44. Ifs and Maybes
Chapter forty-four
Ifs and Maybes
S olveig sat against the rough bark of a tree. Her arms curled around her knees as she twirled a dagger between her hands, keeping her mind occupied as she fought through the sleep deprivation. Only the roaring fire kept her company in the dark. She was staring through the rustling canopy of the trees to the starless sky above, when soft footsteps sounded behind her, breaking her reverie.
“Mind if I join you?” the prince whispered from the shadows.
“What’s this? Another misplaced act of kindness.”
“No.” Emmerich said, as he took a seat before her. “Wrenn is snoring in my ear. I can’t sleep for shit.” Solveig said nothing as she continued to stare up at the sky. “You’re not going to sleep, are you?” he asked.
Solveig shook her head as she lowered her eyes to meet his thoughtful gaze.
“Will you tell me why?”
Solveig warred with herself for a moment, tilting her head back against the tree as a soft breeze caught her hair. “I never trusted Commander Sellen. And now that you and I showed him and his guards up at the gates. I trust him even less.” She sighed, a deep cleansing breath. “He let us go for now, but I have no desire to sleep when his men could creep up on us at any moment.”
“Here, I thought nothing scared you.”
“Luxenal was never a paradise, but it’s not the place I knew. Something has changed.” She stared over the prince’s shoulder into the shadowed enigma of the trees as her mind whirled.
“Are you going to tell me or leave me guessing?”
Solveig eyed the prince. “If it becomes pertinent to your investigation.”
“And if I was your friend?”
“You and I can’t stop lying to each other long enough to even try.” She said, shaking her head in defeat.
“We could start now, clean slate.” He moved to sit on his knees as he extended a hand toward her.
“What’s the price?” She didn’t move an inch, eyes narrowed on his outstretched hand.
“Renit Teria. Is she…”
“She’s safe. The boys too.” Her shoulders slumped in defeat as the prince’s mouth fell wide open. “I took everything from them. The least I could do was give them back their freedom.”
“The parents are dead, then?”
Solveig’s head shot up; jaw clenched. “You mean to tell me you threatened my life when you weren’t even sure if I’d killed them?”
“I hoped more than anything that perhaps you aren’t as lost as you appear.”
“Hope is a fool’s errand; you should have left it in Elithiend. It abandoned these shores long ago.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I have my reasons, and they aren’t for you to know.”
“And yet you let the children go free,” Emmerich whispered, at a loss.
“The children were innocent.” Solveig shrugged, “misled by their parents’ poor choices.”
“She was an elemental, a powerful one, and you still let her go.”
“Don’t paint me for a saint.”
He was fighting a losing battle against a princess, with a moral code blurred beyond recognition. Had tried to shove her into the box of the heartless killer, her parents’ puppet, but it wasn’t as simple as that.
He watched in silence as she leaned her head back against the tree once more, at a loss for what to say, when a silver chain glinted at her neck. The unfamiliar jewellery pulling his focus. Then he stilled. Ice in his veins as his eyes zeroed in on her choker free neck, and the faint scar that it revealed on one side.
“How did you get that scar?” His muscles were tight as tension invaded his system, hands fisted, jaw set. His eyes appeared almost black, churning like charred firewood as he continued to stare.
“It’s a long story,” she muttered, meeting his gaze as her hand moved to cover it. Surprise colouring her words at the intense anger that simmered beneath his. “And nothing more than I deserved.”
“Friends. Remember?” he gritted through clenched teeth. “We’ve got all night.”
Solveig stared into the prince’s eyes. Trying and failing to understand where his sudden concern had appeared from, before taking a deep, steadying breath as she began.
“I hadn’t been at Luxenal long when the first execution summons arrived. It was for a man charged with treason and attempted murder. They wanted flare and drama. They had trained me for it for years.”
“It had rained all night long, but that didn’t stop them. They set up a stage right on the edge of the open cast, where they chained the man to the floorboards from the waist down.”
“He should have been the one screaming. Every test of my new power told me that, but as I bent and gripped his neck, closing my eyes to delve down into my power, it wasn’t him, but me.”
“They hadn’t chained his arms, and I, in all my cocksureness, had failed to notice. He had grabbed a fistful of my hair that I had naively left down and yanked me toward him. Stealing one of my daggers to hold it tight at my throat. Hard enough to break skin.”
“I can still remember the stench of his breath as he whispered, ‘what a show it would be to slit your pretty throat and watch you bleed out instead.’ He’d pressed deeper as he drew the blade across my neck. I felt the bite and tug. The warm sticky fall of my blood and then it was over. Blood splattered across my face as the blade fell from his hand, and his body slipped to the floor with it, a bolt protruding from his neck.”
“If you check the records, the kill is mine. Even though if it hadn’t been for that guard, I would have been dead. The healers patched me up, and I was back on my feet the next day. Where a shiny new execution summons waited on my desk. For Dorian Illsen, Guard of Luxenal Mine. His crime? The unwarranted murder of a prisoner.”
“I had to go back on that stage and face the chained down man who had saved my life and take his in return. I had to watch as every glimmer of life drained from his eyes until all that remained of this man — whose only crime was saving a stupid girl’s life — was a dried-out husk.”
With her eyes trained on the floor, she heard rather than saw the prince move. Felt him in the sparks across her skin as he drew close. And with slow, excruciating tenderness, he drew a fingertip across the scar. Her pulse flickered beneath his touch as her eyes met his.
“How old were you when they trained you to become… this,” he whispered. His voice was low, fingers resting on the crook of her neck, feather light but infinitely distracting. She swallowed, trying to regain her composure, as her pulse raced, blood heated, and skin tingled beneath his attention.
