18. His Mother’s Heart
The second Hyperion let her go, she crumpled to the floor, both hands flying to her belly to shield it from the fall, and the king stormed out through the wooden door.
Now slamming it so hard behind him that she flinched where she lay, curled around her stomach, dragging deep and shuddering sobs up out of a body that shook with them.
I reached for her on instinct, and the room spun out from under me, making me drop to my hands and knees, waiting for the world to still.
It came back as cold.
Icy, brutal cold that swarmed over me and stole the breath from my lungs.
Moonlight lit the deep snow my hands sank into, and each thick flake stung where the wind hurled it against my bare skin.
I staggered up at the edge of a black and foreboding forest, the night alive with the cries of things I couldn’t name.
A few paces off stood a small, half-collapsed barn, pale smoke curling from the gap where a door should have been.
I trudged toward it through the snow, my bare feet screaming, and ducked into its feeble warmth. And there, at the far end, half-buried in a mound of straw, was Melanthe, curled tight and protective around a small sleeping boy, her thin cloak wrapped around them both.
She held him the way someone would hold the only thing left in the world worth living for.
Because he was. His small face was peaceful in sleep, but her eyes never left the fire, fixed on it with a trembling, desperate watchfulness, and every so often she pressed her lips to his brow.
Fear and exhaustion had carved deep lines into a face that should have still been young.
My heart hammered as I saw how close the fire had crept to the straw. One stray spark, and there would be nothing left of either of them.
And the guilt of being unable to help them tore through me, because they hadn’t asked for any of this.
Least of all the child, and I hated that this was the price she’d paid for nothing more than honesty.
Honesty given out of love and answered with cruelty.
Honesty that had cost her absolutely everything.
But then my mind also battled with how wrong her actions had been, leading her to this point.
Because the king had been right in his anger.
You couldn’t force anyone to love you.
That wasn’t love. Love was a gift freely given.
And his heart had been nothing more to her than a stolen possession. So, I guess I felt sorry for the poor child who didn’t ask for any of this the most. A life born from deception of the worst kind.
All I could do was watch as her tear-streaked, grime-dark face slowly hardened, sorrow setting into something cold and steely.
Pain seared through my own chest, sudden and vast, and for one terrible moment, it was as though we shared the same heart.
I could feel the love she carried for her son, so enormous it stole my breath.
But I could feel the rest of it too. The betrayal.
The humiliation. The king’s rejection. It sat in her like a blade lodged between the ribs, twisting deeper as she stared into the dying embers.
Each breath we drew filled us both with an ache that sharpened and curled until, on a low exhale, it pressed up against something deep inside her. Inside us. Something that wanted, very badly, to lash out.
And as the wind howled through the rotting walls, her grief curdled into a bitterness so thick I could taste it on my own tongue.
Shadows began to bleed out of her, out of me, thickening in the dark until they ran together as one.
Whispers in a language I didn’t know spilled from both our mouths, and there was nothing I could do but watch as her gaze went hardened.
She pressed her lips to her son’s forehead one last time. But her eyes stared out into the dark, and I heard the vow take shape in her mind even as it festered in mine.
‘They named you nothing. A mistake. A monster.’ Her arms tightened around the sleeping boy.
‘But I swear it to you, my love, on every drop of blood they spill and every door they shut. One day, you will have all of it. The crown they hid from you. The throne they denied you. The blood that called you bastard will kneel at your feet and weep, and I will teach you, my darling, exactly how to make them pay.’
The scene tore away, and I gasped as the pain in my chest let go, the shadows scattered, and that terrible thread between Melanthe and me dissolved.
I stood now, leaning against the stone parapet of a bridge over a moat, the sun barely cresting the horizon, though its warmth already promised a hot and beautiful day.
And before the castle’s great wooden gates stood Melanthe, one hand resting on the shoulder of her son, older now, as she argued with a guard.
“Keep your voice down, woman. You’ll wake the whole castle,” one of them said, dark eyes blazing with disgust as he levelled his spear at her.
“Point that thing at me all you like,” Melanthe said, arms crossed, planted and defiant. “I am not leaving until I have spoken with the King.”
“We have told you. The King hears petitions at the end of the month, at open court.”
“And more will come from all over to bring their troubles to him then,” sneered the second guard. “Far more important than the likes of you. He’ll have no time for a peasant.”
Melanthe’s eyes narrowed. Her son shrank back, half-hiding in her skirts, his lip quivering. She raised a finger to answer, but the groan of the great gates swinging open silenced everyone.
A woman walked through them, and the breath left me all over again.
Hair as dark as a raven’s wing. A laugh I would never hear, but a face I somehow already knew, because a man I loved had described it to me only hours before, lying in the dark with grief in his voice.
Ianthe.
Atlas’s mother.
The flower his father had planted a whole garden for.
A stern look sat on her beautiful face. “What’s all this racket?” Her gaze swept across Melanthe and the two guards, who all seemed to lose their tongues at once. It was Melanthe who recovered first.
“I need to see the King. It’s very important.”
The Queen looked her up and down, and then her eyes dropped to the boy, and a flash of recognition, of hurt, marred her lovely face, there and gone in an instant. Because it was obvious. The child looked exactly like her husband, right down to the dimple set into his chin.
“Leave us,” she told the guards.
