44. Alar #2
The breaking glass mimicked the one thing guaranteed to break him.
Why?
Who benefited from my brother's misfortune? Or rather, who thought that he would benefit once Arlen was out of the picture.
Avren.
He was the most likely to do this. Perhaps not with his own hands, but he could have paid someone.
Balert?
The man seemed devoted to Arlen, but Avren could have bought his loyalty.
I wasn't sure about Balert, but I was pretty sure about Avren. Sitorians wouldn't have bothered with breaking Arlen psychologically, and neither would political rivals inside the Federation. The previous assassination attempt might have originated with either of those, but this was an inside job.
Avren dismissed Arlen as broken, and since he assumed the twins weren’t considered an option and didn’t know that I had been promised the throne, he believed that he was the next in line. He was motivated to see Arlen eliminated, believing that removing him would make him heir.
For Avren, it was a simple calculation.
I was grateful that he didn't know I'd been tapped, because Avren was dangerous. If he knew I was standing between him and the crown, he might do me a lot of damage, and hurting me physically was not even the worst of what he could do.
I stood and turned back to my family, but I wasn't going to tell them my suspicions. If it was indeed Avren, I would have to find a clever way to deal with him.
I went to Arlen.
Balert had gotten him back into the chair and was checking him for injuries, but somehow the shards seemed to have missed him.
That didn't mean he was all right, though.
He wasn't. His eyes were open, but they were not with us in this room. His pupils had blown wide and black, and his breath came in fast, shallow tearing pulls. His hands were shaking in his lap along with the rest of his body that could still move.
I knew what it was. I'd seen the edges of it and pulled him back from it.
But this was worse than the edge. This was all the way under.
It was the flood the healer had warned me about, the door we'd cracked open week after week, torn off its hinges by the one stimulus that matched exactly the thing that had broken him.
Not an echo of it like a dropped tray or a wine glass breaking. A big window coming at him.
I knelt in front of him. "Arlen. The wheels. Put your hands on the wheels, feel the rubber. A window broke because of rot, and nothing is coming. It's over. Hear my voice. You're here. It's now."
None of it reached him. I repeated it time and again, low and even, providing a handrail and not pushing. He just stared through me at a gym five weeks gone and shook.
There was a devastating sort of helplessness in watching a discipline I'd staked everything on dissipate into thin air. I kept talking past the point of hope because stopping was unthinkable, but eventually I understood that the only thing left to do was wait for his body to exhaust the terror.
His mind had gone somewhere I couldn't follow and couldn't call him back from.
"How long has he been like this?" Father's voice was quiet, controlled, the frightened-soldier steadiness clamped back down over whatever was underneath.
"It will pass," I said, not turning. "It takes time. The shock was bad. It was an exact replay of what happened before, just without the grenade."
"Alar." He said my name gently. "Look at him."
"I am looking at him."
My brother, who'd shaved himself that morning and put on a good coat to show his father he was worth a gamble, was sitting in his wheeled chair only because his manservant had lifted him like a child and put him there.
He was shaking, his eyes staring blindly into a past he was reliving in his mind, the nightmare claiming his senses again.
"Your Highness." Balert crouched next to him. "Let me get you to your bed. You need to rest."
Arlen gave no sign of hearing him either.
Balert might have been speaking to the furniture. He kept at it anyway.
"I have seen enough," Father said to my mother, and his voice was full of grief.
Mother uttered a whimper. Her lip was trembling, and she had a scrape along her cheekbone where she'd met the floor, but I didn't think she was aware of it. She was looking at her eldest son with her hand pressed to her chest.
"He is not well." Father turned to me. "I love him.
You know that I do. And because I love him, I will not set the weight of the Federation on his shoulders and watch it crush what's left of him.
I will not do that to him, and I will not do it to Catonia.
We go back to the original plan. Arlen is cared for by his future wife, and Tarina gains more influence than it could have ever dreamt of.
And you, my youngest son, are the heir." He said it as if he were closing a ledger after discovering a shortage of funds.
"I am sorry. I have wanted you to succeed and bring Arlen back restored.
But a window fell, and I watched a kingdom's worth of decisions land on a man who couldn't stay in his chair. "
If there was one saving grace I was grateful for, it was that Arlen heard none of it, because he wasn't with us in the room. His body was, but his mind was in the past.
My father had just proclaimed what the rest of Arlen's life would be like, in a calm grieving voice, and my brother was too far gone to realize what was happening.
I went to my father and dropped any pretense of pride.
"Give us the time you've already given us.
You set the timer at five weeks. We have a week left.
Don't end this in the same hour a window frightened the life out of all of us, because a decision made right now is a decision made by broken glass.
" I gestured at the littered floor. "You taught me that.
Never sign anything in a rush, or when your temper is high, or if your heart is full of vengeance.
The ball is two weeks off. Nothing has to be unmade today that can't wait until then.
Give him the days you've already promised. "
Father looked at me for a long moment, and he saw how badly I wanted this, and something in his expression softened. It was pity. Pity for me. For Arlen.
He let out a slow breath. "All right. I'm not one to go back on my promise.
The days I gave you are yours. To the ball, and no further.
I'm only granting it because you asked, and not because I believe it will change anything.
" He glanced once more at Arlen and then back at me.
"I'm doing this out of mercy, not hope. I'm giving the time to you. Not to Arlen."
He collected Mother, who went to Arlen first, touched his hair, took his hand in hers and kissed it, but got no response. Father had to draw her away, and as they left, the guards left with them. I heard my father order a crew to come and board up the window until a replacement was ready.
And then it was just the two of us and Balert.
It came back to Arlen in pieces, the way the healer had told me it would, slow and partial and merciless.
The shaking eased first. Then his eyes began to refocus, to recognize the room, to land on the floorboards, on the glass, on his hands, which he stilled with a visible effort.
He came back to just enough of himself to understand where he was and what had happened in front of whom, and I watched that devastating understanding arrive.
"Don't," he said. His voice was rough. "Don't say anything."
"Arlen."
"I felt it." He wasn't looking at me, and his breath was still hitching. "I was right back. The glass…" The words were coming out broken and spaced apart. "I couldn't. I couldn't stop it." A long shudder. "Father saw."
"Father loves you."
"Take it. Just take it, Alar. Or the twins. Or Avren. Let. I can't. Stop trying to. I'm not." His hand made a vague hopeless motion at his ruined body, at the floor and the glass. "Done. I'm done. Stop wasting. On me."
He wasn't making an argument. He didn't have an argument left in him. It was surrender leaking out in fragments, the bare gist of it, take it, leave me, I'm finished, stop spending your energy on a lost cause.
I leaned and gathered him against me and didn't try to talk him out of any of it, because it was futile to try reasoning with him right now.