Chapter 41
KORYN
Between sharing a bed with Garrick again, Isanara flying in and out of Balar Shan in her perpetual quest for food to fuel her next growth spurt, and Syleris making silent demands, I was desperate for a moment to myself.
For the months between my ouster from my coven and entering the first temple, I’d been alone.
Lonely. Before that, I’d shared a cave in the coven lands with four sister witches. And still, I’d been alone. Lonely.
Now I was never alone.
I wasn’t lonely, either. Which was… beautiful. And terrifying.
But when I opened the door to the bedroom, it was, by some miracle from one of the gods who didn’t spend his time whispering into my ear, empty.
I nearly collapsed on the bed out of gratitude. To whom? It did not matter. I was finally, blessedly, if only momentarily, alone.
The bed was a good option. I could spread my arms and legs out in every direction. Without Garrick or Isanara to press against me, I could sink into deep meditation. Shut out all of the noise and sensation, just like Tomin had taught me. It was so tempting.
The chair by the fire called to me, too. It still smelled of cinnamon and wine from the weeks that Garrick had spent sleeping in it. I cringed. It was comfortable, but not that comfortable.
But neither stood a chance once I spotted the gown.
It hung on the outside of the wardrobe, the layered panels of the skirt shimmering in the flickering firelight from the hearth.
It was velvet, like almost every other gown that I’d worn since arriving in Balar Shan.
But it was different, somehow. I drifted across the room, transfixed.
As I moved, the colors shifted. The lavender velvet was embroidered with an undulating pattern of emerald and turquoise that seemed to move when it caught the light.
The sleeves were sheer. Iridescent and embroidered with the same pattern that adorned the rest of the garment. They seemed much too long.
“It turned out well, I thought.”
I rammed my knee into the bottom left post of the bed. “Fu—” I swallowed the word down, choked on it, and started coughing.
I had to hang onto the bedpost to keep myself from careening forward from the force of my cough onto my unreliable knee.
Garrick’s mother got to her feet quickly and pounded a fist on my back to help me clear the cough. She alternated the motion with wide, arching circles between my shoulder blades.
“I… I did not realize anyone was here,” I sputtered.
“I should not be,” she said, glancing over her shoulder to the spot where she’d been seated on the floor, between the bed and the window. “This is your room now.”
“It’s Garrick’s,” I said. Stupid. I sounded stupid.
“One and the same now, I think,” she said with a knowing smile.
A motherly smile. Not that I’d had a mother long enough to remember what that looked like.
But I could make logical assumptions. “I come up here sometimes to enjoy the daylight. My room is deep within the inner spiral. It doesn’t get any natural light. ”
Garrick had told me, but it felt worse hearing it from her directly. I could not imagine never seeing the sky. “Of course.”
She drew back a step, giving me more space, and dipped into a very proper curtsey.
“Iravena,” she said. “I am Garrick’s mother.”
“I know.” Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
I did not know what else to say. This was only the second time I had seen her.
Garrick favored his father in appearance—the blue-green eyes, the silver hair, the breadth of his shoulders.
I searched for him in Iravena’s face. He was there in the shape of her nose and the curve of her lips.
I wondered if she smirked the way he did.
Maybe she’d never had the occasion. That empty part of my chest ached.
I rolled my shoulders to banish the discomfort.
There was already plenty of it in this exchange.
Iravena nodded over my shoulder. “Do you like your gown for the Winter Tithe?”
I frowned, not understanding. But she moved past me to the wardrobe. The gown. Gods, I’d forgotten it completely. Which was a travesty. I’d never owned something so spectacular, living or dead.
“It is an homage to your familiar,” Iravena explained. “I hope she will forgive me. I was not able to capture all of her colors. I don’t believe a human ever could. But I thought it turned out well.”
The lavender fabric, the turquoise and emerald thread that seemed to move.
It evoked Isanara’s scales. The long, sheer sleeves, cut wide to hang in a graceful arc…
they were reminiscent of her wing membranes.
Of course I had been drawn to it. Garrick’s mother’s interpretation of my dragon was beautiful beyond—
Garrick’s mother. Iravena.
My breath tried to desert me.
“You made this,” I said softly, with the bit of air that remained in my chest. “You made all my clothing.” All the new pieces that arrived in the wardrobe each fit perfectly to my body. I’d assumed that Garrick had paid off a troupe of servants somewhere in the castle, but it was his mother.
She’d only seen me once, in the throne room on the night I’d broken out of the bathhouse. New garments had appeared almost daily. She must have spent hours every single day crafting them.
“How?” I asked.
My awe earned me a small smile.
“I am good at approximating sizes,” Iravena said. “My son weighed in on the styles. But I used my own judgment. Garrick can be…” She shrugged her slim shoulders and smiled again. Yes, I knew exactly how Garrick could be.
I was already barely breathing. My throat decided this would be a good time to close, too. My eyes burned. My entire body seemed ready to turn on me.
“No one has ever taken care of me like this before,” I managed to rasp. Except that was not true. Who had carried me from the Devotion Gate when I could not walk? Who had cooked for me night after night as we climbed the mountains between the gates? Garrick. Her son. “Garrick has,” I said softly.
