Chapter 46
Forty-Six
I don’t realize I’m sobbing until Alaric’s fingertips graze my cheek, wiping my tears. But even that small movement is too much. His face contorts, and his body.
“Shh,” I murmur, trying to hold him steady. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
But he has to know it’s a lie.
“I’m so sorry, Indira,” Delphine babbles as she steps up beside me, still wearing my cloak. It’s charred at the hem, so is the tail of her golden braid, and several angry pink burns dot her forearms. But she’s alive.
Because I saved her.
Because I thought she was my friend.
“I didn’t want to betray you—not after meeting you—but I didn’t have a choice.”
“What do you mean, you didn’t have a choice? Of course you had a choice!” I explode, even though, deep down, I know she didn’t. I would have done the same thing in her shoes—whatever it took to protect my sister.
I round on Rowenna. “Why did you target an innocent girl like Cloudia? How did you do it? If you can plant false memories into anyone’s mind, why not attack Soren or Alaric directly? Wouldn’t it make more sense to take control of Vanzador and their power to move the earth that way?”
“Because Soren and Alaric wouldn’t let me get close enough to stick them with a needle.
And in order for the hallucinations to linger like a memory, the person must be kept in a drug-induced state.
It would have been rather suspicious if the rulers of Vanzador suddenly couldn’t get out of bed.
I needed to come at this from an unexpected angle, and I knew you’d befriend our sniveling maid and feel compelled to help her ailing sister.
I also knew you were more likely to believe the worst about your lover”—her upper lip curls as she looks down at Alaric—“if proof of his crime came from a ‘credible’ source—like a friend’s beloved sister.
Especially if her ‘memories’ had proven truthful before. ”
“Listen to yourself!” I say with disgust. “All these lies and manipulations! This isn’t who you are.”
“This is exactly who I am, who I’ve always been! I’m not the one who’s changed, Indira. I’m not the one who wants an alliance with our oppressors over freedom for our people outright. Cloudia will be perfectly fine once I stop the injections.”
Delphine staggers back, as if slapped. “You said she’d need an antidote! One you’d only provide if I upheld my end of the bargain.”
Rowenna smirks. “I couldn’t have you running off with your sister before our work was finished.”
“Well, now it is.” Delphine dumps a heavy satchel at my sister’s feet. “Supplies for your journey back to Tashir. Von Nevus is waiting at the base of the mountain with horses. I pray to the gods of rock and stone I never see you again.”
“Von Nevus is in on this too?” I sputter. “You’re bringing him back to Tashir?”
Rowenna shrugs. “I told him he could be my king regent in exchange for his assistance.”
“You’d let him rule alongside you?”
Ro shrugs again. “Anyone will do, because no one will be ruling alongside me.”
She picks up the satchel, which looks identical to the ones Alaric and I filled with bagrava. That’s the real reason Delphine helped us carry them up the mountain, so she could hide Rowenna’s provisions in among the others.
I have to be here. That’s what she said, and fool that I am, I assumed she meant she wanted to be here to support me. Not that she physically had to be present because she was being blackmailed.
“I wanted to tell you so many times.” Delphine blinks at me through watery eyes. “I wanted to stand up to Rowenna and refuse to cooperate. But I couldn’t. I had to think of Cloudia. It’s like I told you from the very beginning—there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my sister.”
I don’t tell Delphine it’s okay or that I forgive her, because I don’t. But I do nod once in understanding because I said the same things—came here under the same pretenses.
“You can go,” I tell her. “Return to the Fortress and Cloudia. My sister won’t bother you anymore.”
She studies me, tears streaming down her face, and for a minute, I think she might choose to stay—choose to help me, to atone for her betrayal and prove our friendship wasn’t a complete lie. But then Delphine lowers her head and sprints back toward the caves without looking back.
Pain carves through me like a red-hot poker, almost as unbearable as the moment I learned of Rowenna’s “death.” At least she was ripped away from me unwillingly.
Delphine is choosing to abandon me.
She was never with me from the start.
“It’s time for us to be off too,” Rowenna says, as if everything’s resolved.
I shake my head and rise to my feet, standing over Alaric like a towering, immovable oak tree.
“Stand aside, Indira. I’ve been more than patient. We’re leaving this mountain with the blood, flesh, and bone of Callahan, which I will cut from Alaric’s skin, since you’re too weak to stomach it.”
