Chapter 22 #2
‘Look at that!’ As if she was proud of me for waking up at all. ‘And on your feet already – what a pleasant surprise. I’m Estegonde, Durlain’s aunt. Call me Gon, if you wish. Do you feel like eating, or is it a little early for that?’
And just like that, the world had gone even more insane.
Estegonde Averre.
Varraulis’s missing sister. The woman who’d been labelled a pretender to the throne a decade ago, after the Thrice-Dead King’s latest trip in and out of hell, and who had vanished into nothingness soon after – that very same Estegonde Averre was standing in my mother’s bloody house?
The house her brother was supposed to have burned down?
Hell. Had they been Varraulis’s soldiers at all?
All I knew was they’d carried his personal sigil, but family members – wives, children, siblings – were allowed to wear that eight-ray sun.
‘There are some … slight complications,’ Durlain said in my place, which was probably for the best, because I doubted I’d have managed the restrained, grammatically correct sentences that were generally expected while speaking to sisters of kings.
‘She’s familiar with houses like this one, for a start. ’
Like this one.
Was he suggesting there were more of them?
Estegonde did not show surprise, of course. Blinking and gasping were activities for the baser classes. Her perfectly shaped eyebrow did come up a quarter of an inch, however – an expression that granted me permission, generously so, to interpret it as interest.
‘That seems rather extraordinary,’ she said.
‘I’m not lying,’ I sputtered. ‘I—'
‘Of course you aren’t, dear.’ Her faint, unfazed smile effortlessly skipped over my rudeness. ‘Lies are quite commonplace, which is not a word I’d ascribe to the current situation. May I ask when you became acquainted with such a house, exactly?’
Perhaps I was dreaming after all.
Her calm was grotesque in its bizarreness, her sophisticated accent a wry joke at the memory of Kjell’s rural drawl.
I was a feral little killer on the run. I made my bed in servants’ rooms and crumbling sheds.
I did not have pleasant chats with royalty in magical houses that should no longer exist, and the fact that she was acting as though this was nothing out of the ordinary only served to make it stranger.
‘I … I lived in it until I was five. Until …’ My eyes found Durlain, who stood perfectly still in the doorway – spine ramrod straight, eye very dark. ‘Did you tell her …’
He shook his head – a single, almost imperceptible movement.
‘It was burned down by Averre soldiers,’ I said hollowly. ‘My mother died.’
There was a small pause.
‘Your mother,’ Estegonde repeated, carefully.
It was somehow a question, so I nodded.
‘I see.’ She sighed and swept around, with the effortless poise of a woman who knew even her gentlest suggestions would always be taken as commands.
‘Dur, be a dear and get the poor girl something to wear, will you? I’ll ask Nanna to make her breakfast, and then we can all sit down.
This will be somewhat of a conversation. ’
It turned out I’d rather overestimated the strength of my legs.
By the time Durlain returned with a snug woollen dressing gown, fur-lined slippers, and my own tunics and trousers, my quivering knees had forced me to sit down again on the edge of that almost-familiar bed, staring at the almost-familiar walls.
Not Mother’s house, after all. It couldn’t be Mother’s house, because that had burned to the ground.
It didn’t make the sight of the carved arches and inlaid wooden floors any less unnerving. Who in the world would build two near-identical houses like this – and why in hell had my family lived in one? Why was Averre royalty living in the other, for that matter?
Somewhat of a conversation.
Estegonde wasn’t about to tell me she’d known my mother, was she? That I was Averre bastard offspring myself?
Next to me, Durlain put the pile of clothes down on the bed, threw me a single one-eyed glance, and turned to close the door.
I should have been galled by the presumptions in that little gesture, the very notion that I’d want to be alone with him …
but the damning truth was that he was right, and that I couldn’t bring up the energy to do anything about it.
I knew him, at least.
He could answer some questions, at least.
‘How long have I been out?’ I mumbled as he turned back to me.
‘Four days.’ His voice was distant, almost formal, as he handed me the slippers, then began to untangle sleeves and sashes.
As if we’d never sat on that blanket together, warming ourselves by the fire in woollen socks and dressing gowns.
As if he didn’t still owe me a barrel of mead.
