Chapter 26
‘You should eat something, dear,’ Estegonde said.
As if she hadn’t said the same thing that morning, when she’d cleaned out the bowl of uneaten porridge Nanna had invisibly slipped onto my nightstand.
As if Durlain hadn’t said the same last night, sitting on the side of my bed with a plate of cheesy thyme-and-onion pastries in his hand and a look of unbearable concern on his face.
I said the same thing I had on those occasions, too, which was nothing.
‘Between you and me,’ Estegonde added, undeterred, jewellery tinkling as she bent over to settle the newest plate of bread and plum preserve on my nightstand, ‘terrible men are rarely worth the trouble of starving yourself. Throttling them in their sleep tends to be much more satisfactory in the long run.’
Despite myself, I blinked at that.
She gave me a wink, turned, and left the room in a swish of moss-green skirts, closing the door carefully behind her. Locking me up with my own thoughts, and with that hell-cursed bread, which was fresh and fragrant and made me want to lose the contents of my stomach all over again.
Terrible men.
Was Lark a terrible man?
Presumably. Apparently. Had anyone else told me the story, the lies and the deceit and all the ways he hadn’t saved me, I would have been beside myself with rage on their behalf.
I knew, and yet the rage wouldn’t come to me no matter how long I stared at the ceiling with dry, empty eyes – because if anyone else had told me the story, at least I would not have been forced to also feel the heart aching in their chest.
I’d loved him.
Did I love him still?
Had he wanted to save me? Had he felt bad about the lies, at least? Would he have taken me away from Aranc’s cruelty if I’d just loved him better?
The same questions, the same circles, over and over again. I wasn’t even sure whether I wanted to know the answers – whether the answers would make everything worse.
I didn’t want to throttle him in his sleep.
I just wanted him to come back and be safe again.
By the second sunset, the tears finally came.
I was bad at crying. It felt like bleeding – like losing parts of me that weren’t supposed to leave my body.
But curled up under my blankets, a little ball of misery around the vial of blood in my fist, something inside me gave way; I sobbed and sobbed for what felt like hours, my grief and shame and anger salty and sticky on my cheeks, until even those tears ran out and I was hollow and helpless all over again.
Durlain found me like that, hours later, my dinner uneaten on the nightstand. In the darkness, he was little more than a shadowy wraith, his eyepatch a gaping hole in his face, and even then he managed to look at me with something dangerously close to worry.
‘Thraga.’
I didn’t speak.
I stared at the window arches, carved leaves and flowers, and let the world slide off me like water off swans’ feathers.
‘Thraga, look at me.’
It wasn’t my intention to obey – to let him drag me that far back into the here and now, into my own body and all I did not want to feel.
But his tone was every inch the fireborn prince again.
He sat down on the windowsill before I could avert my gaze.
And the truth – the damning, undeniable truth – was that Durlain Averre was so very easy to look at.
He seemed made out of silver in the moonlight, a creature spun of stardust and steel.
Narrow face a collection of shards. Lithe frame elegant, almost fragile.
The collar of his shirt was lower than any he’d worn so far, and above the black silk, the scar slashed across his throat shimmered in silvery shades of ice – looking even harsher in the midnight dark.
Around him, the flimsy white curtains rippled on a non-existent breeze. He sat inhumanly still between them, legs stretched out, eye on me, and I wouldn’t have been able to look away if my life depended on it.
‘Leave me alone,’ I mumbled.
He considered that. ‘No.’
Fucker.
Nothing else followed. Just that look, pinning me in place, picking me apart piece by worthless piece, as I lay and breathed and tried not to exist.
‘What do you want?’ I muttered, finally, when it began to look like he wouldn’t disappear if I just ignored him for long enough.
‘Oh, many things.’ He rested his head back against the window, one horn ticking quietly against the spelled glass. ‘I’d be a significantly happier man if you were to eat some of that soup Nanna made for you, for a start.’
I had ignored the soup, too. ‘Shame that I’m not here to make you happy.’
‘You aren’t,’ he agreed, unnervingly amenable. ‘So who are you trying to make happy at the moment, Thraga?’
The question hung in the air, soft and simple and yet treacherous like beckoning marshland.
I should never have started talking. Now we were having a conversation, somehow, and had conversations with Durlain ever made anything better?
All the same, there was no scrubbing those last words out of my mind.
Who was I trying to make happy? The premise itself seemed absurd.
