Chapter 23 #2
‘Yes,’ she admitted, and as opposed to her nephew, she at least had the grace to look unhappy about it.
‘Yes, it is. But usually that sort of things happens through, for lack of a better word, trial and execution. It’s hardly common for my brother to bother with sending soldiers at all, let alone his personal guard. ’
I opened my mouth.
The space on my lips suddenly felt painfully hollow.
It was true. It was so obviously true that even my obstinate thoughts couldn’t find a way around the matter – so true, really, that it shouldn’t have taken me the long-lost sister of Averre’s king to realise that something was off about the story I thought I knew.
Us witches must be careful, Kjell had said, with that grim look on his face which signalled forbidden territory.
We’ll speak about this when you’re older, little monster.
And then I’d been older.
And he’d been dead.
‘What do you …’ My voice had abruptly gone hoarse. ‘Do you know why she was killed?’
Rather than answering, she threw Durlain a swift look – her face unreadable but her shoulders tensing ever so slightly, as if she expected objections she’d have to deal with first.
He’d gone equally unreadable on the other side of the table.
Not that he was an open book even on the best of days – but it was only then, confronted with the inhuman impassiveness on his starkly drawn face, that I realised how well I’d learned to decipher the slightest hints escaping his masks.
There were no hints here. Just the thread of tension thrumming in the air between them before Durlain folded his long fingers on the edge of the oakwood table and said, ‘Thraga is surprisingly well-informed on the ins and outs of our family dealings. I think a short summary should be plenty.’
It didn’t sound as though he was informing her of my background knowledge.
It sounded as though he was telling her how much he could stand to hear.
But if Estegonde heard that undertone, her faint smile gave no sign of it. She turned back to me with a gracious tilt of her head, golden chains tinkling on her horns. ‘Then I suppose you know that I was forced to leave Mount Averre a little over a decade ago.’
Because she’d either staged a coup or been innocently accused of it – I could sympathise in either case, so prying seemed unnecessary. ‘Yes.’
‘As I was looking for a place to go,’ she went on, pensively, ‘I asked a friend of mine for help. A family member with useful contacts. He told me about this house – the Dawn House, he called it. He also told me there used to be at least one more of its kind, the Dusk House, but that it had been destroyed about seven years earlier.’
I had been five years old when Mother’s home burned. Had seen my twenty-third winter this year. Which meant—
Sweet hell.
Eighteen years.
My chest was drawing in, tighter and tighter, as if to shield my heart from something I didn’t even know yet was coming.
‘But you told me these were old structures Seranon found during his research,’ Durlain said, his posture a convincing imitation of loose, his narrowing eye the only hint of something much more dangerous beneath the surface. ‘Which, according to him, had not been in use for decades.’
‘Yes.’ There was a hint of apology in Estegonde’s smile. ‘I’m afraid I lied.’
He didn’t exactly stiffen.
But I recognised the way his expression seemed to pull shut, his features far too calm, far too meticulous for the cosiness of this place – a mask that wasn’t so much another face but rather a shield.
A happy family, I’d thought a minute ago.
Aunt and nephew, snugly rebelling together.
Yet that tension was back between the two of them now, too taut for it to be just this single instance of annoyance; it had the air of a wound already prodded once too often for it to ever truly heal.
By the wall, Errik absently fingered the hilt of his sword.
Mists take me. What age-old machinations had I dragged to the surface here with my ill-timed drowning?
‘I do hope,’ Durlain said, with a cold, courtly crispness that contained nothing even remotely resembling hope, ‘that you’re not about to tell me Seranon has been meddling with individuals threatening to undermine the peace and stability of the fireborn kingdoms?’
Resistance.
He was talking about resistance.
Estegonde gave a soft, noncommittal sound. ‘I’m very fond of Seranon, Dur.’
It sounded like a warning and an explanation at once.
Durlain Averre. The prince who would be king.
The prince who believed, truly believed, that he deserved that fucking throne – who believed, too, that anyone acting against him would be acting against the interests of his people.
Family members mingling with rebels, no matter how futile their fight might be …
Keep your hands off him, Estegonde’s almost aggressively genteel smile said. There’s a reason I did not tell you before.
Why was she telling him now?
Because he’d shown up with a half-dead runewitch in his arms, desperate to save her life?
