Chapter 14
KORYN
“Why?” I wanted to scream. A thousand words crowded my throat, fighting for their chance to give shape to the pain. I swallowed them all. “Why?”
I did not bother to look around the room Garrick had led me to. What did it matter if it was well-appointed and comfortable? It was just another dungeon, even if there was no salt in sight.
Garrick closed the door behind us, shutting out the rest of the world. We should be quiet. But I did not know if I was capable of it. Isanara wove in between my legs, wrapping her tail around my bare calf in a show of silent solidarity. She intended to stay out of this argument.
The fucking Duke of Sein Talam did not avoid my glare as he spoke. “The title was granted by my father before my brother was born as a threat to his queens, should they continue to fail to produce a male heir.”
I don’t give a fuck about your title—but Garrick spared me having to swallow the words by cutting me off. “I don’t want it. I don’t use it. This is not my home, and I do not answer to the king.”
That information would probably be valuable someday. An hour in the Court of Lies and I knew that understanding the complex inner workings would be essential to my survival. But I could not bring myself to care, not when one knife competed with the other for how it could carve up my chest.
“Why does the king trust you with my keeping?” I’d worked most of the rest out. As best I could. While trying to figure out how everyone was related.
I’d figured very little out, actually. I had no confirmation that Maura was creating a talisman, for what purpose, or where she’d hidden them. Auri was still an ally. The fae king was exactly as awful as I’d always imagined. Everything was deeply fucked up.
But none of it explained why the king had agreed to allow Garrick to guard me and ensure my good behavior, when he clearly hated his father.
Which meant that Garrick was still keeping secrets.
I waited for him to try to dodge the question. Offer me some stupid tidbit about his very special royal fae title.
Instead, Garrick the Red lowered his hands and offered them to me, palms up, in a gesture that could only be interpreted as submission. Maybe even supplication.
“The woman standing at the edge of the dais was my mother,” he said, still holding my gaze.
I knew immediately who he meant. The slight, dark-haired woman I’d noted and dismissed. Her hair must have been styled over her ears, if I hadn’t noted her humanity. That made sense. Who would advertise that weakness in the fae court?
His mother… the one who’d been raped by the fae and forced to bear a bastard child. Not any fae, I amended, but the evil king himself. Thirty-some odd years later, she was still not free of him. Her son was grown, and she was still forced to stand at the beck and call of her abuser.
Others’ rage might be fire, but mine was ice.
The block in my chest hardened, giving strength to the power that surged in my veins.
Garrick’s eyes shifted, the blue subsuming the green, the lids pulling in opposite directions as his gaze widened.
He noticed the shift in my power. At least he did not reach for me.
If he did, I was certain I would shatter.
The events and emotions of the last hour would turn outward, and I would not care who the icy shards cut—including myself.
And from the way his eyes softened, Garrick knew it, too.
“When I was twelve years old, my mother and I were summoned to Balar Shan. The king’s wives had failed to produce a male heir. I came here expecting a family, only to find myself a weapon in a war that had already been raging for centuries.”
Garrick could not touch me with his hands. So he reached for me with words instead. His voice was steady, even as he recounted what must be among the worst moments of his life, pressing warmth against the ice and slowly melting it.
It was shared trauma that had drawn us together.
We’d both lost so much. We’d never talked about what we each stood to gain from conquering the Seven Gates and lifting Velora’s curse, but the feeling had been there.
The significance lingered just outside the pocket of reality created by the gates, the one where we’d fallen in—
The sound of ripping fabric accosted my senses, rupturing my reverie.
My gaze snapped free of Garrick’s.
One of Isanara’s spikes had caught in the coverlet of the bed to my right, tearing a large gash in the thick, quilted brocade. It might as well have been through my skin.
No. No, no, no. I could not let Garrick comfort me, even if it was just his words. In the throne room, it had been a matter of survival. But here, alone, it was dangerous.
It would be too easy to forget. I could not let myself make the same mistake twice. That was why I’d built that block of ice in my chest, to protect myself—and everyone I cared about.
Kyrelle and Isanara. But more faces swam in the eddies of my consciousness. A flash of red hair, a sister I’d never known I had. A head of dark curls and laughing eyes, an unexpected light in the darkness of the temples.