Lark didn’t love me, might never have loved me; I’d been played like a puppet, fooled like a child, and never even realised it until far, far too late.
If years of feeling happy by his side had been an illusion, then why would I believe the very notion of happiness existed at all?
It was time to stop being so gullible, so vulnerable. And if safety made me miserable, then so be—
‘You know,’ Durlain said softly by the window, ‘I never expected Lorn to kill me.’
My thoughts stopped dead.
He was no longer observing me with that painstaking attention, I realised only a moment later – his eye closed, his dark head still tilted back against the window. His lashes were unreasonably long. I wasn’t sure why I’d never noticed that before, or why in the world I noticed it now.
‘Sorry?’ I said.
‘Didn’t see it coming in the slightest.’ A bitter, brittle smile quirked on the edges of his lips. ‘I’m not sure if I’ve ever told anyone that.’
I wasn’t going to be intrigued.
I was not going to be intrigued. He was just trying to pull me into one of those quicksand conversations again. The prince of many faces, spinning his web around me – I could do without that, thank you very much. Yet all the same—
It looked painfully genuine, that hint of self-mockery on his face.
‘I thought you said they both hated you,’ I said, and wanted to kick myself.
‘Oh, they did. None of us ever made a secret of that.’ He paused, visibly considering his words. ‘And I wasn’t surprised Nal went about it the way he did. A day without torture is a day wasted, as he happily reminded me whenever he got sick of me.’
I narrowed my eyes. ‘Which I can only assume was a regular occurrence.’
‘Close to daily,’ he said, and the minuscule tremble of his lips felt like a glorious reward.
‘And I knew Lorn would one day try to get rid of me, too – but I always expected him to persuade Father to send me on some impossible mission and wait for someone else to finish me. That’s Lorn, you know.
Ruthless bastard, but he’s always pragmatic about it. ’
I hadn’t seen much of the princes when they’d visited Mount Estien.
I’d been wise enough to stay far, far away from the family that had killed my mother.
But I knew Nalzen had bedded about half the court’s chambermaids in those few weeks, not all of them willing, and that as far as Rook had been able to ferret out, Lorigern had instead spent every available minute strengthening his diplomatic ties with Aranc, Pol, and other family relations on his mother’s side.
Pragmatic, indeed.
‘Torture tends to be awfully impractical,’ I said and tried not to wince at the memory of Estien, Aranc, Kestrel.
‘Exactly.’ Durlain opened his eye to throw me a look. ‘Which is why I didn’t see it coming.’
Solid reasoning, I had to give him that.
And I no longer felt like a wallowing puddle of misery, which was unexpected; still miserable, admittedly, but this was the sort of misery that hardened my heart rather than hollowed me out.
The sort of misery that made me want to set my knives into someone else rather than myself.
I sat a little straighter in the ridiculous number of pillows. ‘So why are you telling me this?’
He clucked his tongue. ‘Because I felt like such a fucking fool.’
Oh.
The dots started connecting themselves.
‘I blamed myself for months after,’ he added, gaze aimed at the ceiling arches, mouth twisted in that faint expression of distaste at the memory.
‘Shouldn’t have assumed they’d each be working on their own.
Shouldn’t have made myself so vulnerable.
Shouldn’t have looked for danger in the wrong corners. ’
Shouldn’t have loved him. Should have loved him better.
‘Yes,’ I said thickly. ‘I understand that.’
He sent me another glance. ‘I know.’
Bastard.
‘But here’s the thing,’ he went on before I could tell him to stick his smug looks up somewhere else.
‘And please note that it took me several months to come to this realisation – but in the end, they were the ones who had murdered me, weren’t they?
Lorn was the one who’d surpassed my expectations regarding his own lacking morals.
So what in the world was I doing, taking all of the blame on my own dead shoulders, when there was a pair of hell-cursed murderers to be blamed instead? ’
And there it was.
He’d laid out his trap, and as always, I’d walked straight into his snare.
Shouldn’t have been a fool – but what about the person fooling me?
Shouldn’t have loved him – but what about the tender lies he’d whispered in my ears?
Shouldn’t have made myself vulnerable – but what about the promises, the warnings, the way he had deliberately and dishonourably peeled off my armour?
Who are you trying to make happy, Thraga?
There was a maybe-monster sitting on my windowsill, and the world was crisp and crystal clear in the silver-white moonlight.