Chapter Twelve
It takes a moment for him to compose himself. He’s frozen there in front of me, vulnerable at the end of my blunted blade, his eyes running from my sword to my lips to my hips and back.
Oh, I’ve won alright.
He looks like he’s seriously considering tossing the sword to the side and taking me in his arms.
But he controls himself, his mouth twitching as he backs away, laughing. “Well done.”
I lower the sword and give him a little bow. I try not to think too much of the feeling of him hard against me, of how satisfying it was to hear his little gasp of surprise.
Of the way my body stirred in response.
Of the way it pulses with warmth to see him smiling and clapping for me.
All part of the plan, I tell myself. It’s the plan and nothing more.
Off to the side, someone clears their throat.
It’s Taran. He must have arrived at some point during our last exchange.
My mood shifts instantly, and I know Ronan can sense it because he asks, “Something wrong?”
“You know what’s wrong. I don’t understand how you can have someone like that as your guard.”
After everything his people have done to mine. To parade an Orsan around us.
It’s insulting.
“Someone like what, exactly?” says Ronan. He quickly puts his shirt back on, and I do the same with my armor.
“Someone like him. He’s Orsan.” As I say the words, I hear how dangerously close they sound to what Quinn was saying about us.
But it’s different. We’re the victims of them both: the Orsa and the Selarans. It makes sense for us to hate them.
Ronan’s lips press into a thin line. He draws himself up into his full regal posture and crosses back to me.
He towers over me.
“What do you even know about the Orsa?” he asks, an accusation in his voice.
What do I know? Is he kidding?
“What do I know? What I know is that they’ve killed my people for generations. I know they’ve raided our lands and stolen our home.”
King or not, I won’t be insulted in this way. My father started a war for this.
“Taran, come here.”
Taran does as his king commands. I’ve been too distracted with everything going on to pay much attention to him, but I get a good, long look at him now.
Admittedly, he doesn’t look that threatening. He’s not a tall man, only an inch or so taller than Adria, I’d guess, his body all lean muscle. His hair is a bright, sun-bleached blonde, almost as light as an infant’s. His eyes are a clear baby blue, and his face is even more freckled than mine.
But I don’t let his boyish appearance fool me.
I can tell everything I need to know about him from the dark tattoo on his neck.
The shapes of it are geometric, but they follow the curve of his body in an organic way.
I might be impressed by the artistry if I wasn’t so repulsed by everything it stands for.
“Tell her about when we found you.”
Taran looks to Ronan in confusion. “Your majesty? I came to tell you Queen Claudia is looking for you—”
“She can wait. Tell her about what happened to your people.”
Taran and I have at least one thing in common: we don’t know where the king is going with this.
But Taran can’t refuse him, so he does as he asks, even though it clearly makes him uncomfortable. “They came into my camp in the night while we were sleeping. I was eleven. We’d been there maybe a month, following the game down into the valley.”
Poaching illegally, more like it. Poaching was punishable by death.
“We had no real fighters among us. They’d been lost in previous raids on our home, leaving only a couple who knew their way around a sword. Our hunting bows were no use in the ambush.”
Those previous raids had likely been in response to their own.
Ronan’s eyes are on me, and he scowls in disapproval at my emotional response.
Let him.
Taran swallows, looking down at his boots as if it can prevent him from having to picture what he’s saying.
“I was in the forest when they came. I’d gotten up in the night to relieve myself, and I hid when I heard the screams. It…
it wasn’t quick. They kept some of them alive for hours. My parents, my sister—”
He chokes a little on the last word.
And it slaps me awake.
Neither his words nor his response to the memories should come as a surprise to me, but they do. I’ve never spoken to an Orsan before. I’ve never thought of what the stories would sound like from the other side.
I’ve heard about our righteous slaughter of the Orsan raiders who attacked our own people many, many times. Every story felt like vengeance. Every story felt like victory against a savage foe.
But Taran, even now many years later, doesn’t look savage.
I know how he feels, I realize. I know how it feels to lose your family to something that you have no say in. To be powerless to do anything to help them because you’re too young.
“I found their bodies in the morning. They—they had no clothes. They had wounds in places…I couldn’t leave them like that. The Nithyrians had taken everything—our skins, our linens. But I found a shovel, and I dug them a grave.”
“And that’s where we found him,” said Ronan. “My father and I, out on a hunt in Nithyria like we did sometimes before the war. We found him dragging his mother’s naked body into a shallow grave.” His look pierces me. “Eleven years old.”
My stomach twists and lurches upward, a cold, sick wave flooding my chest until I feel like I might retch right here.
I don’t have anything to say to that. I can’t think of anything that could justify what happened to him. What happened to his people. It’s one thing to stop poachers. That’s necessary, especially when people are starving. But what happened to them—if it’s true?
It’s inexcusable. Dishonorable. Vile.
Who had done it? Was it my own father?
My mother?
Larus?
“Sylvie?” says Ronan, lifting a hand in my direction but stopping himself.
I lean against a pillar for support. The world feels as if it’s tilting beneath me, my breath coming in shallow, uneven gasps. It takes a minute, maybe longer, before I can steady myself enough to find my voice, to push past the tightness in my throat and speak.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly, knowing it isn’t enough. It could never be enough to make up for what he lost. What my people took from him. I look up into Taran’s blue eyes, so vividly clear and piercing I feel exposed beneath their gaze.
We took everything from him, just as Ronan and his family had taken everything from us. “I didn’t know.”
I’ve hated the Orsa since I was a child.
I was brought up with warnings about leaving our lands, told countless times by my parents, by Larus, by Adria, by Seth, and even by our servants, about the danger they posed to us.
