Chapter 13 Mance, Without Asset, Without Livid #2
He sets the lantern down and steps away from it, facing the other direction, and I take my chance.
As soon as I see my body appear in the ring of light, dusky and distant, I throw myself back into her. Then I retreat quickly into the shadows, crouching down as I blink through the memories and the pain.
I don’t think he saw me.
Holding my breath while my mind settles, I take a moment to look around.
I realize this isn’t a clearing at all, but rather a part of the former city that’s been flattened by an explosion.
Reltas is standing in the middle of a ramshackle home, its walls destroyed and its furniture collapsed, and I have inadvertently fled into one of the dilapidated bedrooms.
Suddenly, I am uneasy. This isn’t the situation I was expecting.
The murky, yellow illumination of the lamp reveals small markers of a shattered life. A corner of embroidery on a frayed quilt. A box of abandoned toys. A splintered post sticking up from the ground with notches on it for height, names carved into the wood beside them.
I glance back at Reltas, but he isn’t doing much. Just digging around for something in the bare dirt between the floorboards. I crane my neck to see what it is, but when he rises his hands are empty, and my shoulders slump.
Then he just stands there, staring at his shoes, and it seems increasingly unlikely that I’m about to discover anything at all.
I shift, wondering if I should speak. If I should make him tell me what I’m doing here. Not just here in this broken house, but here in the Forest Realm, preparing to become his wife. Perhaps in these woods, in the quiet of the night, he would be more forthcoming.
But just as I take a hesitant step forward, the ground shudders, like the first gasp of an earthquake, and I freeze.
Because I recognize that tremor.
I act fast this time, scrambling on top of a half-broken chest of drawers, while Reltas perches on the high back of a torn sofa across from me, looking decidedly unsurprised at the unnatural quaking.
Between us, in a patch of bare earth that lays exposed in the midst of the planked flooring, two sets of hands break the surface, sending the dirt flying.
I rip a dangling piece of splintered wood off the side of the dresser and brace for the rest of the onslaught, trying to get as much height atop the battered wooden structure as I can.
There’s a fluttering of fear behind my rib cage, as well as a profound exhaustion. Haven’t I been through enough today?
But nothing else comes.
He only summoned two sets of hands. Here, in this abandoned wreck surrounded by miles of nothing.
I pinch my eyebrows together, confused, trying to figure out any possible purpose for such a thing.
And I’m not about to ask him now, so I start by studying the arms themselves for clues.
They’re unremarkable. One set is slender and feminine, and the other is muscled and male, but they have no distinctive markings, no rings or bracelets.
Interestingly, neither one of them heads for me, not even for a second. They scramble to claw at the dirt under Reltas, ripping the fabric of the sofa beneath their dirty nails in their effort to reach him, fingers contorting in their haste.
And I note that the couch’s fabric is already completely shredded in that spot, a mess of ribboned, threadbare cloth.
Slowly, I raise my eyes to his hardened face, realizing that he has summoned here before. Many, many times.
I wonder who they are. Someone he knows, surely. His . . . parents? Remembering the broad, brawny figure of Prime Gore and matching it to the male pair of limbs, I’m sure that’s right.
And I feel a wash of conflicting, churning emotion at the realization.
It leaves me a little sick, wishing I hadn’t followed Reltas after all.
Whatever he’s doing here, with the reaching arms of his dead parents, it’s not part of his schemes for me.
It’s personal, private, and I don’t want to be here any more than he would want me to be. I do still have Heart, after all.
So I go quiet, hoping to do him the kindness of never revealing that I saw this.
Willing to wait until he leaves and then climb a tree and beat him home so he never even suspects.
I hold as still as I can, in tense, awful silence, for several slow, stiff minutes.
The only sounds are the quiet hum of the forest and the scratch of nail on cloth, the subtle tumble of shifting dirt.
His parents must’ve died here. I can’t believe I’ve intruded in such a hallowed place.
I keep my eyes down and occupy myself by counting the scars on my fingers, remembering the battles that brought them, as my creatures crawl along my scalp.
It’s not until I hear Reltas inhale sharply that I glance up, and my eyes widen.
He’s sweating, gripping the back of the couch with white-knuckled hands. His gaze is intensely focused on the arms and he’s leaning toward them, dangerously close. He looks like he’s a breath away from falling.
The hands become more frantic in response to his proximity. They swipe at the air just in front of his face like they want to grab him and pull him down with them. Like they want to bury him, too.
That’s exactly what they want, I realize.
And judging by the way that Reltas strains to keep himself away, there’s a part of him that wants to let them.
My stomach turns over. Is this the dark side of his magic?
Would all his hands act like this toward him if he were near, or is it only because he had an emotional tie to these hands in particular?
I remember that it was Kiar who buried the scroll in the Outskirts and Reltas was nowhere near.
He was busy with other things, of course, but it’s also possible that he couldn’t have been near or he would have been swarmed.
Or, based on his behavior now, he might have walked right into the middle of the onslaught and let them take him.
“Don’t,” I say softly.