Iravena’s smile deepened, a series of interlocking lines appearing around the corners of her mouth.
Guessing ages was always difficult. Fae, witches, and humans all aged differently.
But Garrick had been working in Velora as a bounty hunter for almost tweny years, and he’d been in Balar Shan for a decade before that.
He was an adolescent when he came… Iravena must be past fifty.
Half a century. More than halfway through her mortal life.
But when she smiled at the thought of her son, she looked decades younger.
“Then I did the right thing, keeping him from here for as long as I could.” She exhaled with her whole body. “And letting him go after…”
“After Alair,” I finished, my chest aching.
Iravena’s brows arched up. But a moment later, they softened along with her gaze. “He told you.” She was relieved.
“Yes.”
She walked back to the window. The square panes of crowned glass were difficult to see through. They mostly let in light. She reached for the latch, opening it with familiar hands. She’d spent many years visiting this room.
I looked around it again. Garrick had told me that this was his bedroom when he was at Balar Shan before, but I’d never really looked. I’d been too angry. I did not want to let myself see.
Now it was impossible to miss.
The books shoved onto the shelves on the far side of the hearth spoke of the years of schooling he’d had. Had he shared those lessons with Alize and Edmund?
The paint on the wall was chipped; the molding missing thick chunks in the corner where he shucked his weapons every night before bed. He’d been using that corner for that purpose for decades.
I looked back to where Iravena had sat on the floor with her knees drawn up to her chest. Had she sat there with Garrick when he was young? Read him books? Provided comfort when Balar Shan hurt him?
My eyes burned again. Maybe they hadn’t really stopped.
Iravena stared out the window. She wore a knit shawl over her shoulders. It couldn’t do much against the frigid wind, but she did not shiver.
“I am sorry that he betrayed you for my sake. I know…” Her voice wavered. “I know what it is to be betrayed by someone who you think loves you.”
Garrick’s father. She was speaking of the fae king.
Oh gods. Dark God’s hell. Dark God, help me. Any god, help me.
She’d loved him.
It wasn’t worse than the rape I’d imagined. But it wasn’t better, either.
And it wasn’t Garrick.
Never, ever. The comparison made me sick.
“Garrick is not his father,” I said. I tried to hide it, but she heard the anger in my words.
She whipped around. “Never. I would never imply such a thing.”
“Good.”
She pressed her lips together in an expression of annoyance that was almost an exact mirror of her son's. She stepped away from the window, closer to me.
“But he is fae, Koryn,” she said. “It is why I stayed, even when the bargain was fulfilled. This place is his birthright, illegitimate or not. It will always be a part of him. I will not ask my son to divide his heart in two.”
I did not know if she meant her bargain or his. I was not sure that it mattered. What mattered was what happened next.
“Then come with us.”
She flinched. “I have been in Balar Shan for most of my life.”
After she returned with Garrick… and before she’d been the lover of a king.
I recognized the glint in her eyes, the moisture that burned at the corners and clouded her judgment. I’d lived with it for hundreds of years. It was fear.
A new thought entered my mind. It was reckless, maybe. But it was also the only option I could consider. I should have thought of it sooner. I should have told Garrick and let him begin convincing her a month ago, when we’d first been dragged to this wretched castle.
This time, I was the one who closed the distance between us. I reached for her hand and caged it between both of mine.
“When we leave for the Unknown Gate, come with us,” I said. “When we conquer all Seven Gates, when the curse is lifted… there is a place you could go. With my…” The words stuck in my throat.
I could do this. For Garrick. “With my family.”
“Koryn…”
“It will be a long journey. They live on the southern coast, in a small fishing village. But Kyrelle, she is…” How could I possibly explain that she was my dead sister’s great-granddaughter a dozen times removed? “She is mine. She will take you in.”
It was an insane proposition. She was a human woman in the latter half of her middle age, on a cursed continent, trapped in a fae castle.
But Velora might not be cursed much longer.
And when it wasn’t, everything would change.
I would not return to my coven. Garrick would not owe any more allegiance to his father and the fae court.
And Syleris… well, I’d figure him out later.
But we could be free. All of us.
Rylynn’s face had stayed with me ever since the Peace Gate.
It did not haunt me, exactly, but it lingered.
She lingered. It was becoming more and more clear to me that in order to save Velora, to protect Kyrelle and Isanara and Tomin and everyone else I’d come to care for, I was going to have to sacrifice a part of myself.
Defeating Maura and the fae king would require me to embrace my power—and the darkness within me, whence it came.
But helping Iravena was not an action painted in shades of gray, and that made it even more important to me.
Iravena winced. I had not realized how hard I had squeezed her hand. I released it at once, but she did not retreat. She looked at me hard, with an intensity that I’d felt many times.
“I will ready my things,” she finally said.
My chest threatened to cave in on itself. “Thank you,” I breathed.
I understood Garrick better now. Maybe more than ever before. There were no more walls to erect. No more distance between us. Not now, not ever again.