My head was spinning, and the world spun with it. Because if that was what they were saying, beneath the surface of smiles and euphemisms, then the impossible next step, the only sensible conclusion I could draw, was—
‘Are you saying my mother was in some resistance movement?’
Both their gazes shot back to me, Estegonde’s unfazed and self-assured, Durlain’s brimming with a barely contained ferocity that sent my guts twisting in all sorts of unpleasant ways.
Mostly unpleasant. I looked away, quickly, before I could think too much about that; surely it was more sensible anyway to look at his aunt instead, who could actually answer my questions?
‘That does seem the most likely explanation, doesn’t it?
’ she said, smoothing out a wrinkle in her elegant blue dress.
From so close, I could make out the pattern of rays embroidered around her collar, gleaming thread against the darker velvet.
‘Given that she lived in one of these houses, we might theorise she was one of its leaders.’
I stared at her.
Her smile went a fraction rueful. ‘I did tell you to eat your porridge first.’
The porridge could go fuck itself. ‘A leader?’
‘Well.’ She sighed. ‘Yes.’
‘Of resistance?’
A small inclination of her head.
‘And then she was killed …’ By a king. By the same king whose throne she’d have tried to topple, if any of this madness was true, and hell take me, it made far too much sense for my instinctive denials to get any fair fighting chance.
Why else would Varraulis have given a damn?
Why else wouldn’t he just report her as a witch to the nearest city?
‘But then … then all the people visiting her …’
Kjell.
Who’d been one of Mother’s closest friends.
Kjell, who’d saved my life. Kjell, who’d housed and clothed and fed me. Kjell, who I’d insisted to Durlain would never harm a fly.
When you’re older.
My heart wasn’t rattling. It was beating far, far too slow instead, a hammer-beat pulse I could feel at my temples, in my guts, in the tips of my fingers. Can’t be, every desperate thump tried to tell me. Can’t be. And yet—
The facts were the facts.
Had my life with Kjell truly been safe and simple? Or had it been too safe and simple? Had we lived far from any centre of civilisation not for the calm and the breathtaking coastline of Hjarn Bay but rather to … hide?
I wanted to throw up.
I wasn’t made for intrigue and politics.
I really, truly wasn’t. I wasn’t going to get anywhere near kings and their schemes ever again in my life – I was going to go with Lark and hide on his parents’ humble cabbage farm and spend the rest of my days ploughing unwelcoming farmland, smelling the clean, fresh air.
So this all had to be some sort of misunderstanding.
Perhaps that Seranon fellow had lied and these houses were just …
Just …
Fuck. Just what? Cosy forest cottages sprinkled around Seidrinn?
‘Oh,’ I stammered, minutes too late, and it sounded like the helpless little mewl of a newborn child. ‘Alright.’
Nothing was alright, but Estegonde didn’t need to know that.
More importantly, Durlain didn’t need to know, because I could already feel his gaze boring into the side of my face, and I didn’t want his anger.
I didn’t want his pity. I certainly didn’t want him to think I was a danger to him after all, because one word from him could kill me, and—
‘Could we try to find out more?’ he said on the other side of the table, gaze moving from me to his aunt. ‘If Father arranged that attack, he must have had reason to. If we get a message through to Seranon, Hevaine might be able to dig around.’
Oh.
The prince of many faces again. Knowledge is my dearest weapon.
‘Perhaps.’ Estegonde sounded doubtful. ‘But it would be a risk, and I’m not fully sure what you’d do with the information even if you could get your hands on it.’
A shrug on the edge of my sight. ‘Some people might appreciate having it.’
Some people.
Me?
Did he mean me?
‘I’m fine,’ I forced myself to say, even though it was a lie, even though every single one of them had to know it was a lie. ‘I’m fine, really. I don’t want to give your father any reason to become interested in that house again, or in me. They’re all dead, anyway.’
Mother. Kjell. That little girl who’d never even seen a knife up close.
I didn’t want to think about them, and now there was no stopping it anymore – as if my mind needed to go over every little shred again, turn every glimpse over and over, until none of those safe old memories were left untainted.
I should never have stepped into that fucking river.
I should never have left that Svein’s Creek cell.
‘In that case,’ Estegonde said, picking up her scarf-in-the-making, ‘I believe we have spoken enough on this subject. What do we have for dinner tonight?’