Chapter 25
‘Durlain! Durlain!’
Silence had been forgotten. Stealth had been forgotten.
My fist landed on the connecting door between Cimmura’s bedroom and the next with enough force to leave a nasty bruise, and I barely felt it – not with the sketchbook still clutched in my other hand, those summer-blue eyes gazing up at me from the page.
‘Durlain, open the bloody—’
The door flew open.
He appeared tall and menacing in the doorway, dark hair glistening with moisture, black shirt half-buttoned and not yet tucked into his trousers. His eye flew to me, then to Cimmura’s room behind me, then to the portrait in my hand.
‘What the hell are you—’
‘What is this?’ I shrieked, thrusting the notebook into his chest.
‘Beg your pardon?’ He looked down and back up to my face, eye narrowing. ‘What does bloody Leif Estridson have to do with—’
‘That’s not his name!’ My voice soared even higher, as did my pulse. It was worse to hear him speak those unfamiliar syllables out loud. Worse than merely seeing them in Cimmura’s girlish hand. ‘That’s not his name! He’s not— He wasn’t— He can’t be—’
Grammar, Thraga.
Durlain didn’t even say it.
His gaze snapped to the page again. Then back to me. Then back to the page, eye widening in the sudden, stupefied silence, and up to my face one more time – his expression shifting, finally, from confusion to something I could only describe as dawning horror.
For the first time since I’d told him I was a witch in our Svein’s Creek cell, Durlain Averre looked truly, deeply, utterly shocked.
‘You’re joking,’ he said.
‘Do I look like I’m fucking—’
‘No.’ His hand found the doorpost, fingers clenching around the carved wood as though they needed the support. ‘No, you don’t. I can assure you his name is Leif Estridson, though, and the likeness is excellent. The conclusions are yours to draw.’
My hands were trembling.
The pages trembled with them as I glanced down again, hoping against all my better knowledge that they’d changed. That I’d misseen and misjudged. But the words were still there on the fluttering paper, the hand in which they’d been written so damningly clear: Leif Estridson. He was Nalzen’s friend.
And above them …
Lark.
Blue eyes. Golden hair. That smile, most of all, that broad, dazzling, death-or-glory smile – unmistakably, undeniably Lark.
‘That’s impossible,’ I breathed.
Durlain merely arched an eyebrow.
‘He lived in Estien all his life. He told me he’d lived in Estien all his life.
’ I managed a gesture at the open page before me, hand shaking violently now.
Impossible. If I just clung to that thought, surely this would soon turn out to be some cruel, elaborate joke?
‘So Cimmura can’t have met him. So they …
they can’t be the same person. Just a close resemblance. Just …’
The words died away on my lips.
Now Durlain just had to nod. Now he just had to agree with me that of course, some people just looked like each other, and either way, it didn’t make sense for a humble cabbage farmer to be his brother’s close friend, did it?
But what he said – carefully, as if a single wrong word might end with my nails in his remaining eye – was, ‘Leif’s preferred weapon is the axe. He has a weak spot on the left with his overhand swing, though.’
I was no longer breathing.
‘There’s a scar on his right hip.’ Every word was another vicious punch to the face. ‘A clean cut – a throwing knife hitting the wrong spot during training. And I assume he’ll have arrived at Mount Estien about three months after Pollara died, given that—’
‘Stop,’ I gasped.
Durlain shut his mouth.
Too late. The words had already been spoken.
Three months. Almost to the day. I knew, because we’d toasted to her memory.
I knew, because I still remembered Rook regaling the new recruit with the story of her death, gruesome detail after gruesome detail – because Lark had said he hadn’t known.
Because he’d come from a small cabbage farm on the far west of Estien, and he hadn’t known.
Nalzen’s friend.
Prince Nalzen. Of Averre.
Whose very damn brother had been the one administering that poison.
‘But that doesn’t make sense,’ I rasped, and it felt like trying to hold on to a wall of slippery ice. ‘It doesn’t make any sense at all. Why would your brother’s friends show up at Mount Estien if … if …’
‘Excellent question.’ Durlain let go of the doorpost, jaw set in a line of polished marble. ‘I believe that’s what we commonly call espionage, isn’t it?’
I stared at him.
His lips twisted. Not a smile, nothing even remotely like a smile – a vaguely regretful expression that did not reach his eye.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Leif disappeared from the Averre court about two and a half months after the day my wedding should have taken place. I remember wondering where he’d gone.
