Chapter Twenty-Three
Kai
“What is it, Os?”
What is it now? was what he wanted to say. What have I done wrong this time?
“I’ll give your princess one thing,” said Oswalt. “You do need to think this through.”
“Well, isn’t it fortunate that you’re here to offer your opinion.”
He was immediately uncomfortable with the tone of his own voice, the itchy, guarded feeling tightening his skin.
It wasn’t fair, but their every interaction had been so tense lately.
He felt Oswalt’s disappointment at every turn, and as it was, he was quite well supplied with disappointment of his own.
It was somehow worse that Os didn’t flinch at the terse tone.
His cousin only watched the Healer spread a stinging poultice over Kai’s burn wound, and wrinkled his nose at the smell, sharp and acrid.
Kai wasn’t overly enthused either, but the numbing tonic was slowly wearing off, and his shoulder had begun to feel hot and tight.
He wondered if the tonic had worked a little too well, in fact.
He was beginning to feel other things too, scores of warring, unwanted feelings that churned in his insides.
He found himself reaching for the discarded pendant, earning a soft tut from the Healer when his shoulder shifted beneath her ministrations.
He uttered an apology—and another when he interrupted her work a second time, slipping the chain over his head before he held obediently still.
The cold bite of the pendant seeped a familiar chill into his bloodstream, and he drew a full breath.
There.
“That feel better?” asked the Healer.
Kai hummed; he did feel better, if perhaps not entirely by her hand. But she offered a swift, satisfied smile as she applied clean linen over the pungent mess of his shoulder.
“I’ll fetch a tea for your throat,” she said, and after cleaning her hands on another square of linen, withdrew from the room.
Oswalt cleared his throat, and a prickle of irritation wormed its way beneath the welcome, numbing chill.
“Well?” said Kai.
Oswalt met his eye; he was good at that, always had been. Weathering the uncomfortable moments. Absorbing your anger and giving you nothing in return but a blank and rational stare. It was that stare he fixed on Kai now.
“I want to understand what your goal is.”
“You want me to tell you, again, that I’m going to stop Avette?”
“I want you to tell me why.”
Kai stared at him, uncomprehending.
How many reasons did he need? She had tricked him, betrayed him, doomed the Laune, caused the deaths and displacement of his people.
She had snuffed all magic from the world but her own, all but imprisoning Mother Adhlas herself.
She had extended her reach to the shores of their new home just to show them she could.
She had killed Eda. Simon. The Mother only knew what she had done with Silas Vanjir.
And if that were not enough, her own people were drowning in the onset of her cruelest Winter yet.
Adeline’s people.
“Because she’s suffocating Eisalaan,” he said finally, fighting to grasp at some semblance of his cousin’s composure. “Just as she suffocated the Laune. Because she holds Adeline’s people hostage, just as she still holds our home. Because Eisalaan is not hers to claim.”
Os nodded, thoughtful and still so damned composed.
“So you’re acting on our part? Or protecting Adeline?”
Kai felt his jaw lock, tight enough that he had no choice but to grind his response through his teeth.
“My objective remains the same; what does it matter?”
“It matters,” said Os, slow and cool, “because you’re talking about dragging her along with you. It matters because with Adeline at your side, your priorities change. It’s not a criticism, it’s a fact, and one we need to consider.”
A scoff ripped through him unbidden, chased by a pulse of ice from beneath his pendant.
“It certainly sounds like a criticism.”
For the first time, something flickered across Oswalt’s face.
Something beyond the narrow catalogue of all his cousin’s expressions, one he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen before.
His shoulders curled in, then pulled back with a heaving sigh.
He looked up at Kai from beneath a soft swoop of sandy hair, his eyes hard and flinty in contrast.
“Alright, Kai. Yes. It’s a criticism.”
In Kai’s periphery, a pulse of green flashed in time with the angry jolt in his chest. Oswalt’s eyes flicked to the pendant. He huffed a derisive breath.
“You’re casting aside Mael’s legacy,” he said. “For a girl. Again.”
The words were barely above a breath, but they speared like glass knives through the air between them. Where they landed and shattered, the shards buried themselves in his skin.
“That’s what this is about?” Kai’s fingers found the table’s edge and curled, hard enough to shift the dressing on his shoulder and make him clench his molars so his every word came tighter than the last. “You think I’m letting my father down?”
But Os shook his head.
