19. Two Woefully Screwed Men
TWO WOEFULLY SCREWED MEN
Jasper
What a goddess-damned disaster. How lucky for Maksym and Eilir that I’d spent so many fucking hours of my life honing my self-control. I was as close as I’d ever been to strangling them both in our years upon years of tumultuous friendship.
“You both right fucked that up,” I seethed as I picked up the quarterstaff I’d quickly discarded after Enora’s entirely justified assault.
My Enora.
Fuck.
Weeks now, she had been here. Weeks spent seeing the face I thought I’d only ever see again in my dreams. But the gravity of her presence was coming back to hit me all at once.
Eilir simply let out a stressed squeak and vanished into thin air.
Maksym had no right to turn back and blink at me as innocently as he did. “But you had told us both she was—”
“I’ve said a lot of things privately with the explicit expectation they stay as such.” Gesturing wildly between myself and the gate Enora had just bolted through, I scoffed. “This entire situation is one of them.”
Maksym’s mouth opened and shut so quickly, his teeth clacked.
“Eilir’s poorly timed fuck-up aside, we can’t keep secrets,” he said, as if things were so fucking simple.
“We can’t. I don’t know how I thought we could get away with it.
Could you imagine if she found out weeks or months from now?
After the Agōn Ferr? After we wed? It would’ve been a thousand times worse.
Catastrophic. Maybe it’s a blessing Eilir slipped up. ”
In an effort to keep my fleeting cool, I scrubbed my hands over my face.
Leave it up to Maksym to think someone like Enora—whom he knew nothing about—would see any measure of rationale behind it.
He did not know what the fuck he was getting into with her.
The young woman I knew had never seen the forest for the trees, and age had done little to improve her outlook, never mind the stress of the circumstances she’d found herself in—I couldn’t blame her, as much as it pained me to admit it.
I deserved every lick of her ire, every bit of rage she wanted to throw at me.
All those years ago, I’d known how betrayed she’d feel, even though I never got to say goodbye to confirm it with my own eyes.
Never had the chance to make her realize there was something bigger at play—they knew better than to give me the chance.
So, she was forced to believe I’d left on a whim, like a ghost in the night, and I spent years grappling with how damaging that would be to her.
But, like most of my goddess-cursed life, I’d been given no choice.
Clearly determined to shirk even an ounce of damned responsibility, Maksym waved his hand and sighed. “Maybe you should go after her, no? Offer her some kind of…comfort? I’m sure she’ll come around if—”
“Is she not to be your wife, my liege?” I spat his title with more venom than I intended. “Should you not be the one to offer her your comfort? Start framing out your sham union on the bedrock of freshly ripped open wounds?”
Maksym’s eyes widened before realization settled over his face, and he scoffed. “Oh, I see. Jealousy is not becoming of you, my friend.”
“Jealousy?” I coughed the word, because I’d never heard of something more preposterous.
“This isn’t fucking jealousy, Maksym. This is me not knowing what to do to fix this.
I was supposed to be the one to decide if she ever found out.
Not when, but if, remember? But that just got thrown out the fucking window, and you did nothing to stop it. ”
Maksym winced.
He knew I was right, and his prolonged silence only confirmed it.
Weeks ago now, when the frantic sprites came bearing a report of a ravaged Odessan camp overlapping our borders with the Wastes, I hadn’t paid it much heed.
Until they mentioned a single survivor: a blonde woman with stunning hazel-green eyes and a necklace bearing the Wynn family crest almost burned into her skin.
The same crest I’d told Eilir to keep an eye out for years ago, on the unfathomably unlikely chance, but I hadn’t wanted to believe the possibility laid out before me. Refused to, actually, until I saw her with my own eye.
That moment rattled me.
Despite her muddied and debris-coated body, despite the gruesome burn crawling up her leg, despite her eyes not opening—I knew it was her. How could I not recognize the person who was my oldest, and arguably only, friend until I had everything ripped out from under me at seventeen?
It was a revelation that had necessitated a very frank conversation with Maksym, Eilir, and Gallan, which two of the three seemed to have conveniently forgotten.
The lone bench in our training stall gave a petulant groan as Maksym dropped onto it, bracing his elbows on his knees and pressing his palms to his eyes.
“Fuck,” he mumbled.
