Chapter Thirty-One
Gerard
If Avette were capable of joy, she’d find it in spectacle.
The descent into the Laune was supposed to be a clandestine political manoeuvre.
Cloak and dagger, until she got what she wanted and could throw the cloak aside, ready to dazzle them all with her shiny new treasure.
The dazzling, it seemed, was already underway.
Avette had swanned down to the lakeside at dawn with her personal Gard following like heavily armed ducklings.
She was the Saviour today, swathed in the costume and persona so carefully crafted for the public eye.
The one she wore when she wanted the world to remember every story they’d ever told about her bleeding heart.
Her selfless sacrifice. There was not a soul upon the Laune to see her, yet painted teardrops glittered on her cheeks, and her long, lace train dragged a path in the snow as they rounded the eerily still market with its canvas tents flapping weakly in the ice winds.
And when they arrived at the cordoned off centre of the lake, Avette approached with her arms held high above her head, a ribbon of glittering snowdust swirling around her wrists.
Only when every eye was on her, every gard and Wielder in their number watching in expectant silence, did she let her arms drop—and send a blast of Aera’s wind crashing into the laketop.
The ice exploded beneath the force, shards flying, and the ground beneath them shuddering with the impact.
Wielders pitched sideways, grappling at one another’s arms and slipping around with the grace of newborn foals as they fought to stay upright.
Even Imogen struggled to keep her poise, landing hard on her knees with a rather rough oof.
Not that Ger could judge; he’d staggered into his neighbouring gard, and from there every man behind them fell like bowling pins.
Only Avette remained upright, standing before the crater with a serene smile and a halo of sparkling ice winds.
A spectacle indeed.
Predictably, the queen grew bored once the shine of her big moment dulled.
She left the Wielders with instructions to shift and displace the ice, beginning their tunnel to the heart of the lake.
And, having fallen firmly out of favour, Ger was left behind to guard Imogen and her team as they worked.
Benan shot him a snide look as he departed, rubbing his large hands together briskly.
“Cold as balls out here,” he sneered. “Hate to be stuck doing grunt work all day. If anyone needs me, I’ll be warming up by Her Majesty’s hearth.”
Ger closed his eyes a moment to keep them from rolling, pleased to find that Benan had blundered off when he opened them again.
The big fool wasn’t wrong, though. It was cold as balls, but he was exactly where he needed to be.
Because the moment the Wielders donned their gloves and climbed from the mouth of the tunnel, there he stood, ready to take quiet stock of the progress they’d made.
He had a message to deliver to the Merrow King, after all.
He trailed the Wielders back to the palace later that afternoon, but nobody stopped to ask after him when he peeled away from their number at the gate.
Only Imogen seemed to notice, and other than a quick, keen glance, she didn’t react at all.
Perhaps she knew where he was going. Perhaps Adeline had trusted her with just as much information as she’d entrusted him.
Probably more, said a snide little voice in his head.
Ger wanted to ignore it, but that was sort of difficult when he wholeheartedly agreed.
Imogen had been Avette’s favourite pet for months now, despite being a close friend to the only family who could threaten her claim on the throne.
If she was cunning enough to pull that off, why should it surprise him that she could charm her way back to Adeline’s good graces, too?
Then there was the fact that things with Adeline just felt off somehow.
With all he’d witnessed and lived through in these last few months, it shouldn’t even matter.
He knew that. Knew that something so trivial should barely even register at a time like this, but it did.
Adeline was his best friend, the other half of his whole, and without her, he’d been wasting away in a black pit of panic.
He wanted to feel more relieved that she was back; he wanted to believe that her plan was going to work—but she was keeping something from him.
So here he remained in the dark, staring up from that pit with her outstretched hand just out of reach.
And Ger didn’t know if he had it in him to climb out alone.
He thought about it throughout his trudge to the kitchen, so consumed with his playyard squabble that he didn’t register the sound of the very real scuffle within until he opened the door.
And when he did, his heart dropped.
“Hey,” he yelled, half-tripping over the doormat, but they couldn’t hear him.
Not with Benan bellowing in Jack’s face, one thick hand twisted in the porter’s shirtfront while he shoved him against the wall hard enough to rattle his teeth.
