Chapter Twelve
IT HAD BEEN like a thunderclap.
It had been nothing like he had ever expected.
He hadn’t thought much about regaining his past memories, not truly.
Because he had always felt like it was a protection to him that he didn’t remember.
But he had thought that it was because it would be a terrible thing to remember the details of the deaths of his parents.
Instead, it was the death of something else.
It was the death of every idea he had ever had about himself and his bloodline.
Yes, his father had been deemed somewhat selfish. A man who craved opulence. A man who loved the finer things in life, but he had never been accused of being a coward. A murderer. He had…
A sick, cold feeling slithered through his veins. As if his blood had turned to ice.
“He handed me over to a guard. To be killed.”
“What?”
“He…he killed my mother. He killed her in front of me. He couldn’t kill me.”
“Ragnar. Slow down. Why…?”
“I think… I think he was working with them. I think he knew that they were going to take over, and the only way for him to save himself was to promise to leave and to never come back. But he also promised us. As…as some sort of sign that he… That he was sincere. That he was never going to reclaim his throne. He killed my mother. He killed her.”
“No. He… That can’t be right.”
“It is,” he said, knowing now exactly what had stolen his memory from him. Exactly.
Thankfully, his memory was that of a boy. He could remember hiding in the corner. His father raising a large knife. And he could remember his mother falling, her body obscured by the bed.
But it was unmistakable, what he had witnessed.
There were guards. Military men. “Take him. Dispose of him.”
“It wasn’t my nanny,” he said, the realization rocking him to his core.
“What do you mean?”
“It wasn’t my nanny who saved me. It was the soldier that my father gave me to. He took me away. He brought me to those people.”
“Why did they tell you that it was a nanny?”
“I don’t know. It must’ve been to protect him. It must’ve been. He must not have been able to kill a child. My father was too much of a coward to do it. He should’ve done it. He should have raised his sword and struck me down the way he did my mother.”
“I still can’t understand. Where is your father?”
“I don’t know. For all I know they might have killed him anyway, but he tried to get out of his own death in the most cowardly way possible. He betrayed us. He betrayed the country. He would see his own son killed.”
“Oh…”
He put his hand on his forehead. Because then there were more memories. More and more.
His mother. Reading to him. It wasn’t a nanny in his memory, telling him about Freya.
There is another way to be a warrior. One who leads with love.
“My mother,” he said, his voice rough. “She was my best friend. She was the most important person in my life., I… My father, he was my hero. I saw him as a man who was strong. The kind of king that I wanted to be when I grew up.
“But my mother… She was the one who cared for me. She read to me every night. I felt so safe. I always felt so safe. The palace was my home, the seaside escape was a dream and I trusted them both.”
“Of course you can’t trust now. Of course everything feels like manipulation. Of course it all feels like a lie.”
He looked at Fern, who looked devastated. Her green eyes were filled with tears, her complexion pale.
He had nothing to say to comfort her. Not when he felt entirely undone by the realization.
“It wasn’t real. None of it. My father didn’t love us.
We were never the family that we appeared to be.
Not if one day he could decide to raise his own hand against his wife.
” He pressed his hand to his stomach. “I had no memories. I had filled those blank spaces with an idea, with an ideal. And none of it is true. My father was complicit in what happened to this country, to our family. He saved his own skin. But at the cost of everyone else. Everyone else. My mother, me, the citizens of Asland. Then he burned it so that no one would know he survived. I am… I am shot through with tainted blood.”
“No,” she said. “Don’t say that. You aren’t.
You are brave. You are a man who has spent your entire life fighting against what happened to you.
Because maybe you did tell yourself a new story.
And maybe you didn’t remember, but I believe that your body knew.
And has known all this time. You are a good man.
You brought yourself up from nothing to save this country, and your father never would’ve done that.
He would’ve laid down and died in the dirt.
A man so cowardly that he would kill his own wife, and give his son over to be killed… He would never do what you did.”
“I don’t know that,” he said.
He felt like an imposter. Suddenly it all felt like a lie.
