Sixteen #2
Cin could do nothing but nod. He had to leave—not just because of the body cooling at his feet, but the carriage likely heading back for his home at that moment. If the prince chose to keep this a secret, then Cin still had other woes to worry over.
There was one last thing to be said, though. “They were an enslaved elf. Here, in Hallin. So close to the castle…”
“I know.” The prince sounded bitter as poison as he said it. “Elves do not belong bound to anyone, least of all to the likes of these . Hallin’s stance on that will not change.”
“A stance did not stop this,” Cin muttered.
He didn’t know what he wanted from the recently crowned heir—to do better?
He was not king yet. Besides, he’d seen his own mother establish a watch for the crown only for this to continue while they walked but streets away, their attention elsewhere.
Never where it was needed; even, ironically, the time the prince their system protected was here . Perhaps this was larger than them both.
But looking down at the rich bastard’s cooling body, he knew that wasn’t entirely true. Cin had access to one thing, certainly: a sharp blade and the wrath to use it. Again, and again, as many times as it took.
Cin tipped his head. “I have to go.”
“I know,” the prince said again.
He offered no hand to help Cin mount, no kiss goodbye, no reassurance. Even a look of pity, if he had one to give, was stolen away in the darkness.
So, with three birds clutching to his shoulders and blood drying on his hands, Cinder-Szule left.
C in felt sick to his bones for the full ride home, so lost in thought and anxiety that even Rags’ soft nestling against his chest and Lacey’s motherly plucking at his hair could do nothing for him.
His time with Prince Lorenz had been cut so short.
There was still the rest of his life, of course—if the prince didn’t turn Cin in.
If no one happened to ask him about it. If he never let anything slip by accident.
But then and there, it seemed as though the rest of his life might as well not happen.
He could go back to Dorthe, he supposed; she understood what he was already, and might be willing to run with him to Falchovari to start a new life there, under the long shadow of their terrible queen.
But he knew without a thought that he’d compare any future with a partner to those beautiful moments he’d spent with the prince.
Every smile to his smile, every laugh to his laugh, every soul to the way his always seemed fuller and more mystifying, the final depth of him always further down.
Cin had no desire to put Dorthe through a lifetime of always coming up a little short in Cin’s heart.
As though his anger and grief were a predator at his back, Cin pushed his steed faster, then faster still, letting the pain in his ribs overrun his mind until the magical horse nearly vibrated itself apart as it flew across the countryside and the two of his trio who’d been trying to comfort him were forced to release him and fly alongside their stoic white shadow instead.
Cin’s emotional turmoil turned to panic as he caught sight of an all-too-familiar carriage making the final turn towards his home. Even if every distress of the night was erased, he still had much left to lose if Louise and his siblings realized he’d been outright lying to them for weeks.
He directed his mount through the forest in a mad dash that would have ended with him thrown into a trunk or his brain knocked out by a thick branch if not for the magic that carried him.
If it were a month later, he knew, the trees would have cast off their golden leaves, exposing his silhouette as he cut through the foliage and rounded the back of the house.
His steed vanished beneath him into a swarm of birds, their fleeing bodies seeming to pull the last of Cin’s outfit glamor with it.
It left him wearing what felt like rags in comparison. Rags, and a dead man’s blood.
Cin could hear his siblings’ voices as they spilled out of the carriage, Floy in a huff, Manfred complaining, Emma as lost in her beautiful daydreams as ever.
Cin fumbled the house key, grabbing it a second time to shove it into the lock, and somehow—somehow—it turned.
His heart seemed to throw itself against his ribcage with each frantic step he took through the house. His sides ached from it.
He could hear his family’s knocking already.
“Cinder-Szule?”
“Cinder!”
“Fucking Cinder-whore.”
A little voice in the back of his mind screamed that a knife could end this. End them, end him, he didn’t know. But the prince had kept Cin’s blade, by accident or on purpose—he didn’t know that either.
The knocking and shouting continued.
Cin almost bolted for the door, before remembering his bare skin was still covered in blood.
He’d left a water bucket in the laundry after last laundering-day.
Cin ran for it. He plunged his hands in first, rubbing, rubbing, then splashing it onto his face—careful not to drench his hair.
He had nothing but the inside of his own thin underthings to wipe over it all, but he did, and—
They were banging now, Louise calling with such fury that Cin swore it had been years since he’d heard her like that. He scrambled down the hall, messing up his hair with his hands— fuck, still damp, how were they damp—as he ran. At least his clothing was already a disaster.
Cin nearly slammed into the front door in his flight, yanking it open so fast that Louise’s fist flew through the space.
She stumbled into him with a gasp. For a moment, her gaze went too wide, too knowing.
Then she huffed, straightening her outfit and scowling at Cin.
“My God, this is a level of irresponsibility I expect from Emma, even Manfred, but never—”
“I’m sorry,” Cin didn’t even have to pretend—the bite of Louise’s words hit home.