In the quiet of the night, my words may as well have been an explosion.
His eyes snap to mine, finding me in the shadows, and he snarls, his features completely overtaken by fury. “What are you doing here?” he thunders.
But the hold that the arms have over him seems to lessen when he’s not staring at them so intently. So I keep his gaze, hardly even thinking about why, as I climb down from the dresser and step into the halo of light. “Not like this,” I say.
There’s nothing but hatred in his expression as he regards me, like he’s caught me reading his journal or going through his things.
And yet he doesn’t look away. Slowly, under the weight of my stare, his breaths even out and he leans back again, farther out of reach.
The sound of nails on wood and ripping fabric pierces the silence, but our eyes stay locked on each other, neither one of us looking down.
His expression is grim, but the scratching eventually slows down.
Then, finally, after what seems like a small eternity, there is a strange slithering sound and he relaxes, breaking our eye contact quickly, angrily, clearly upset that he held it for so long. That he needed to.
And then there is nothing left between us but silence, and a patch of empty dirt, freshly overturned.
A beat goes by, the stillness weighted.
Then he surges off the couch, closing the space between us in two strides, lantern light exaggerating the contours of his glower.
“How dare you—”
“Do you really do this every night?” I interrupt. “Alone?” Reltas is not exactly my favorite person, but even so, the thought makes me ache.
“It’s none of your—”
“Whose home was this?” Without Poise, I’m not so worried about talking over him or whether my questions are rude. After all, I’ve already intruded and he’s already upset. I may as well ask what I want to.
“It was my mother’s, if you must know,” he scowls. “Until your father brought the war to her doorstep.”
“Didn’t she live in the palace by then?”
“Of course she did. But that particular day she was hiding me. It never occurred to her that your father would attack civilians.” He spits the last word, and it’s clear he’s only answering this particular line of inquiry because it’s another barb he can throw at me, another action of my father’s to heap on my shoulders.
But I heard the quaver in his voice when he said “me.” And I can put the pieces together, figure out that she must have died saving him that day. Because he’s standing here in front of me, and she’s reduced to a pair of hands in a broken house.
“I’m so sorry,” I breathe.
It only makes him angrier. “I don’t want your pity.”
“I know.”
“In fact, it’s pathetic.”
“Okay.”
“At least what I’m hiding is my weakness. You actually hide your strength. You refuse to use it at all. You’d rather mope.”
My mouth opens to say something else placating, but when his words register, the breath evaporates from my lungs. “How . . . How do you know about—”
He smirks, obviously pleased to have found something I’ll react to, something to finally turn the conversation away from him. “I met her, remember?”
I hadn’t remembered. Or, rather, I hadn’t thought about what it meant. The fact that he saw that part of me. That piece of my soul I hardly want to look at myself, that I haven’t even shown to Silver.
My creatures skitter around my body, not knowing where to settle.
I feel the void where her predators used to prowl, and for a second I swear I hear a wolf again, in the distance.
But most of my creatures are too consumed with the urge to hide, desperately burrowing deeper inside me, covering their snouts with their paws.
“What did she do?” I ask, afraid of the answer.
He snorts. “She almost killed me, to be frank with you.” He rolls up his sleeves and stretches out his collar to show me scabbed-over gashes on his skin, disappearing beneath the fabric.
I remember how much he kept adjusting his shirt when he stood in my throne room the next day.
I didn’t realize it was because he was hiding open wounds.
“I’m s—”
“Stop it,” he snaps. “This is what I’m talking about.
Do you know she actually made me nervous for a minute?
Like maybe forcing you into my plan wouldn’t be as easy as I thought?
I could even respect her. But when I met you it was clear she didn’t go back to you.
You had nothing of her fire. Everything went as smoothly as I’d hoped.
And now she’s gone, and you’ll never have the strength to stop me.
I don’t know why you did it, Mancella Cliff, but you cut out all your own power. So don’t you dare judge me.”
He keeps trying to hurt me, but without Livid’s fury I don’t feel the need to scream back. I feel exposed, raw, even a little afraid. But I also feel sad.
For him.
I let the pause stretch long before I say, “Power. Yes. You seemed very powerful tonight. It must have felt wonderful.”
He grits his teeth, glancing back at the overturned dirt behind him, before returning his glare to me.
But for once he has nothing further to say.
And it dawns on me that for all our stark differences, there are many things about us that are the same.
We have both experienced terrible traumas.
We are both possessed by dark magic we can’t always control.
We both have secrets to hide, parts of ourselves that we’re ashamed of.
We were both suddenly stripped of any guidance and thrust into rule.
And we are both . . . doing our best to live up to that responsibility. Albeit in very different ways.
I don’t realize how hard I’m returning his stare until his changes, recalibrating into something less confrontational. Something that on anyone else I would call . . . searching.
It feels significant, this moment. Like we’re seeing each other for the first time, here in the ruins of a war that changed us each. I find that I can’t look away.
He doesn’t either.
And so we keep our eyes locked, both of us ripped open and speechless, as the night continues to darken around us.