He had been meant to come back and rule this country.
And yes, he had known that he would be a different sort of ruler to his father, but in many ways he had felt like he was restoring the rightful bloodline, but his father had sold it away. He had sold them.
He had betrayed them, and left them. He had sacrificed everything for his own gain.
Yes, he had lost the throne, but he had… What he was out there living?
The very idea made him feel sick. That his own father was out there watching all of this, watching the return of his son, watching him discover that he had not succeeded. From the comfort of…whatever new existence he had fashioned for himself.
“I will find him,” Ragnar said. “And I will have him killed.”
“Ragnar. I understand that you want revenge. But the work that you’re doing here in this country is so important. And revenge…”
She stopped.
“What? What is it that you have to say to me?”
“Nothing. You saw your father kill your mother. I’m not going to tell you to take the high road. I can’t say what would benefit your soul, not today. Not knowing that he did that. Not knowing that he passed you off to a soldier to be killed.”
She was still sitting with him, on the floor, as she had been that morning that she joined him after they’d first made love.
“Of course you don’t like to be too comfortable. The only time you ever were it all turned out to be a lie.”
She was stroking his face, and he couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t bear any tenderness with the vile memory still echoing in his head.
“Leave me,” he said.
“No. I don’t want to leave you. You’ve been dealing with all of this by yourself for all this time and—”
“You didn’t ask for this,” he said. “You were supposed to escape. Escape toxic families, and all of the other baggage that you grew up with, and here you have found that my family was worse than yours could ever be. It sounds as if your father is a sniveling coward. But one who would never ever get blood on his own hands. My father was dripping with it. I despise him. I… I am unclean. His blood is in my veins.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. But she still didn’t leave. She put her hands on his face. “I don’t know what to say because this is monumentally fucked up. Because there is no guideline or handbook for how to help somebody through this, but I’m here. I’m here. I’m not going to leave you.”
“You should.”
She looked at him, her green eyes measured.
“We have an agreement. I promised you that I would stay married to you for at least two years, and I will keep that promise, King Ragnar. I will stay your queen. Because you can trust me. You can trust that I will do what I said, that I’m everything I appeared to be.
I’m not lying to you. And I would never, ever betray you. I swear it.”
Her vows came from deep inside of her, and she understood them. They were nothing like the vows they had spoken to each other at the wedding, in a language that she didn’t comprehend.
She was promising to stay with him and… He had no idea how he was going to feel in five minutes, let alone over the next two years.
At the moment everything felt degraded. Destroyed.
He had been inside of her, and everything had felt good. For a moment, everything had felt so good it was like all of the walls inside of him had ceased to exist. And that was when the memories had come.
It was why he couldn’t afford to be too comfortable.
It had been a warning.
And he had let himself down by letting everything fall away when he was with her.
He had no one to blame for all of this but himself.
The truth is the truth, whether you know it or not.
Yes. That was true. He couldn’t deny it.
But he also couldn’t reconcile the terrible burden of knowing these things either.
It made him want to drain the blood from his veins.
It made him want to claw into his own skull and remove part of his brain. The part that knew these things.
He wanted to go back to the way things were.
He wanted to go back to not knowing them.
Then go back.
You don’t have to be open like this. You don’t need her. You don’t need anyone. And you sure as hell don’t need these memories.
Yes. He needed to get a grip on himself. He needed to go back to when he didn’t know.
He could rule the country that way.
He never had to think about this. He never had to acknowledge it. Yes, it would mean never finding his revenge, and there was something unsatisfying about that. But he would be a better king, a better man, if he didn’t have to face the reality of this.
He would go back. He would go back. He just needed to erect the barriers around his soul again.
That was like a memory too. This act of building up a wall inside of himself. Around those thoughts. Around everything that had happened.
He had done this once before, and he would do it again. He never had to think about this again. Not ever.
He never had to think about it again.
He stood up. “I will sleep in the other room tonight.”
“Please don’t.”
“I must. It is for the best. Tomorrow we will go home.”
And with that, the conversation was over.
In that he was determined.