Chapter Sixteen #3
“I met someone the first night we arrived in the market,” I say, my pulse thrumming in my ears as I look around us. Even though we’re at a distance from the nearest spectators, there’s always a risk that a wind-born is near enough to hear. I drop my voice low. “It was him. In disguise.”
“Disguised how? Wearing a wig? Did you recognize him immediately?”
I shake my head. “His magic.”
“There were rumors,” he muses. “Not about him, but some of the old kings and queens. Never verified.”
“Or perhaps stricken from the record.”
Larus nods slowly, stroking his beard. “When did you know?”
“That night, although I wasn’t certain until last night.”
“When you saw him again.”
I nod.
“Did he follow you there? To the market?”
“I think so.”
Larus claps for someone emerging from the water-born trial. The sudden movement and sound startle me. I hadn’t even noticed they were swimming. “It seems he shares our idea,” he says as I join his applause.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that he wants to keep you close just as we want to keep you close to him. Convenient, but also dangerous. Has he done anything to endear himself to you?”
I blush, remembering the near-kiss. “Maybe once or twice.”
“And did it work?” Larus has been keeping his eyes forward, but he shifts them to me then, and I know he can see the answer before I say it.
“I liked Soren,” I admit. “That was who he pretended to be. But I don’t know the real him. I’ve only spoken to him a couple of times.”
That was the truth of it. No matter how much I’d liked Soren, Ronan wasn’t Soren, and I had no real idea how much they had in common.
It could be everything or almost nothing.
The entire existence of Soren could have been made to appeal to me specifically, for all I knew.
Ronan couldn’t read thoughts, but it seemed like more than a coincidence that my impression of him as too perfect when we met led to meeting a version of him with flaws fully on display.
“Be careful,” whispers Larus, his hand twitching over his sword reflexively. “It benefits him to win you over. Don’t forget it.”
I nod, but I know Larus can see something else is on my mind. He pauses, waiting for me to speak, but I don’t. I cheer for a man who hit a bullseye with a spear instead.
He sighs at me. “Say it,” he says.
I swallow, trying to force the panic that’s rising from my chest back down my throat. Of everything I’ve said to Larus, this is the thing I’m most afraid to talk about. “It’s about the Orsa. And Taran, in particular.”
Larus uncrosses and crosses his legs, switching which one is on top. For most, it would be a casual gesture. The kind of thing you do one hundred times a day without attracting any kind of attention. For him, a man completely aware of his appearance at all times, it’s the peak of agitation.
“What did he say to you?” he asks, his voice clipped.
“He told me about how his village was slaughtered—”
“Poachers. I remember.”
“You were there?” I can’t hide my shock and disgust, and I know Larus sees it too.
“No,” says Larus. “Your uncle’s men.” My uncle Theron, father’s younger brother. Lost in the war with the rest of them. He had been a favorite of my brother Seth’s, although Mother wasn’t fond of him from what I remembered. “Theron kept his men on a longer leash than your father liked.”
“So it’s true what they did? Slaughtered all of them, even the children?” I’m unwilling to ask what else had happened to them, what reason they had for stripping them naked. I can’t bear to even think of it.
“Yes, and it was disgracefully done. And with the king nearby on a hunt. Aurelian took no issue with it; no laws were broken after all. They were on Verran land. Their lives were forfeit. But your father was angry, both at Theron and at the king taking Taran as a ward. It never should have happened, but to keep the boy was a terrible insult.”
Their lives were forfeit. Even the children, who had no choice in the matter. I didn’t—couldn’t—understand. “Taran was only eleven. There were other children there too. What could they have possibly done?”
“Their parents knew what the consequences were, and they trespassed anyway. The blood is on their hands.”
“But they were starving—”
“Sylvara.” Larus never uses my full name. Not ever. Not even the time I climbed the highest castle tower as a child, a castle the Orsa now control, nearly falling to my death. I’ve always preferred Sylvie, and he has always respected that.
Until now.
“You don’t understand what you’re talking about, and that’s my fault, not yours.
I protected you from it. I shielded you from what the Orsa do, what they are.
But make no mistake, Sylvie, they are monsters.
They are not like us, no matter what Ronan would like you to believe.
They have ravaged your family’s lands for generations.
They have plundered your villages. They have slaughtered your children in their beds.
Everything we did to them in that village, they’ve done to us one hundred times over.
They are savages, and they will stop at nothing until Nithyria is ground to dust.
“I have served your family faithfully since I was no older than Taran. I have fought and bled for you because I believe in you. If you had seen the things I’ve seen—if you had watched your dearest friends die at their hands—you would never dream of defending them.”
I have never heard Larus say so much at once. He’s a man of few words, seldom prone to lecture. He likes to let me come to conclusions for myself. And yet here he is, telling me I’m wrong.
I trust Larus beyond anything. Beyond even my brother and sister. He’s more than twice my age, but in many ways, he’s my closest friend in the world.