“I won’t let you kill him.”
“That’s rich, considering he’s mostly dead already, thanks to you,” Rowenna retorts.
“Only because you deceived me and framed him! Alaric is innocent in all of this.”
“You already know my thoughts on his innocence, but fine.” Rowenna lets out a long exasperated sigh.
“Since you’re too tangled up in your feelings to think clearly, I’ll concede.
Again. Because, contrary to what you think, I am a thoughtful, reasonable person.
Instead of killing Alaric, we can bring him back to Tashir, throw him in a prison cell, and allow him to live as long as he cooperates and continues feeding his power into the mountain range.
While I’d obviously prefer to control the earth myself, this will do for now.
It might even be preferable for a short while—we won’t have to worry about the logistics of reimplanting the gemstones. ”
I look down at Alaric’s broken body and picture him languishing in one of the dark damp cells beneath the hillock palace. Everything about it is wrong. Most obviously, that it would be impossible to keep him there.
“He’ll just move the earth and escape,” I point out.
Rowenna sucks an irritated breath through her teeth. “Then we’ll let him live free from a cell—give him the same ‘comforts’ he afforded us in Vanzador. You can’t possibly take issue with that.”
I try to imagine this scenario—Alaric in Tashir, wandering through the rolling fields, sweating beside me in the planting beds, lying on his back as dragonflies buzz overhead and the sun browns his marble chest. I see us laughing as we chase each other through the tunnels and dancing beneath the golden harvest moon.
We could be happy, away from these cold mountains, without the dark legacy of his father looming over us.
Except I know, deep down, it would kill him to abandon his people. And it would quite literally kill them—Vanzador’s economy would collapse if he wasn’t there to oversee the mining operations.
A stone will never have a place in a planting bed. Just as a flower is never going to thrive on this frigid mountaintop. There’s nowhere on this continent a girl born of seeds and a boy forged of stone can exist together. Not without sacrificing our seminal roots—the core of who we are.
“We’re not taking Alaric back to Tashir,” I say firmly.
I feel Rowenna’s reaction before she says a word—like grass, standing on end before a lightning storm.
“What do you mean we’re not taking him back? This is a generous compromise! Did you forget the other option is killing him?”
“I won’t let you do that either.”
Rowenna blows out a long breath. “Stand aside, Indira, or I’ll be forced to remove you.”
“What does that even mean?”
Ro’s eyes dart sideways, and before I realize what she’s doing, she snatches the discarded knife from the ground—still slick with Alaric’s blood—and levels it at my chest.
“You wouldn’t,” I whisper.
“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for Tashir. I’m beginning to think you never really knew me at all—that you never truly loved me, as you always claimed to.”
Before, this accusation would have gutted me and made me question everything I thought I knew about myself.
But now I hold my ground and raise my chin high, because if Rowenna truly loved me, she wouldn’t make me feel this way.
Her love wouldn’t be contingent on my obedience.
She’d let me put down my own roots and become my own person instead of treating me like an offshoot of herself.
The seconds tick past, and even though discomfort twines through every part of me, I stand tall.
Meet her stare. Surprised to find that the longer I sit with these feelings, the more I’m cleansed—like a controlled fire, sweeping through fallow fields.
Burning everything down in order for it to grow back stronger.
“You don’t want to do this,” Rowenna warns, raising the blade.
“You’re right. I don’t,” I admit. “But I won’t sentence either nation to death when there’s a better way forward. You’re just too stubborn to open your eyes and see it.”
“And you’re too blinded by love to admit Alaric and his people are feeding off us like spider mites. Tashir is better off without them.”
“No. We’re dead without them!” I cry out. “I think that’s what Earth Mother has been trying to teach us—why she blessed each country with power that the other needs. We have always been meant to work together. To unite and thrive or perish alone.”
Rowenna closes her eyes and squeezes the bridge of her nose. “Tell me, Indira. What happens when worms infest apples before the harvest?”
The shift is so abrupt, I stammer over the answer, “Th-they rot?”
“And cucumbers, left too long on the vine?” Ro demands.
“Again, they rot. I don’t see what any of this has to do with—”
“And what must be done with rot?” Ro’s voice is as voice as sharp as the knife in her hand.
“You have to cut it out, before it spoils the entire crop.”
“I’m glad you understand,” she says with a sad smile.
Then she lunges at me.