Chapter 26 #2
“Alright,” Peter said, cutting off the conversation and looking over at me and Ford pointedly.
I couldn’t meet his eye. Peter was the closest thing I’d had to a father and I had no interested in him knowing the intimate details of my life.
“Let’s allow everyone to settle back in.
Everyone is alive and healthy—that’s a win.
I might even turn a blind eye to some celebrations later tonight. ”
That sent everyone scurrying away, motivated to finish their tasks for the day as early as possible. Hell, even I wanted to cut loose a little bit.
“Not you all, obviously,” Peter said, his mouth turning up in his tell-tale sign that he thought he was being funny. His dry humor never quite landed with the punch he thought it did. “My office. Now.”
Before any one of us—or all of us—could protest, Peter sighed and ran his hands down his face. “Yes, I mean after you tend to your horses. Fifteen minutes, not a second more.”
Even that was pushing it, seeing as in our home stables, our horses tended to act like preening babies. Sky had a particular appetite for treats that had ended with my ponytail in his mouth, refusing to let me leave, more times than I could count.
I’d always had a sneaking suspicion someone had been feeding him treats behind my back, something I quickly confirmed when I saw Ford slip him one.
“Hey!” Ford caught my hand in a warm grasp right before it connected with his shoulder with a light smack. “You know that’s spoiling him.”
Even now, Sky was looking at me with huge, pleased eyes, thinking he’d gotten away with something sneaky.
Ford dragged my other wrist into his grasp, holding both of them firmly—and in a way that made my stomach clench—before moving to feed Sky another treat, keeping eye contact the entire time. “Yeah, well he wasn’t my biggest fan for a long time. I had to bribe him somehow.”
Ford had said something about Sky pushing him over. At the time, I’d thought damn right, but now—you know what, damn right. Sky was half of my heart and he thought he was protecting me the way he knew how. At least he was smart enough to accept a bribe when it was given to him.
“He likes you fine now,” I said, nodding at the way Sky was subtly notching his nose down to invite some pets on his muzzle.
Ford smiled wide. “Progress. He probably knows you like me now.”
It was on the edge of my tongue to correct him. Well, not correct him, but add to it. Tell him I didn’t just like him, but loved him. Was in love with him.
It was right, right there, but I didn’t get the chance because Ford pulled me behind him with a muttered curse under his breath that we didn’t need Peter coming down here after us.
My entire body felt tight, with the sort of anticipatory pain of knowing something that someone else didn’t. It wasn’t a good time to have that kind of conversation with Ford, to just drop that bomb on him.
Sure, I didn’t think he would proceed down this road with me if he didn’t at least think something permanent would come from it. But that was hope for a future. It didn’t mean that he was actively in love with me.
My mind was momentarily caught in a battle of wills, the darker parts of myself launching horrible, intrusive thoughts at me that Ford felt nothing more for me than Bond-powered lust and it was silly of me to hope that he would want anything more, especially with someone like me.
The part of me that I’d trained to combat those thoughts did a pretty good job of swatting them away, getting a solid bout of help from the Bond itself.
Even if the latter camp won that fight, it still wasn’t a good time to say anything. And a sinking feeling in my stomach—something deeper than just an intrusive thought—was worried that there would never been a good time.
Right as I was considering throwing caution to the wind and just blurting it out, Peter’s voice stole my chance.
See, the Bond grumbled, just say it.
“In, in,” Peter beckoned, shuffling all of us into his office. Freya was already sitting there, looking a touch too sad for my liking. I needed to check in on her.
“Where’s Arthur?” I asked her quietly as I moved to take the chair next to hers, hoping that was a sly way of getting the truth out of her without outright asking.
“Oh,” Freya said, blinking like she’d just realized there were new people in the room.
“He is taking a nap. Tired from the journey.” Tired from life went unsaid.
Freya did what she could for him, even advocating strongly for him to have access to medication to ease the pain of being a world away from his brother, but there was only so much that could outweigh the soul-deep depression that came with his situation.
Another three months, and they’d send him back. Bring another set of twins in to pose as Freya’s Match. Maybe that was what was bugging her, she always got a little weighed down by guilt before the transition.
As was becoming an increasingly bothersome trend, I never got the chance to ask.