Beyond them, a cluster of maids awaiting their daily ration had all huddled, cowering, around the farthest end of the farthest table.
They squealed as Ger tore past them and lunged for Benan’s cocked back arm, his heart drumming so hard his vision was bouncing beneath his pulse.
“I know you’ve been squirrelling food away, you fucking weasel,” Benan snarled, spit flying from between his clenched teeth.
“Benan.”
Ger tried to wrench the big bull backward but Benan shook him off and gripped Jack’s shirt with both hands.
“Mouse, squirrel, weasel,” Jack huffed under the weight of Benan’s two fists. “Really have a thing about rodents, don’t you?”
With no clever retort to offer, Benan just growled and gave a sharp tug on the porter’s shirt that sent his head cracking into the wall, the maids screeching at the sound, though Jack himself barely winced.
For Ger, though, the sound could have been the crack of something inside his own head.
His ears filled all at once with a distant, humming static.
It was strange, he thought, to be in two places at once.
He stood here in this kitchen, but also in the kitchen of his childhood home.
He watched Benan and Jack, but he was also watching another big brute throw his weight over someone unequipped to fight back.
At sixteen, Ger had finally made that split-second decision that he was equipped to fight back.
And now, at twenty-three and with six years of formal training under his belt, surely he was more equipped than ever.
Still, when Benan’s arm reared back once more, Ger wasn’t aware of making that same choice he’d made so many years ago.
He just—moved.
And Benan fell.
And the static in his head rose to a scream, the screams of the maids now and the scream of his mother back then.
Gerry, what did you do?
Ger’s heart was a hummingbird trapped in his chest, flinging itself against the cage of his ribs in a panicked bid for escape.
He fell to his knees, hands scrabbling over the other gard’s prone form.
No, no, no, no, no, his mind bleated. Blood, there was blood, that was blood.
It was pooling between the tiles and—no.
No, it wasn’t, not this time. This time it was pooling in the brute’s stubble, slipping between his swollen lips. Benan spluttered, a spray of red.
“You—you—”
Relief cascaded through Gerard in a hot wave, such a violent release that it wracked his entire body.
It was only when that wave crested past his throat that he realised it was not, in fact, relief.
The splatter of bile across the tiles was nearly as loud as the chorus of horrified groans.
It was nowhere near as loud as Benan’s outright scream.
“Did you just puke on me?”
Gerard could only gasp, still retching on all fours, vaguely aware of Benan’s legs scrambling out from under him.
“You alright, Pup?” That was Jack at his side, down on his knees and patting his shoulder despite the fact that Ger was splattered with blood and bile. He tried to shrug him off, but his body would not respond. “You need to breathe, you hear me? You’re alright, just breathe.”
Above them, Benan gave another beastly growl.
“You’ll be breathing out your fucking armpits when I’m through with—”
“Gregory Michael Benan,” came a thundering voice from behind them. “What have I told you about starting fights in my kitchens?”
A dramatic swirl of wind tugged at Ger’s hair and cooled his flushed skin before the door thunked shut.
He managed to turn his head, just enough to see Marie nearly vaulting tables to get to them.
Benan had been sidestepping the puddle on the ground and halted midstep, nostrils flaring with a huff of breath.
He wrenched his death stare away from Jack and Ger, turning to Marie, who waited with her hands on her broad hips.
“Well?”
“That I’ll be—”
“That you’ll be fighting the mice for crumbs, that’s right.”
Marie stepped in then, one clipped footstep after another until she was looming over Jack and Ger where they knelt on the floor, a bear standing over her cubs. Her tone lowered to a pitch deep and dangerous, the voice of pure wrath.
“And besides that,” she swore, “if I see you anywhere near my boys again, I’ll be on to your grandmother so fast it might finally spin that thick head of yours into place.”
Benan bristled. His face worked a moment, caught somewhere between rueful and rageful until the latter won out, twisting his thick eyebrows in a knot. That rage jerked visibly through him, jolting his gaze from Marie to Ger—to Jack.
“Good of Leman to save your ass,” Benan spat, “even if he doesn’t want a piece of it.”