He’d known better, known he was out too long, known that accompanying the prince back to the city was a bad idea, and he’d—but he couldn’t dwell on that now.
He’d already washed the blood off. Lamely, he added, “I fell asleep.”
Louise only scowled harder. As she pushed past Cin, she grumbled, “Be sure it doesn’t happen next time.”
Manfred pushed past after her, markedly harder than Louise had. “Bet you were fingering yourself in the ashes,” he spat.
Floy followed him, their nose in the air. They seemed to have no time for Cin, but he caught their muttering, “We should have stayed. I told Mother he was merely testing us...”
Last came Emma, throwing herself against Cin’s chest in a dramatic sigh. He sucked in a pained breath, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“I still think you’re the best,” she said. Her brow furrowed, and she touched the edge of Cin’s cheek tenderly.
Blood, Cin realized. He hadn’t fully cleaned it after all.
Instead of accusations, Emma said only, “I’m sorry you’re hurt.”
For a moment, Cin hated them all a little less.
But then Floy stopped in the doorway to the hall, turning back. Their eyes narrowed. And Cin felt like they had been the one he’d killed in front of.
F loy seemed no less suspicious of Cin the next morning, but they said nothing to him, slinking around the house during their usual morning piano hour as though searching for something—across the floors, the walls, the back garden.
Cin wasn’t sure what they were looking for, only what they stood to find if he’d been any sloppier coming home.
Cin tried not to let it terrify him.
He didn’t quite trust when Floy seemed to turn back into their normal self, spending the better half of the day complaining that they’d left the ball too soon.
According to the gossip, the prince had shown up in the final hour, twice as flamboyant as ever, and danced with every attendee who remained.
And, to hear Floy tell it, the worst tragedy of their century was the fact that Floy had not been there.
It would have made Cin smile, if not for the fact that he was just as hurt, deep down.
Prince Lorenz had witnessed Cin kill a man and gone back to flirt his heart out.
It didn’t help that it was what he was meant to do, what Cin had always expected of him.
He had to choose a partner, and Cin had taken him away from that, out on an adventure that ended in tragedy.
The fact that he had managed to pull himself together enough to act the princely rake was incredible.
And, if Cin had any sense, he’d be more worried about what the prince could have said to those who’d planned the party than to those attending it.
By midday, word had already spread throughout the kingdom that the Plumed Menace had struck again—this time at the kingdom’s heart.
It turned out that Cin’s victim had been a lower aristocrat, already partially disgraced by his many unsavory habits, but to hear some tell it, he was the prince’s truest friend, closer than the elder brother who inevitably came up a minute into every gossiped conversation.
Was this, they asked, a return to origin for the Plumed Menace; a sign that they truly had killed Prince Adalwin?
Worse though, were the other brand of whispered rumors, circulated by the Menace’s fanatics: that if the Plumed Menace truly was content to kill aristocracy if they were deemed terrible enough, then that must mean Prince Adalwin had been one such villain.
Cin felt sick at the thought of Prince Lorenz hearing such nonsense, even if he would, technically, know better.
Know better, yet be holding all that knowledge inside himself, to protect Cin.
As one day turned to the next, Cin wanted to trust that if the prince had not spilled his secret yet, then he had no plans to. But he had felt his blade sever through muscle and tendon, seen the look on Prince Lorenz’s face after, felt the blood on his hands, and he could only trust so much.
Cin ran spirals around the thought, working himself into a panic before forcing his mind elsewhere.
The way he kept himself sane was to focus on what justice he had brought—could bring—as the Plumed Menace.
The little spots of good he’d sacrificed his righteousness for.
He went out more and more, feeling a rush every time he spotted a member of the crown’s watch in town, an empty hollow after.
On his way home, he’d visit the woman he’d last seen sobbing behind her farmhouse well—not introducing himself, of course, always keeping to the brush and the roofs—but still he felt the more he saw of her, the closer to her he became.
He knew her now, knew how much she loved the cats that lounged in her garden, feeding them even when her husband disapproved, how she could read, and read well, and would take a break for a book at exactly noon every day, her choices so varied that Cin swore she must have a library hidden somewhere in her tiny house.
And how outside of those two joys, she was terribly unhappy.
Her sobbing behind the well was far from the last of her breakdowns.
By the end of the week, Cin made it there in time to catch the preamble to one, sitting on the couple’s roof as the fight crescendoed into screams.
“Get rid of her!” The husband shouted, moving through the kitchen after his wife. Cin couldn’t make out the rest of his lecture, until he was poised on the other side of the house, leaning out above their front window. “Your family is nothing to us anymore. Nothing.”
Cin’s stomach sank. Cutting her off from her family—that was what her husband was asking. Family . Security. Home.
It made Cin cling to the hilt of the kitchen blade he’d placed in his knife’s empty sheath.
But he didn’t go down. He thought of Prince Lorenz’s face, the horror and shock, and he crouched there, motionless, as the woman ran through the house, out to her place behind the well, and sobbed again.
Chest binding tight against his heart, Cin sobbed with her.