“Twenty-one.” She let out a shaky breath. “I lost someone close to me. It was the same night they arrested Malik. After that, I didn’t particularly care what happened to me.”
“They manipulated you,” he hissed. Pulling away from her as his hands fisted, leaving her cold without him.
She shook her head, coming back to her senses.
“Yes, Solveig,” Emmerich insisted, taking both of her icy hands in his. “You were finding your feet in a new world where a friend had betrayed you and you lost someone you loved. They took that weakness and spun you into a mythical monster fit to do their dirty work under the guise of giving you purpose.”
Solveig’s head continued to shake with every hope filled kindness that drifted from the prince’s mouth.
“Be honest with yourself,” he pleaded, “if your friend hadn’t died, would you have become the person you are today?”
“I can’t answer that,” she bit out, nostrils flaring, as she tried to push the pain in her heart back into the box that she kept padlocked shut.
“Why?”
“BECAUSE THEY DID DIE! AND I DID BECOME THIS PERSON!” She wrenched her hands from his, slamming her dagger to the hilt in the dirt beside her as she stared up at the sky, fighting to calm her erratic breathing. “What use are ifs and maybes when they won’t change my reality?”
Emmerich reached out again. Gripping the hand that had gone white at the knuckles. Pulling it away, he massaged the hurt in her muscles as he whispered, “they let you know who you are. Who you truly are deep down if this world wasn’t so broken.” His voice was soft, as though he spoke to a wounded animal.
But as Solveig’s heart rate slowed, her breathing followed, and her eyes shuttered. She pulled her hand back from his grasp, removing the dagger from the earth as she spoke. “It’s a beautiful sentiment, Prince. I can only imagine what life in Elithiend is like for you to have grown up which such whimsical notions in your head.”
“We are not without cares. My people had to adapt the same as everyone. Our ancestors’ reluctance to join with yours in their worship of that, that, thing…” he sputtered.
“The Oracle,” Solveig bit.
Emmerich ignored her. “They cut us off from everything. We had to learn to provide for ourselves and we have become stronger for it. Elithiend is a nation reliant on itself and we have earned our place through the blood, sweat and tears of our ancestors.”
“Perhaps one day I’ll get to see this magical place.” Solveig scoffed.
“Now who’s thinking whimsical notions?”
The crackling fire was the only sound between them for a while, aside from the faint snoring of Commander Bleeker. Solveig resumed gazing at the starless sky, and the prince stared at her. The real her. Her mask and armour dropped slightly in the relative anonymity of the woods; she appeared younger, softer, more human. He hated to ruin the almost carefree look on her face, hated that he was about to cause any amount of tension to creep back into her muscles.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said at last, and Solveig’s gaze shot back to him, instantly wary.
“We took your notes,” he whispered, crushing dry leaves between his fingers nervously, “and the book you were studying.”
Solveig’s face clouded. A storm brewed in her eyes, her voice cold as death as she hissed, “Are you insane?”
“We were desperate!”
“How am I supposed to trust anything you say when you’re going behind my back?” she spat. “You’ll return that book the minute we get back to the city. And you best pray to anyone out there that still listens to you that the library hands haven’t noticed it’s missing.”
“You were on to something,” he interrupted.
“What?”
“Your list of names, the dead, the weakened. Why were you writing them down?”
“Why would I tell you that now?”
“I think we solved it. The people who are dying come from families who historically had a significant amount of power.” He paused. “And the families whose magic is failing all together don’t. There’s no crossover, not in the names you found.”
“Since you solved it, why don’t you tell me what it all means then, tell me how we stop it.”
The prince hesitated, fumbling with the leaves once more. “That we haven’t figured out yet.”
“Of course you haven’t.”
“Because we need your help.”
Solveig’s eyes narrowed. “For what?”
“I need you to get us into Leader Ezekiel’s library.”
Solveig laughed, but when he didn’t join in, she froze, staring. “You’re insane.”
“Can you do it?”
“It’s not a question of can I . It’s: will I?”
“Will you?” he pressed, voice shaking.
“No.” She scoffed, as though the mere idea was completely nonsensical. “Not now, not ever.”
“This could be the key,” he tried. “What if there’s a way to save your people from this horror?”
Solveig hesitated, remembering the sight of her own blood splattered on the stones in the temple. Memories of chest rattling coughs that echoed from the duchess and her son flooded her mind. “I’m guessing at some point you considered me a suspect, but that idea must be at the back of your mind now. So, tell me, what is it you’re after?”
“Whatever it was, Malik Etana took. We think The Oracle has something to do with what’s happening here, and to prove it, I need to know how elemental magic reacts to its presence. Information that only your temple leader has.”
“We’re finished here.” Solveig’s eyes shuttered, locking him out completely. As she made to stand, Emmerich grabbed her hand. The Oracle was their saviour, not their destroyer. She believed that. He was chasing a false lead.
“Wait,” he implored, staring up at her, “Please, what happened?”
The princess stared down at their joined hands wistfully before pulling herself free of his grip.
“The Oracle is Osvolta’s saviour. They brought blessed balance to our country.” She said simply, “You’re on the wrong track, Prince, investigate elsewhere.”
“I think it warrants looking into,” he insisted.
“Then you’ll be doing it alone. I cannot go up against The Oracle. Don’t ask me too again. This is the only warning I’ll give you. I won’t report you for what you have already done, though Oracle knows I should.” Solveig walked away, lying down on the opposite side of the fire, her eyes never closing as she watched and waited for the dawn to crest. Giving birth to a new day without answers, another day closer to making friends with death.