Chapter 20 #3
‘That doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense, Thraga.
’ He broke a crumb off his cake, rolling it thoughtlessly between his fingers.
‘If he had to come after you, then it’s a plain fact that you were the first to enter that tunnel.
Which means that, according to every definition I’m aware of, you were the one who discovered it. ’
I stared at him.
He absently slipped the morsel of cake into his mouth and chewed for a moment, his gaze never straying from the fire.
‘I never thought about that,’ I said blankly.
‘I noticed.’ A small shrug. ‘That concerned me.’
‘Why in the world would that have concerned you? You hate me. Or … or at least …’ It occurred to me, belatedly, that there had been suspiciously little loathing in that pensive, intrigued look at me. ‘You told me I was lucky you needed me alive.’
A twist of his lips. ‘Well, you were.’
‘You’re talking around the point,’ I snapped.
‘The point isn’t a very pleasant one, and I’m not sure you’ll enjoy hearing about it.’ He popped a last bite of cake into his mouth. ‘Then again, you might have gotten used to the unpleasantness by now. So I’ll leave that for you to decide.’
Unpleasantness, yes.
But somehow …
Somehow, it was rarely dishonesty.
‘Tell me,’ I said, and it felt like plummeting – like sucking in a breath and diving off a cliff the way I’d done on the warmest days of our Hjarn’s Bay summers. ‘Please.’
Again there was no answer for a while.
The fire hissed. Our wet clothes dripped. The downpour outside was abating ever so slowly. We were miles away from civilisation, miles away from any other living soul, and it felt as though I was miles away from myself and my own life, too.
‘I used to think,’ Durlain said, calmly and exactly, as if measuring every word to the letter, ‘that my mother loved my father, because she never disagreed with him.’
My heart stood still.
I parted my lips, and found that no words were coming to me.
‘And then as I grew older, I started noticing things that didn’t add up.
’ His voice was distant. ‘She was very intelligent, you know. Every now and then she’d say something brilliant, and the next day, she’d tell us it was my father who’d said it first. Or she’d speak to my aunt about things she wanted, and then she’d go to see my father, and suddenly she’d want something else entirely.
Or he’d call her a vain little fool and she’d just nod along, even though she wasn’t vain in the slightest, and certainly not a fool. ’
The warm glow of the fire had faded. Something cold as midwinter frost was creeping up my guts, my lungs, my throat, turning the breath on my lips to ice.
That wasn’t me. That wasn’t—
‘And she swore she loved him,’ Durlain continued, still in that strangely flat tone.
‘I think she believed it, too. Because that’s the thing, isn’t it?
As long as you’re happy to stay inside, a cage just feels like a home.
It’s only when you want to step out that you start to see the bars for what they are. ’
Step out.
She had died.
Queen Izenore, second wife of Varraulis Averre, had died.
‘What …’ My voice came out feeble; I swallowed and tried again. ‘What happened?’
‘My father crossed a line,’ he said quietly. ‘She got angry with him. Criticised him, very explicitly and very publicly. And five days later, she was dead.’
‘He killed her? He killed her for—’
‘Well, he says he didn’t, of course.’ Bitterness edged his voice.
‘She was Lesceron’s cousin; he had to soften the diplomatic blow.
Swore with the oathstone in his hands that he’d never ordered anyone to kill his wife, that he’d never expected any member of his court to do such a thing – so I don’t know how he did it. But I know it was him.’
The oathstone. One of the rare relics from old times still in use at the fireborn courts – runic magic ensuring its holder could only speak the truth or die.
‘Fuck,’ I said.
A huffed laugh. ‘You have such a way with words, Thraga.’
‘Knives tend to be more effective,’ I muttered, and again he gave one of those strange, mirthless, laugh-like exhales – as if humour, even the palest, weakest attempt at it, might just cover up the aching vulnerability of the words that had come before.
For a minute, perhaps longer, neither of us spoke, sitting side by side on that dusty blanket and staring at the flames, at the pulsing glow of the wood, at the sparks erupting from the fire in flurries of golden pinpricks.
I thought of Queen Izenore. Of Queen Mahelt before her.
The thrice-dead king and his twice-dead wives, and then …
Then there was Lark.
It hurt to even think of him in that sentence.
‘So what you’re telling me …’ It took a physical effort to push the words from my mouth, but there was no going back, now. There was no living with the thoughts half-spoken. ‘You think I’m living in a cage, too.’
‘I’m hardly in a position to tell you anything,’ he said with startling bluntness – Durlain Averre, showing a glimmer of modesty.
‘You know yourself better than I do. But having seen you at work these last few days, I can’t shake the impression that you’re stuck behind your own set of phantom bars, yes. ’
Like the bars through which I’d watched the gallows.
Like the chains around my ankles that I hadn’t broken for eight long days.
The vial around my neck seemed so heavy suddenly, dragging me down and down and down.
You wouldn’t survive a week without me, he’d said.
As if it were a simple fact, obvious even – but I had survived, for months on end, after Kjell had been murdered.
You were wise not to fight – but today I’d fought, and I’d been bloody good at it.
I keep finding you in the strangest places – but had I ever even been lost?
Was I going mad?
And she swore she loved him …
Fuck. I wanted to scrub the sound of those words from my mind like I’d scrubbed the mud off my skin in Durlain’s bathtub – wanted to have never heard them at all, because now there was no unhearing them, and they were tearing at the fabric of my sanity, thread by thread.
Had he intended to lie to me?
No. Sweet hell, no, that couldn’t be true.
Four fucking years – no one could keep up a deliberate lie for so long, and Lark had been a bloody cabbage farmer, not some scheming prince!
He wasn’t a villain. He wasn’t a monster like Varraulis Averre, and I was an utter disgrace for allowing those thoughts into my mind at all when he wasn’t even here to defend himself …
It must have been a misunderstanding. Nothing more than that.
He’d wanted to save me, like any good man would have; he might have gotten so carried away by his noble cause that he’d simply seen a few too many reasons to.
Nothing we couldn’t fix. Once he came back, once I explained what I’d come to realise without him, surely he would be happy that I’d found some unexpected strength within myself?
‘All the more reason to hurry up to Mount Garnot, then,’ I said, aiming for firmness but unable to keep some relief from my voice.
My thoughts were back in line. Now it was a matter of keeping them there.
‘We’ll get Cimmura back, and then you’ll bring Lark back, and I’ll tell him everything and we’ll figure things out.
Without any cages. That should work, shouldn’t it? ’
Durlain was quiet for a moment.
‘Yes,’ he eventually muttered, lips barely moving, as though he wasn’t speaking to me at all. ‘Yes, supposedly.’
He did not, I noticed, sound terribly convinced.