If you say he turned up at Mount Estien …
’ A glance at Cimmura’s drawing; his jaw tightened further.
‘I figure my father had decided by that time that I’d be dead soon, and he was preparing to get his information from some other sources. ’
Information.
Spying.
Lark.
‘No,’ I said, hearing the hollowness of my own denial. ‘No, he can’t— He wouldn’t—'
‘I’ll gladly welcome any other explanation of the facts.’ He stepped back from the doorway with another brambly smile. ‘Come in. That is to say, put that book back where you found it, and then come in.’
Right.
Shit.
‘I … I didn’t want …’ The sketchbook became a guilty, leaden weight in my hands. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude, I swear. This used to be my room, and I just wanted to see—’
‘Thraga.’ The glint of purple in his eye shut me up. ‘It’s alright. Put that book back on the desk. Then come in here and take a chair before you topple over, because I’ve seen corpses with a healthier complexion.’
I put the book back on the desk.
I staggered in after him.
The world was a blur of wood and dark linen, turning and churning around me like a column of smoke.
Bookcases covering the walls. Coats and shirts flung over the backs of chairs.
A wet towel on the bed, at least three layers of blankets beneath it.
The scent of woodsmoke and dark roses hung faintly in the air, and motes of dust danced in the golden light that fell through the two arched windows.
Mother’s room, looking nothing like Mother’s room.
I barely registered Durlain guiding me to a chair by the fireplace, his hand firm on my elbow.
As if they’d waited for their chance, my knees gave in the moment we reached the seat; I fell rather than sat, landing in the cushions with a crash that rattled my bones.
My throat was squeezing shut. My sight was blotting violently.
Lark.
Leif Estridson.
‘Breathe,’ Durlain commanded, crouching before me, and something in his voice left no choice but to obey – that sharp, indisputable confidence of a man raised to hand out orders. I gulped in a lungful of air. ‘Good girl. Keep doing that. Need a drink?’
I managed a nod, breathing in, out, in, out, as if my life depended on it. He rose in a supple movement and disappeared into the bathroom, returning a moment later with his shirt fully buttoned and a glass of water in his hand.
His fingers brushed mine as he pressed it into my palm. They were colder than the fresh water itself; I couldn’t help a shiver.
‘There you go.’ His voice was soft, although nothing close to gentle. ‘Take a moment. No need to hurry yourself.’
I sipped. I breathed.
Durlain sank into the other armchair, slender elbows on his knees, hands pressed together before his lips.
His gaze didn’t meet mine. It lay fixed instead on the smouldering embers in the fireplace, calculations visibly running in the shadowy depths of his eye – no more shock on his face, no more surprise.
Just the look of a carette player inspecting the latest cards to have landed in his hand, contemplating his next devastating move.
Another shiver ran down my spine, this one colder still. My fingers found the little vial around my neck – glass, blood, Lark.
Leif Estridson.
Nalzen’s friend.
If it was true – and try as I might, I couldn’t see a way around that – then what else had he been lying about? His political sympathies? His future plans? Or even—
‘Do you mind if I ask some questions?’ Durlain broke the silence.
I shook my head, then realised he was not looking at me. ‘No. No, that’s fine.’
Fine.
What a fucking laughable word.
‘How did Leif find out you were a witch?’ A world of questions lay beneath the small tilt of his head. ‘You’re hardly forthcoming with the information. Did you tell him?’
Oh.
Oh, no.
Was that the sort of information he’d been sending back to Varraulis in Averre – Aranc’s secret weapons? Although surely he wouldn’t have told his king about me? He knew how Mother had died. He knew what fireborn did to my kind.
He hadn’t. He couldn’t have.
‘I … I didn’t.’ My voice was a little choked. ‘He found out by accident.’
Durlain waited.
‘There was another bird. Hawk.’ I still couldn’t speak the name without wincing. ‘In the early days I slept in the barracks with all the others, and he kept trying to— Well. You know. Had to fight him off me all the time. Until I got my own room – that is, until Pol made Aranc give me my own room.’
He closed his eye.
All of a sudden, he looked so very weary – so very empty. But all he said was, ‘I see.’
‘So it got better for a while. And then I forgot to lock my door one night and it turned out Hawk was still trying, because he barged in while I was sleeping. We fought. He tore my sleeve and saw my mark, and I just … froze. He was telling me that I was going to do his bidding or he was going to have me stoned when Lark walked past and bashed his head in.’
You were wise not to fight, witchling.