“I’m worried we are letting him down.” He let that hang a moment. Nodded slightly at the flicker of confusion that twitched Kai’s brows together. “You were different before he went to Caldbon, Kai. Reckless, impulsive—”
“I was barely more than a child.”
“And he was going to war. He was concerned. I made him a promise to help you, to stand by your side for as long as you led the Merrow. So yes, I am worried that we are letting him down. You’re not the only one with Mael’s legacy on your shoulders.”
Kai froze, and in his stillness, time paused too, the years peeling back. He saw Mael, in his mind, drifting high above the lakebed. An apparition beneath the Laune’s surface with the sun’s thinned rays playing over his furrowed brow as he took one final look at all he left behind.
It was the last time he’d ever seen his father.
Kai’s hands cramped with the pressure he’d pressed into the table, and he spread his fingers wide, exasperation tensing through his muscles and creeping into his voice.
“This wasn’t his bloody legacy, Os, it was an obligation. We did just fine with the Elder Council, and he had a family to raise. It was bureaucratic nonsense handed down by the Beiras. He wanted it even less than I—”
His pendant pulsed, a cold bleat against his heart.
Kai swallowed. His hands fisted once more.
But Oswalt’s eyes flashed with understanding; the wrong kind of understanding.
It was nothing close to that warm brown look that made him feel seen.
It was a cool, stone gaze that told him he’d been seen through.
“That’s the thing, though, Kai. He did it anyway. It is his legacy, and now it’s ours too. You’re his son, and I am—”
Oswalt’s voice thinned, but Kai had barely a moment to blink before his cousin pushed away from the table and shot upright.
The reaction was jarring, more erratic and emotive than he’d ever been before.
As though he had to physically separate himself from the uncomfortable sensation, step out of it.
Os glanced around, brow furrowed. And Kai felt the cold pressure in his chest lift, ever so slightly.
Thawed, he thought, by a dawning understanding.
A missing part of the puzzle that was his ever stoic cousin.
He had been raised with Os; that was how he’d always seen it. But for Os, that meant he’d been raised by Mael. That Kai and Ceri were not the only ones who had lost him in that long-forgotten battle.
“You meant a lot to him, too,” he said carefully. Quietly, as one approaching a temperamental cat. “You know you did.”
Not carefully enough.
“Don’t patronise me,” said Os at once.
Kai stood to meet him at eye level, hands coming up to bare his palms.
“I wasn’t. But he wouldn’t want you to feel like this, Os. To feel like you owed him anything other than to live the happy life he’d wish for you—and for Ceri. And for me.”
Os just looked at him. Looked at him, unmoving and unreadable even as a storm rolled in across his stony features. For a moment, Kai wondered if they were about to crumple. But they set, even harder than before, his lips pressed in a thin line so taut it dimpled his chin.
“If that’s what you need to tell yourself,” he said simply.
He turned to go, and Kai kicked his chair back to round the table.
They would not leave it there. They would not.
Not with Os tormenting himself over some obsessive ideal he thought Mael had wanted.
Believing that Kai didn’t care what Mael had wanted.
Because, as angry as he may have been, it mattered what Os thought.
It always had, and he could not abide it.
Could not stand to let his cousin reach through the mess within him and draw out only the worst parts for them both to pick over.
“Os,” he called, moving around the table in a few short strides, and when his cousin didn’t stop, “Oswalt.”
The burst of panic boomed out of him, dragging a cold pulse of green from his chest so bright it painted the opposite wall, Oswalt’s shadow thrown crookedly across it. His cousin paused, but did not turn.
“You wanted to discuss a plan,” said Kai, a little numbly.
“I did. But we both know you’ll do as you like, Kai. You always do.”
Os started for the archway again but stopped abruptly when Kai laughed; not out of amusement, but the urgent need to release the devastating weight in his chest. It did not help, especially when his cousin turned slowly on the spot, a dark and expectant look on his face.
Silence hung between them for one stagnant, sickly heartbeat.
“You think anything I’ve done is because I wanted to?” said Kai. “You imagine this is what I wanted?”
Os considered him coldly, but Kai didn’t elaborate. He knew Os understood what this meant. This crown. This responsibility. This weight. This fate.
“No,” Os said finally. “This was your duty, and I’ll grant you that you tried to fulfil it. You made mistakes, and you made sacrifices. But it’s not what you wanted. What you wanted was her. Your princess.”