16. If It Were a Better World #8
She pulled her hood tighter and dismounted just outside the old trade square. Miners shuffled across the yard like ghosts, heads bowed, coats frayed. The stalls were sparse. Canariae merchants wrapped in wool and chainmail shouted in a dozen dialects over crates of ore and fading spices.
This place was barely Awyan anymore.
And that was exactly why Malec had chosen it.
One gate. One road. One way out. Anyone fleeing the kingdom would pass through eventually.
Lord Surin dismounted behind his daughter, his presence quieter, heavier.
He looked like an Awyan meant to command boardrooms and war councils, not frozen outposts, but his eyes missed nothing.
He scanned the square, noted the burned watchtower on the ridge, the scattered patrols, the military precision layered over decay.
"He's cornered the rat's hole," Surin muttered. "Of course he has."
Surian ignored the chill his words sent through her. She approached a hunched servant girl with frostbitten fingers and pressed a coin into her palm.
"I'm looking for the Capitol Guard's outpost. Where have they pitched?"
The girl blinked, then pointed south. "By the quarry ridge. Near the burned watchtower."
Surian flipped her another coin. "Thank you."
As she led her horse in that direction, Surin fell into step beside her, his voice pitched low. "You know he'll be worse than you expect. You've not seen him in months."
Surian's lips pressed thin. "I need to see for myself."
Before Surin could reply, a voice broke across the square.
"Surian! Surin!"
She froze. That voice.
A tall figure pushed through the half-frozen crowd, clutching a sack of provisions too heavy for one arm.
Luko.
His face was raw from the wind, lips cracked, hair longer and untamed. But his eyes lit when he saw them, lit with a joy that sat just beneath desperation. He caught Surian in a one-armed embrace, as if afraid she might vanish.
"By the stars, how are you here? Does Malec know?"
Surian arched a brow. "I'm a grown woman, not a prisoner. I don't need permission to travel."
Luko chuckled, breathless and hollow. "No, I suppose you don't."
But Surin was watching him closely, his hands folded behind his back.
He cataloged the details with the precision of a general assessing battlefield casualties: the purple shadows beneath Luko's eyes, the grief cut deep into his face, the way his shoulders curved inward as though bearing weight no man his age should carry. The hollow behind his smile.
A tightness settled in Surin’s chest but he chose not to acknowledge it.
Surian's voice softened. "How is he?"
The question made Luko's jaw work. His gaze dropped to the soot-stained snow at their feet.
"He's holding together," he said finally, the words brittle as glass. "If you can call it that."
A pause. Then, quieter: "If sleep is forced and the liquor flows."
Surian's chest ached. She curled her fingers around her reins.
Surin said nothing. But his gaze sharpened, and the certainty behind his eyes faltered. Concern, perhaps. Or the first whisper of guilt he would not yet name.
Luko's hood slipped back in the wind, exposing new lines carved into his face, lines that had not been there six months ago.
"I started slipping herbs into his wine weeks ago," he confessed, barely above a whisper. "Sleeping draughts. Mood stabilizers. The kind healers use on soldiers after sieges. Sometimes he notices and other times he does not even care."
Surian blinked at him, stunned. "You're drugging him?"
"I'm keeping him alive," Luko corrected, his voice raw. "On the nights he eats, it's barely a mouthful. On the nights he doesn't, he drinks instead. Then he paces, for hours. He mumbles to himself. Sometimes he talks to her like she's in the room as if he just keeps speaking, she'll answer."
His voice cracked. "He still calls her his dove, Surian. Every night, like a prayer to a god who abandoned him."
Tears pricked Surian's eyes. Her hand flew to her mouth.
Surin's expression remained carefully neutral, but his fingers tightened where they were clasped behind his back.
He had known Malec was struggling. The reports had said as much.
But reports were bloodless accounts, numbers and observations stripped of humanity.
This was different. This was Luko, steady and loyal Luko, admitting he was drugging Malec just to keep him functional and while his son was talking to ghosts.
"I've never seen him like this," Surian whispered. "Not during the war or when father cast him out. Not even when he?—"
Her voice faltered.
Not even when he chose cruelty over mercy. When he became the thing everyone feared.
Luko's shoulders sagged further. "He's not the same man you remember. I don't know if that man still exists."
Surin finally spoke, his voice low and controlled. "Take us to him."
Luko hesitated, searching Surin’s face for any sign. Permission, perhaps. Or warning.
"He won't want to see you," Luko said carefully. "Either of you. He barely wants to see me."
"I don't care what he wants," Surin replied. "Take us to him."
His tone brooked no argument. Luko nodded slowly.
As they followed him through the frozen outpost, Surin felt the weight on his shoulders grow heavier. He had sent Malec away once, cast him out for crossing the line. He had believed distance would temper him, that duty would teach him control.
He had been wrong.
They walked in silence for a moment, their boots crunching over frozen ground, past soldiers who averted their eyes and moved quickly away.
"I was going to leave months ago," Luko admitted after a long pause. "I packed my things, boots on, cloak fastened. I couldn't stand the way he looked at me anymore. Like I was the enemy. Like I was her but I stayed."
"Why?" Surian asked, her voice hoarse.
Luko stopped walking. He turned to face them, and for the first time, Surin saw it clearly.
The grief, yes, but also the fear. Fear of Malec, fear of himself.
And something else burning there. "Because if she ever shows up again, and I'm not there to fall to my knees and tell her how wrong we were, how wrong I was—then I'll never be able to forgive myself. "
Surian looked away, blinking hard. "You're not the only one."
They walked on, a Talandros daughter and the soldier healer, bound by guilt and breath and the ache of hindsight. The wind howled through Dremond's Gate, rattling loose shutters.
"She was the best thing to happen to him," Surian whispered.
"And he was the worst thing to happen to her," Luko answered. His lips pressed thin, and he nodded slowly. "And now we have to live with that."
For a moment, the air curdled between them.
Then Surin's voice cut through it like a knife. "Spare me the poetry."
Both heads snapped toward him. The elder stood a few paces off, cloak drawn tight, his frosted gaze perceptive as a hawk's in the gray light. He had listened the entire time without interrupting, measuring and weighing.
"You speak as if your feelings matter," Surin went on, his tone low and unyielding. "As if regret will rewrite what's already done. It won't. She's gone, and whether by choice or by fate, she will remain so until Malec drags her back. That is the only truth that counts."
Luko's jaw twitched, anger sweeping across his face. "And if dragging her back kills her?"
Surin stepped closer, his presence heavy as stone. "Then that is the cost of being loved by my son."
Surian flinched, tears stinging her eyes, but Surin didn't soften.
"You both carry guilt like it makes you noble," he said coldly. "But guilt is wasted air. It doesn't save lives or win wars and it certainly won’t keep kingdoms standing. Survival does."
His gaze lingered on Luko, hard enough to make the younger man shift beneath it. "So mourn her if you must. Curse Malec if you dare. But remember this—if she lives, she belongs to him. And if she dies, she dies his."
The words hung in the frozen air like a sentence passed down from a judge's bench.
Luko's hands curled into fists at his sides, but he said nothing. There was nothing to say. Surin had spoken the truth they all knew but refused to acknowledge.
Malec would never let her go. Not until death claimed one of them.
And perhaps not even then.