But what he’s saying just doesn’t make sense to me, and I won’t lie to him and pretend that it does. I respect him too much for that.
“You say they’re not like us. But you also admit my uncle’s men did the same—”
“Because of what they did first.” His voice is sharp and impatient, and hearing it makes heat rise in the back of my neck.
It hurts me to hear his disappointment. I’m ashamed to argue with him, ashamed enough to consider letting it go, but I just can’t. “Does that make it right? It isn’t what you taught me.”
Larus sighs. “I hoped you would live in a time of peace. Of reconciliation. I prepared you to fight a war, but I didn’t prepare you to live in one. They took your home, Sylvie. We are at war with them, no matter what they say here. They are your enemy.”
The enemy. The other. I think of Adria’s words, and then of Ronan’s.
I think of Taran on the road back last night.
Shy, almost painfully so. Never drawing attention to himself, serving his king without complaint or question.
Beyond that, he’s grateful to him. He serves Ronan out of love, not fear.
If the heart of a killer beats in his chest, Taran hides it better than anyone I’ve known.
“The man who nearly killed me down there thought the same thing about me. Was he right?”
Larus opens his mouth to speak and then closes it.
He furrows his brows and crosses his arms in front of him, opens his mouth again and closes it again, and then shakes his head.
“Sylvie,” he says, and he softens, his eyes wrinkling at the corners as he almost smiles.
“Who taught you to be so wise?” He sighs again, a deep, heavy sigh that moves his entire chest. Then he slowly stands up.
“There’s a part of me that knows that you’re right.
Maybe not about everything, but you could be right about Taran, at least. I know it, I know it, but still I can’t agree.
I’m an old man, Sylvie, and the wounds they made have been there longer than you’ve been alive.
It’s not my mind you need to change. It’s my heart. ”
“Can you change my heart instead?” I ask him. I stand to face him, and I see a mixture of pride and confusion. At the end of the day, he loves me, even if he doesn’t understand me.
“I don’t think I can,” he says. “And I wouldn’t even if I could.” He places his hand on my shoulder. “Trust yourself, Sylvie. I have served your house most of my life, and I will continue to serve you as long as you let me. I have always believed in House Verran.
“But I have never believed in anything more than I believe in you.”
Tears spring to my eyes. I slowly nod at him. I don’t know if I believe in myself right now, but his faith in me gives me courage. Thank you, I think, but I don’t say it.
I don’t need to.
Larus returns to help Felix, whose dark skin has taken on a pale, greenish hue as he’s woken, and I check the arena floor for Adria so we can return to the palace together.
I’ve had enough of the tournament for one day.
There’s no sign of her near the sword-fighting ring, and no scorch marks leading away from it, so I take it her battle with Quinn was purely verbal. She probably guessed that I would return with Larus, so I head into the tunnel we entered to take a chariot back on my own.
I spot her there, standing against a wall just past the tunnel entrance. If I hadn’t been able to see in the dark, I’m not sure I would have noticed her. “Waiting to pounce?”
“Something like that,” she says. Her voice sounds rough, but that’s not unusual. Where there’s fire, there’s smoke. She must have gotten into something with Quinn after all for there to have been enough fire involved to make her voice hoarse.
“You alright?” I ask. I see no obvious burns, though her clothes are a bit disheveled.
“You should see her.” She grins.
“Come on.” I want to tell her what I’ve learned about Ronan and what I’m thinking about Quinn, but I can’t if she turns her to toast before I get the chance.
“I’m not heading back just yet.”
I roll my eyes and keep walking. There’s no point in arguing with her when she takes that tone. She just can’t help herself. “Keep an eye on her,” I say. “She could be up to something.”
“Like what?”
There are a few people making their way through the tunnel, so I don’t tell her about my suspicions that she could be leaking information about Ronan, and that if she is, she may even be an ally.
“She’s keeping an eye on us,” I say, echoing Larus’s words.
“Try not to kill her before we can find out why.”
“Look at who’s giving the orders now,” she says. She mockingly bows to me, and I give her a rude hand gesture. “Before you go, those shadow-born girls,” she says. “What does he think happened to them? Are you going to help him find them?”
That’s odd. She showed no interest in them before. “Did Quinn ask about them?”
“No,” she says, sighing impatiently. “Just tell me what he said.”
“We found one of them. No sign of the other.”
She doesn’t seem surprised when I tell her we found them, even though I hadn’t told her that part of the story yet. “Got it.”
I really don’t understand why she’s asking, unless she’s thinking that his shadow-born spies have been compromised in some way. Maybe she even had a part in it without telling me.
“Do you know where she is?” I ask. I remember the sound of Vesper’s mother’s voice, her worry and fear for her daughter. If Adria did something to her…
“For fuck’s sake, no. Now fuck off, before Quinn comes back.”
I shake my head and leave her there to play whatever stupid game she’s playing.
Fucking Adria. When they go low, she goes straight to hell.