Chapter 32
Kallen found me in our sparring chamber late that night. I was punching the bag over and over, my knuckles bruising and healing in turn. “Go away,” I said, voice hoarse.
He didn’t reply, just closed the door and stood in front of it, arms crossed. He wore a long black coat that covered him from neck to ankle, and I wondered where he was coming from and why he was here, since I’d sent a note canceling our lesson.
I moved around the bag to put my back to him, then furtively swiped my wrist over my eyes, hoping he didn’t see the residual tears.
This was weak. I was weak. And because a princess didn’t have the luxury of fragility, I’d stopped at Blood House to change into sparring clothes and pen a note for Kallen, then come here to let the pain out where no one could see.
Even without looking at Kallen, I was uncomfortably aware of his presence. It was as if the air shaped itself differently around him. I glanced at the mirror and found him watching me with a furrow between his brows and a brooding angle to his lips. “What happened?” he asked.
I gritted my teeth and slammed my fist into the bag harder. My knuckles throbbed, and the pain reverberated into my arm. “Don’t you already know? You always know everything.”
“Was there a problem in your house?”
I stopped hitting long enough to press the heels of my palms against my eyes. Yes, that was how this horror of a night had started. An ugly suspicion formed, and I spun on him. “Do you have a spy in my house?” I demanded.
His eyes narrowed. “No.”
I let out a rough laugh. “How am I supposed to believe that?” And how had I not considered this before? He had spies everywhere.
Kallen took one step closer. His coat was clasped with silver, and the fabric whispered around his boots with the movement. “Have I given you reason to doubt my word, Kenna?”
Anger felt better than sorrow or the gnawing worry in my gut that never left. I glared at him, notching my chin into a more confrontational angle. “Then tell me why you think there were problems in my house.”
A muscle flexed in his jaw. “If you’re this upset, it’s because you saw someone else suffering. Since I haven’t heard of anything happening, an issue at home was the most logical conclusion.”
It’s because you saw someone else suffering. Why would he say that? Why would he know that? But the first conversation I’d ever had with Kallen was when I’d been weeping over King Osric’s executions. Maybe he’d understood me from the start.
My skin prickled under his unrelenting focus. Sometimes I hated how Kallen looked at me. Like he was noting every detail of my appearance—the mess of my hair, my reddened eyes, the fading purple on my knuckles—and could read the emotions and thoughts beneath the surface, too.
I wasn’t ready to talk about Anya yet, and that wasn’t what had sent me here to batter my knuckles bloody, anyway. “I went to the brothel.”
“Ah.” His lashes flickered. “Thinking about helping them escape?”
“Now how the fuck would you know that?” The question exploded out of me.
“Because I know you .”
A small sound caught in my throat, a scoff that couldn’t pick up the required level of disbelief.
“Do you?” I turned my face away and wrapped my arms around myself as the last traces of soreness in my hand vanished.
I’d fractured a knuckle an hour before, and even that lightning crack of pain hadn’t lasted long.
I was too aware of my own body these days. Too aware of everything—my failings and fears, the vast gulf that separated me from the other Noble Fae. All this power, and I’d still watched helplessly as a faerie was tortured and murdered.
“Kenna.” The way he said my name drew my attention again. But I always wanted to look at Kallen, and that was another thing I was far too aware of. “Do you not want that?”
“To be known by you?”
He nodded.
“I’m not sure I want to be known by anyone.” It wasn’t true, though, and that made me even more anxious. There was something endlessly hungry in me, endlessly lonely, and it stirred whenever Kallen was around. I sniffled and wiped my eyes again. “Have you seen what happens in the brothel?”
Sorrow crossed his face. “I know what happens there, but I’ve never been inside. Osric warded it against me.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t want me at risk of forming any…connections.”
What did that mean? Love, sex, companionship, all of the above?
“I wouldn’t have gone for that reason,” he said quietly. “But I would have been tempted to try to save them.” He paused. “I sometimes wonder if Osric suspected there was a part of me he hadn’t been able to corrupt yet.”
More likely he’d wanted Kallen completely isolated. No friends, no allies, no lovers. A weapon didn’t require anything but the hand wielding it.
“Talk to me,” Kallen said, stepping closer. “Tell me what happened.”
I shook my head, but it was a useless denial. It was only a matter of time before I confessed my failings to him.