Much to my shock, Peter took a moment to hug each of us. Bellamy seemed the most taken aback by the gesture. I was sure her own father had never hugged her a day in her life.
We danced around the subject for a little, focusing more on descriptions of Caspian—pompous ass, but surprisingly capable for someone his age, Soren had said—and the content of the peace negotiations, mainly minutia regarding potential trade agreements that made my head hurt.
Peter shared about Carson, how he’d stayed mostly quiet and didn’t give up any information. Carson had been tasked with clearing out the Bridge, if not to perpetuate the lie that we still hadn’t made it back through.
Peter hadn’t wanted to all out interrogate him, lest it be seen as bad faith.
When I knew my turn to share was about to come up, the templates of Marks and the books I’d skimmed through started crashing through my head with frustratingly perfect detail.
Ford’s hand came down on my shoulder at some point, his thumb tucked behind my neck and making small passes over my skin.
Anchoring me, for when Bellamy said, “This agreement is solid. Hard for my father to reject it. Caspian was all for it, and said the Queen feels the same. They seem willing to overlook our difference of opinion on the beginnings of this war to just get it to stop, but there’s…”
She broke off, probably unsure how to even phrase this.
It was Ford who did it. “We have very solid reason to suspect that they do not have Marks, paranimas, nor any sort of Matches on Muli. Certainly not from birth.”
Peter looked right at him for a full minute of silence, eyes unfocused and shifting side to side rapidly. Then, as expected, he turned to me. “What did you find?”
“How much detail do you want?” I’d learned to ask before spewing every single thing I remembered, which was every single thing.
Peter breathed out with a shake of his head. He pulled a tablet out of the side of his desk and passed it over to me. “I’ll need to know everything. But keep it high-level for now.”
Which meant ten minutes or less. As I started speaking, I realized it was really quite simple.
We’d found templates needed to draw on Marks, literally seen someone getting theirs drawn in a temple, and read through multiple books that claimed to extol the complete and comprehensive history of Muli, without ever mentioning something as notable as babies being born with a tattoo that matched them to another.
As it started pouring out, memories started assaulting me from all angles, little things I’d picked up on but never had any color to until now.
I was halfway through explaining that Officer Edeka, on his task to deliver that note from Caspian, seemed genuinely terrified of me and Ford—more than just by way of reputation, and that was probably because he thought of us as some supernatural beings with our Marks—when my breath started to seize in my chest a little bit.
Not an unusual occurrence, in fact annoyingly common, when my brain couldn’t decipher which details were important, only understanding that it remembered things and needed to share. Peter rose from his seat, stepping around his desk with a small pile of yarn in his hand.
He’d started keeping things around for me to fiddle with as I worked, noticing that it helped me focus. Before he could, Ford silently handed me a rubber band that was wrapped around his wrist—one of mine, probably the one he’d pulled out of my hair the night before.
Peter’s eyebrow rose in a silent, but incredibly poignant statement of I saw that, but casually redirected to leaning back on the edge of his desk.
By the time I finished, with a big sigh of, “So, yeah, I think it’s best we get this thing signed before they realize we know,” Peter had taken to fidgeting with the yarn himself.
“Nine minutes, fifteen seconds,” Ford whispered to me, the warmth of his breath causing a shiver to shoot down my spine. “Well-timed.”
Ford had been on the receiving end of one of Peter’s annoyed, “I said high-level, not every goddamn detail,” quips as much as I had. I smiled at him, a sharp juxtaposition to Peter’s exhausted groan, dragging his hands down his face.
“Thank you for that, Esme,” he said, earnest despite his obvious irritation. “I am concerned that if this does come out down the road, it will cause tensions.”
“More so on them than us,” Bellamy said. “A fair bit of what we agreed to, we did under the assumption that they had this special link to the Goddess that could help build up our own knowledge. You could say they were the unfair negotiators.”
Peter cocked his head to the side. “That, or you knowing and proceeding anyways was yet another example of us being unreliable. Let’s not forget they’d been trying to sue for peace for years, only to be ignored by your father.”
“Well it makes a hell of a lot more sense now why they were trying,” Soren added. I didn’t miss his slight shiver at the reminder of how those pleas were getting to the Emperor.
No one was quite sure when or how Carson had turned.