Red Hands. Their leader claimed as much moments before it happened.” His gaze narrowed on Nik. “Who are you, farmling?”
Nik bowed again, though he winced a bit. Was he in pain? Or perhaps, like Mamma, he didn’t appreciate the term farmling. “Nikanor Tristansson, Your Majesty. From Harroby Dome.”
Nothing could have prepared her for the sneer that seized her father’s lips—lips usually in a straight line, unperturbed by either the positive or the negative. Nor for the arm he lifted, slashed out. Ice encapsulated Nik’s feet and arms.
“Fodur!” She didn’t mean to interfere, not really—but her own arm flew out, and in the next moment, the ice shattered.
She dropped her arm. Blinked. She must have startled her father into withdrawing his ice. Otherwise there was no way she could have overpowered him, even if he was exhausted. She was too.
So why was it his hand rather than his magic that reached out, curled around her wrist, and yanked her away? “You will not sully yourself defending that traitor.”
“Traitor?” She and Nik echoed the word at the same time, and she knew her face betrayed the same confusion as his.
“His father is Tristan Hansson—leader of the Red Hands. Terror-maker. Bomb-planter. Murderer.”
She looked from her father’s face, cold with fury, to Nik’s. Some of the confusion faded, yes, but no guilt replaced it.
No denial either though. No stubbornness. He moved his mouth for a moment before he found his words. “My…my father did this?”
“With pride. He boasted about it seconds before the explosion, before he claimed his son would see the thanes received their due and took his own life.” Fodur all but spat the words, motioning his Vektors forward. “Seize him.”
Kyrja tried to pull her arm free, to move between Nik and the guards, but her father pulled her from him. “But Fodur, this man did nothing. He arrived in the city moments before the explosion, was speaking to me when it happened, and has been aiding me in relief efforts ever since.”
“And you think that was coincidence? That he didn’t seek you out? That he wasn’t helping to try to provide himself with an alibi?”
Nik’s face went white as the snows. “Your Majesty, I—I assure you, I am ignorant of my father’s plans. I thought he was here for trade negotiations, I—”
“You will be tried.” As Fodur spoke, his men wrested Nik’s arms behind him and wrapped his wrists in metal twine that one of the Blessed officers then froze into place. “The truth will be discovered.”
Kyrja’s shoulders sagged a bit. A trial would be humiliating, but of course her father was right. It was the means of discovering the truth. If Nik was innocent, as her gut said he was, then his claims would be verified.
If not, then that would be discovered too.
Nik’s gaze snapped to hers. He straightened, a plea in his eyes. “I would never seek to hurt anyone, Your Highness. That includes your family. Please know that.”
That was his plea? Not that she would try to help, not that she would find him a man of law to defend him, but that she wouldn’t blame him for the deaths of her family?
Not the words of a terror-maker.
Or the words of the cleverest of deceivers?
She made no response. Just watched as the guards led him away, no doubt to take him to the prison that her brother was no longer there to maintain.