“Kenna. Why were you crying?”
“Can’t you just leave it?”
“No.”
Of course he couldn’t. Kallen was dogged in his pursuit of whatever he wanted to know.
I turned to slam my fist into the bag one more time. The skin over my knuckles split, releasing ruby drops.
He was walking towards me now. Quickly, purposefully. My heart raced with sudden panic, and I backed away. Realizing how cowardly it made me look, I hurried towards a rack of weapons, yanking a spear out like that was what I’d meant to do all along.
“Tell me,” Kallen ordered. “Tell me why you’re hurting yourself.”
I squeezed the haft of the spear in my sore hand. “I watched Torin and Rowena force a sylph to dance in red-hot metal shoes,” I said, the confession ripping out of me. “I was in the catacombs, and I watched as they tortured and killed her, and I didn’t do anything to stop it.”
He was still coming, not seeming to care that I was armed and he wasn’t. Why would he, though? I was useless. “Why didn’t you do anything?”
The answers tumbled out. “Because of the Accord. Because everyone would realize it was me if I killed them with magic. Because it would have started a war before we were ready, and I have people I’m responsible for now.
” My throat felt painfully tight. I could hear the sylph in my head, screaming as her skin burned down to the bone.
“And none of those— none of those —seem like good enough reasons right now.”
He was within arm’s reach. I halfheartedly angled the spear towards him, but he grabbed it in one hand, wrenched it out of my grip, and tossed it away. It clattered against the floor.
“Aren’t you sick of me by now?” I asked, grief and self-reproach welling up until my eyes stung. “I’m weak.”
“No.” He gripped my shoulders. “Let it out.”
Tears were streaking down my cheeks now. I choked out the question that was haunting me. “What is the point of all this power when I’m still failing to save people?”
I had watched Osric torture Anya and done nothing.
Tonight I’d watched the same thing happen again, except this time I had magic and immortality and a deadly weapon on my side and there had been no wards stopping me from attacking Torin and Rowena, and I’d still done nothing.
I hadn’t saved the sylph. I wasn’t saving Anya, either, and no matter how many people I brought to Blood House, it didn’t make up for that.
Kallen’s jaw worked, and his fingers flexed on my arms. “You didn’t fail. You chose the long game. And you saved lives by not rushing us rashly into war.”
“Not that life,” I whispered.
“No,” he said. “Not that one.”
It was blunt and matter-of-fact. Free of judgment and forgiveness both. I envied him his certainty—how he could look straight at a situation like that, understand my decision, and quantify the loss without diminishing it.
This was precisely the type of calculation Kallen was best at, though.
Weighing lives against other lives. Weighing crimes.
Trying and sometimes failing to fight the sense of futility that permeated our lives down here.
History ate itself like a snake swallowing its own tail as the Fae continued their unending battle for power… but that didn’t mean we should give up.
Even if our victories had a steep price. Even if we lost.
I closed my eyes, breathing in his scent. I felt wrung out and exhausted, but confessing had been a relief. It felt like poison had been building up inside me, and I’d finally bled some of it out.
“Sometimes we have to pick the least awful of two bad choices,” he said quietly.
I nodded, letting the words sink in. It wasn’t absolution, because no one could offer that. But it was perspective.
I kept breathing, letting the messy emotions settle into a gentler ache. Kallen didn’t try to fill the silence. He held me by the shoulders, waiting.
“How do you do it?” I finally asked.
“Do what?”
“Survive this.”
He took a moment to answer. “Well, sometimes I hit things late at night where no one can see.”
“You guessed I’d be here?” I opened my eyes again, unable to resist looking at him for long.
“No. I set a few shadows in the corridor outside.”
Irritation sparked again, but it was a relief to feel something besides guilt and grief. “Why didn’t I see them?”
His lips quirked up on one side, but it wasn’t really a smile. “I’ve been doing this a long time, Kenna. I know how to make them blend in.”
The dark stone of the corridor, the shadows between torches—yes, I could see how a few tendrils of darkness could escape my notice. I shifted out of his grip, turning to look at the rack of weapons. “I wanted to be alone.”
“Do you still want that?”
I gripped another spear haft, considering the question. Speaking to him had made me feel better. Still ashamed of my failure, still angry and grieving, but…a little better.
I wanted to be alone when it came to everyone but him.