‘Badly feverish for three of those. You got some unpleasant blows to the head, too, so you may want to be mindful of concussion symptoms. Do you have a headache?’
I shook my head, felt my skull more emphatically than I usually did with that movement, and grimaced. ‘A little.’
He sighed. ‘Could have been worse.’
That seemed an understatement.
I could have been dead. I had been as good as dead, and only now did the memory fully return – the strength of the water, the slippery stones. I had been dying, and that hand—
I blinked.
Undeniable facts collided in my mind.
‘That was you.’ It wasn’t a surprise, exactly; I just hadn’t had the time to reach the conclusion yet. ‘You pulled me out of the water.’
He didn’t meet my gaze, long fingers working tirelessly on a knot that didn’t look like it should need that much time or attention. ‘Pain and Smudge seemed uninclined to do it.’
‘But … but the cold, and …’
‘I noticed the cold.’ A swift, thorny smile. ‘I’m not saying I enjoyed it.’
But he’d done it.
He’d wanted his hot baths enough to potentially risk his life for them. Had wanted to avoid the river so much he’d suggested riding for the next town, straight back into the birds’ talons. And then I’d been drowning, and he’d stepped right into a rush of ice-cold meltwater to save my sorry life.
His eye stubbornly avoided mine.
I swallowed and muttered, ‘Am I allowed to thank you yet?’
‘I’ve invested rather a lot in you at this point,’ he said tersely, holding up the dressing gown. ‘Losing all that work to a river seemed ridiculous to say the least. Do you prefer to stay in that nightgown, or would you rather wear your own clothes?’
‘Nightgown.’ I squinted at him. ‘And stop trying to make me hate you.’
He stiffened.
A moment of deafening silence, then he finally turned his head towards me, lowered the blue robe in his hands, and said, ‘Beg your pardon?’
‘You’re getting rather transparent,’ I said, shocked by the clarity of my own thoughts – as if the river had washed all facades and misunderstandings away with it.
‘With your insults and your unnecessary lashing out whenever you’re giving me even the slightest reason to think well of you.
You might as well stop doing it. I don’t think it’s working. ’
That last sentence was a surprise.
To me, at least; Durlain didn’t blink.
‘Ah.’ He gracefully handed me the dressing gown. ‘A display of particularly poor taste on your part, if I may be so free.’
‘I never claimed to have good taste,’ I said with a scowl. ‘My only friends are knives and murderers.’
Something twitched around the corners of his lips.
A flash, and then he’d averted his face – but there was a distinctive air of shaking shoulders about him as he began folding my tunics again, and somehow I doubted he was crying.
Which shouldn’t be a reason to feel so hell-cursed smug about myself.
I didn’t give a damn about his shoulders, shaking or otherwise – but mists take me, there was something strangely addictive about shattering the bastard’s composure.
‘You could tell me the rest of the story?’ I suggested to his slender back.
‘There isn’t much else to the story.’ His voice sounded a fraction smothered, and it took a long moment before he turned back to me, tunic still in hand.
‘You were unconscious and burning with a fever. It wasn’t my plan to bring you here on the way to Mount Garnot, but you needed help and we’d rather run out of options. So I brought you home.’
Home.
The fucking irony of it.
‘Which is also your aunt’s home,’ I said, wrestling the dressing gown around myself and slipping my arms through the sleeves, ‘and of someone called Nanna, and—’
‘Nanna is our old nursemaid.’ His face softened a fraction ‘She’d die for Muri and me – that is, she did – so you don’t need to worry about trusting her.
Aunt Gon is possibly the only person in the world who hates my father as much as you do, so I’m sure you’ll get along splendidly, and the last member of the household is Errik, her guard.
’ He shrugged. ‘Don’t harm Gon. Other than that, he’s hard to provoke. ’
I frowned. ‘I take it you tried?’
‘No comment.’ The perfect blankness of his sharp-edged face said all that needed saying. ‘Are you able to walk?’
I told him I was, then made it halfway to the door before my knees gave out on me. He swept in just in time to catch me, with an ease and speed that suggested he’d anticipated the necessity, and carried me down the hauntingly familiar stairs, then into the living room below.