I scoffed. Leave it up to our hells damned king to keep the peace between a dozen warring factions at any given time but be unable to do anything of the sort with interpersonal relationships of his own inner circle.
He’d had a hundred damned years to refine those skills, and somehow, he had squandered all of them.
“She’s going to want to leave now. You know that, right?” I shook my head and took a few steps away. “Whatever upper hand you thought you were getting by corralling her into this unfathomable marriage is gone.”
Maksym’s head snapped up. “She’ll die. If she even makes it out of Grimmoria, the Wastes will eat her alive and grind her fair bones to dust. And even if she somehow survived that, the bargain mark would eat at her until she came back. Fuck, it would eat at me too.”
“Did that look like a woman who makes rational decisions when she’s angry? She was considering her odds before. Now you and Eilir sealed that decision for her.”
I could rant endlessly about just how badly the two of them had fucked all of this up, but there just wasn’t a point.
They both knew. But what they didn’t know was how critical it was to move into some kind of crisis management with Enora, something I’d done a hundred times over with her, just with much smaller crises. A lifetime ago.
“Fuck,” Maksym mumbled, dropping his face back into his palms. “I upset her at dinner last night too, if you hadn’t gathered.”
What a goddess-damned surprise.
Maksym, fumble an interaction with a woman? Never.
“Of course you did.” I drew up my hood again, giving myself a precious moment of shadowed privacy to scrub my hands over my face before I turned and asked, “How?”
“By just…existing, I think. Talked too little and too much. I don’t fucking know how it started.
” He sagged against the wall behind him, a pose woefully unbefitting of his usual regality.
“It got…tense. Hostile, even. Just earlier today, I was wondering if it might bring her some kind of reassurance to know she had a friend here, and that she’d be happy to see you after so many years. ”
For all his more redeeming qualities, Maksym could be ignorant as all fucking hell—selectively, of course, when it fit in the way he needed it to.
“Happy to see me? Maksym,” I groaned. “I did not leave Odessa on good terms, and you know that.”
The legitimate truth of why I left Odessa was hideous, but even worse was the fabricated version. The one I was forced to pen and sign my name on, and the only one Enora had ever learned of, if her reaction was anything to go by.
For all Enora knew, I’d simply absconded from our kingdom, grown tired of the rigor and pressure of being a high mage in training, poised to be the future right hand of their king.
And I’d left in the middle of the night, thrown ten years of careful upbringing right into the face of her father and Odessa itself.
It was not something I was proud of, despite having no choice in the matter.
I just never expected coming face to face with the repercussions of that awful day, let alone with it in the circumstances that Max, Enora, and I had found ourselves in.
And my friend, the sometimes willfully ignorant king, knew there were two versions of the truth and all the ugliness that came with both of them.
Still, he had the audacity to ask me, “Why do I feel like there is something you haven’t told me? Bad terms aside, I can’t see how she wouldn’t be even a little relieved to see you.”
It was laughable how much blind optimism Maksym held for matters that didn’t involve him directly. If the tables had been turned, and I’d vanished on him, he would have taken a grudge to his grave and well into whatever afterlife awaited him.
“That’s easy for you to say when you know everything that happened.
Nora doesn’t know an ounce of the damned truth.
And if my king—” I fixed Maksym with a pointed look, “is amenable to the suggestion, I’d like to be the one who decides if and what she learns of the rest of that truth, if she even stays. ”
“Of course. You have my word on that. I promise.” After a healthy pause, Maksym sighed and added, “Why are women so difficult?”
“Goddess, Max. They aren’t,” I chuckled. “How would you feel if you were in her place, truly?”
He fixed me with a sharp stare but ceded far faster than I thought he would. “Furious, I suppose. Seems like she’s had an incredibly shite run with life recently.”
As if a shite run with life recently could somehow sum up everything I’d gleaned had happened to Enora.
From my understanding, ever since her father’s sudden death not even half a year ago, her entire life had taken a vicious, downhill tumble.
When I was still in Odessa, her half-brother Calder was a child but already as easy to endure as the bite of midwinter wind.
Clearly, time had done little to change that.
Or, at least, I assumed, based on him making his first order of business to send his only sibling off to her death—or to a strategic marriage, if he felt like spinning that lie further and Enora still felt like believing it.