That they would kill me in my sleep without a second thought.
That they’d drag me off in the night and force me to bear their children. I accepted it as true without question.
And I still believe them, but I can’t help but think about why Taran joined the fight against us. It wasn’t because he was inherently bad. He was just a child; how bad could he have possibly been? It was because we had taken everything from him, and in a brutal, horrible way.
We took out our enemies that day, and in the process, we made a new one.
“I tried to fight Ronan when he found me. I thought he was one of you.”
His words sting, but I can’t blame him for seeing me as one of his enemies.
I had seen him that way until only moments ago.
“Thankfully, all he had was that shovel. But my father was so impressed with his courage, he asked him to join his guard in training, and the rest is history,” says Ronan.
Taran clears his throat, an awkward smile tugging at his lips at Ronan’s praise, searching for something to redirect the conversation and lighten the mood.
“If we’re reliving the past, you should at least tell her about the birthday when you challenged me to a duel because you thought I’d drunk the last of your beer.”
Ronan laughs, and I can see the years of friendship between them. Taran is more than Ronan’s guard. He’s a confidant, a companion whose loyalty is rooted not in duty but in their history together.
I’m embarrassed by what I’ve said about him.
But I’m also angry because it all comes down to the food.
Maybe if we’d had enough food, we wouldn’t have needed to treat poachers so harshly, and we could have shared more of our land.
“I am sorry for what happened to you. No one should have treated you or your people that way. But my people were starving because of what Selara demands of us. My people are still starving because of what Selara demands of us. We have done what we have to in order to survive.”
Ronan and Taran exchange a look I can’t read. “Is that what they’ve told you?” asks Ronan.
My blood boils at the implication that we’d lie about that. “I’ve seen the hungry people myself. I’ve seen the spoiled grain.”
Ronan’s brow furrows, genuine confusion spreading over his features as he studies me. It’s clear this revelation unsettles him, and for a moment, he seems at a loss for words. “But have you yourself ever gone hungry?”
“I—”
No, I hadn’t. The castle had many mouths to feed, all of them vital to keeping the country—province, whatever—running.
Just because there was enough to feed the castle, that didn’t mean there was enough for everyone.
“There was a problem with the grain last harvest,” Ronan explains, “but we increased our imports from Brakkar to make up for it. Your stores should have kept you going in the meantime. That’s the report I have from Typhon. Was it inaccurate?”
Shit.
I may have just revealed something I shouldn’t have. I know we’ve kept Typhon out of our plans. I’m not sure what we told him to report back to the king. It sounds like we managed to hide the problem with the grain from Typhon.
But…why? I thought we’d asked Ronan for help, and he’d refused. He’s acting like he didn’t know there was a problem at all.
“Just because things are better now doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten the past,” I lie, hoping he doesn’t notice my confusion.
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” says Ronan. “But I hope you’ll also think of the future.”
He looks at me intently, and Taran backs away a bit to give us some space.
Ronan drops his voice so it’s very low and soft, the same sort of intimacy he offered me on the night we met.
“We have lived with these feuds all our lives. There are scores being kept that have been kept since long before we were born, and if we don’t do something to change it, they’ll keep going long after we die.
We can tally them all up, measure whose loss hurts the most, find out who is owed the most in repentance.
A point here, a point there. Weigh the missing grain, count the parents taken from their children.
Gather up all the blood, sweat, and tears and see whose make the deeper ocean.
But to what end? Where does it stop? Are we doomed to repeat this pattern for all eternity? ”
It's easy for him to say this from the top. He won. If we let the feud end here, he’s triumphant. Would he feel the same way if our rebellion had been a success?
A wrinkle forms between his brows. “You don’t believe me?”
“It’s not that I don’t. It’s just that I think it’s a lot easier to say what you’re saying when you’re the winner.”
“It didn’t feel like victory.” There’s a raw edge to his voice, the same bare, painful look on his face as when we first met.
“What I’m saying is that there is no winner.
There shouldn’t be. This world was built on violence.
On slavery, on conquest. On the backs of the other, the outsider, the stranger.
The enemy. There’s always an enemy. The alchemists tell me it’s in our nature.
The strong over the weak. The pure over the tainted.
The priests tell me it’s destined by the gods.
The righteous will triumph over the unworthy.
“But the gift I was granted has taught me one truth: there are no others. Whatever it is that we are, we’re the same. And this beautiful, terrible world has enough for all of us, or it did until we destroyed it. Until my family destroyed it, and yours too.”
My family didn’t destroy anything. What little we had was taken from us. His father is the one who destroyed it all.
“But I believe it can have enough again, if we nurture it. If we work together to build something better than what was given to us. This festival isn’t just for fun. We were born into a fight that doesn’t have to be ours. We can choose another path.”
What is this? Some kind of trick? A pretty speech to make me feel like he cares so I won’t do what I came here to do?
If it is, he’s a better actor than even Adria. He’s wasted on the throne. He should have been on the stage.
And if he’s being genuine, if he really believes what he’s saying, what does he intend to do about it? Pretty words won’t save my people. Pretty words won’t feed them. It’s nice that he wants to build a world where we all have enough one day, but what about right now?
And what am I meant to do about what he says, anyway? “Why are you telling me this?” I ask him. “I’m not the head of House Verran. I’m not even the heir.”
“Because I know you’ll listen. Because I know you’re smart enough to see I’m right. And I’m hoping it makes a difference.”
I shake my head. “You don’t know me, Ronan,” I say again.
“Maybe not,” he says. But this time, he adds, “But I want to.”