Too many people.
I could not protect everyone. Not if I could not first protect myself.
My fingernails pressed crescent moons into the flesh of my palms as I forced out an exhale.
Focus.
Garrick’s mother brought him to Balar Shan when he was a child. The king gave him a title that enmeshed him in court politics. Decades later, Garrick betrayed me. Now I stood in this bedroom, still a captive in actuality if not in name.
Explanations. I deserved them, and Garrick was going to give them to me. Or I would have Isanara start taking bites.
“None of that explains why your mother is here now,” I said between gritted teeth. “Or why the king should trust you, or me.”
Garrick’s jaw ticked. “You are not the only one who has made bargains.” Or mistakes.
I hated that I could hear his unspoken words. I should not have allowed myself to know him so well. Damn it, I don’t know him. Everything between us had been a lie. He did not deserve the charitable implications of my addled brain.
Garrick’s eyes lifted over my shoulder. I was not certain if he looked at something specific in the room or simply into the past as he spoke.
“When I was born, my mother struck a deal with the king. She would be allowed to raise me on her own, away from Balar Shan. But should the king ever summon her, she must return.”
My stomach twisted. “Why would she make such a bargain?”
“Because it was the only chance she had to save me,” he said. From the king, my mind supplied, ignoring my earlier demands. “She gave me twelve years of peace and safety.”
It wasn’t fair. Even if the king had not physically forced Garrick’s mother, it was still rape.
The imbalance of power between them was too stark for it to be anything else.
Maybe she’d been in love with him. My brief interactions told me that the king was not capable of reciprocating the emotion. Lucky him.
Garrick’s eyes slowly tracked back to me, but I could tell from their sheen that the past still held him captive.
“My mother raised me to be a good and honorable man,” he said quietly.
“You are a bounty hunter,” I said—and regretted it. The shift was subtle, but I was too familiar with his body to miss it. His shoulder blades contracted, his jaw stiffened. Restrained, private movements, laid bare before me. He could have closed himself off, but he let me hurt him instead.
And why shouldn’t I? Garrick the Red had left a trail of bodies across the entire continent of Velora in his pursuit of money and fame. He had betrayed me and my familiar. He deserved the things that had happened to him.
He stood under my scrutiny, unflinching.
“I am a disappointment to her as well as you,” he said.
My stomach turned. I was going to be sick. Garrick kept talking.
“Your head witch offered me a bargain on behalf of the king. If I entered the Seven Gates and shepherded you through them, then the king would release my mother from all obligations to Balar Shan. She would finally be free.”
I could almost see it. In my mind, it was the same desolate tavern in Canmar where I’d first caught sight of Garrick. I knew from the Memory Gate that his presence there had been no accident; he’d already been a player in Maura and the king’s ploys.
Maura would use her mastery of fire and flame to intimidate and impress.
Plenty of fae had the power of flame. But only witches could use spells.
Only someone like Maura, who’d been burned alive, could use her power in death to manipulate the flame of the candle on the table so that it took the shape of those you loved, or whisper a spell so that its smoke made your thoughts turn dark.
Garrick had his own magic. No doubt he’d tried to use his compulsion to understand Maura’s motivations. But Maura was hundreds of years his senior. She knew just how to press upon an old wound, and the fae king had surely told her where all of Garrick’s were.
“She is mortal, Koryn,” Garrick said quietly.
I knew what her humanity meant. But in a world of immortals, it was easy to forget how precious the years were to some.
I could see it. I could almost feel the pain of that moment he’d agreed, before ever setting eyes on me, before Isanara had chosen me.
Close. Your. Eyes.
“You fulfilled your deal. She can leave,” I said. My voice shook. Damn, damn, damn. I had to keep going. “And so can you.”
Garrick’s eyes flared. Around the black pupils, a thin circle of glowing blue shone amongst the turquoise. He dipped his head—acknowledgment, not agreement.
“She is still here—she is choosing to stay because even after all that has happened, she will not leave me here to face him alone. And so long as she is in Balar Shan, she is under the king’s power,” Garrick said. “He is betting that she will not leave me. And he knows that I will not leave you.”