They gaped at her. “But your majesty…”
“I said, leave us. That is an order.” She glared until they bowed low and withdrew through the gates. “Close the gate behind you.”
They hesitated, then obeyed.
“How old is the boy?” she asked, turning back to Melanthe.
“Five, your majesty.”
“And does the King know of him?”
“He knows there was a child. He does not know he has a son.” I heard the pain in her voice saying this, but she wasn’t the only one affected.
I could see the hurt move through Ianthe, as it was plain that the Queen had known nothing of this until this very moment.
“What is it you want from the King?” Ianthe asked, her lips tight around an emotion I could feel pressing at her edges.
Melanthe hesitated. “I want the King to know his son. I want the boy to have a full belly, and clothes that aren’t two sizes too small.
I want nothing for myself. Only to know that my son has a better life than I can give him.
” She paused. “He need not claim him as his own. Only take him under his wing and keep him safe.”
The Queen looked at the boy. And I mean she looked, studying every part of him as the silence stretched, filled only with the gentle lap of the moat and the morning birds. And when at last she spoke, there was no venom in it. No cruelty. Only a careful, aching gentleness I hadn’t braced for at all.
“Where do you live?” Ianthe asked.
Melanthe blinked, thrown. “I… what?”
“Where do you live, you and the boy?” The Queen’s gaze moved over the child’s too-small clothes, his thin frame, and something soft and sorrowful crossed her face.
“I will have food sent to you. Clothing. Blankets. Whatever you have need of, enough to see the two of you through the winter and more besides. You need only tell me where.”
Melanthe stared at the queen, completely disarmed, as though kindness were the one weapon she had never learned to guard against. And I felt it flicker through her too, the shock of it, the terrible, traitorous temptation of it.
But it didn’t last. Because it wasn’t what she had come for.
“So.” Her voice hardened, the gratitude curdling before it could fully take shape. “You will not permit me to see the King.”
The Queen’s lips pressed together, and that troubled sorrow only deepened in her eyes.
“I understand why you wish it,” she said, and her voice held an apology. “Truly, I do. But he may not see it as I do. And I do not think it wise. Not now.” A pause, gentle and pained. “Perhaps, in time, I could persuade him to think differently, but right now…”
“Then you offer me nothing.” Melanthe spat the words, and the boy flinched at her side.
“That is not true.” Ianthe’s voice stayed soft, but it did not waver. “I offer you the means to fill your son’s belly. To keep him warm through the cold. That is no small thing.”
“My son,” Melanthe hissed, “is none of your concern.”
And there it was. The bitterness, rising up between them like a black tide. Because this woman, this kind and sorrowful woman standing before her, had every single thing Melanthe had lost.
The King. The crown. The life.
The love.
And she hadn’t needed one drop of magic to keep a moment of it. She had simply been chosen, where Melanthe had been used and cast aside, and no amount of kindness offered through a gate would ever be enough to close a wound like that.
The Queen drew a slow breath, and I watched her gather herself to reach for this furious, grieving woman one last time.
“Please,” she said quietly. “Let me help you. It is all I…”
She never finished.
I lurched forward with a choked gasp as Melanthe seized the Queen by the corset and dragged her close, and in that split second, I felt everything she felt all over again. But it was not the clean, aching grief I had felt in the barn.
This was something uglier.
Something that turned my stomach. Jealousy, black and bottomless, and a rage that had nowhere left in all the world to go, and so turned, at the last second, upon the only soul who had offered her nothing but kindness.
A flash of metal caught the sun and was gone, driven hard through the boning of the corset and deep into the soft flesh of the Queen’s side. Just once.
Ianthe’s breath left her in a soft, startled rush, her eyes flying wide, her lips parting on a soundless plea. But Melanthe did not wrench the blade free, and she didn’t strike again. She held it there, buried to the hilt in the Queen’s side, drew her close, and let the darkness do the rest.
Because that was when I saw it.
Shadows leaking from every pore of her, sliding down her arm and along the length of the blade.
Now pouring into that single wound like ink poured into clear water.
Not blood. Something far worse than blood.
Something that drank the warmth out of the very air and left a cold so deep it ached in my own bones to watch it.
And then it reached Ianthe’s eyes.
I watched the blackness bloom there, swallowing the white, swallowing the colour, until for one terrible heartbeat the Queen’s eyes were nothing but pools of pure, depthless dark. As though something had reached down inside her and seized hold of the very heart of her.
Melanthe slid the blade free at last, slow and almost tender, and let the Queen fold down onto the stones at her feet.
We watched the darkness still wreathing her like smoke, watching those black-drowned eyes.
I was certain to my very soul that I had just seen a woman die.
That whatever the witch had poured into that single wound had snuffed her out as surely as a pinched candle.
The witch bent low over the woman crumpled at her feet and hissed the words against her ear.
“You will all regret this. The King most of all!”
As the pale stone beneath us drank down the last crimson drops of royalty, the scene began to fade. Darkness closed in from every side, and for one blessed moment, I thought, surely, that the vision was finally done with me.
Then the stench hit.
Urine. Decay. Damp, rotting stone. It flooded my senses all at once, so thick and sudden that I gagged on it, and the dark resolved into something worse than nothing at all.
The air sat heavy in my chest, close and starved, as though there wasn’t enough of it to go round.
I reached out blindly, and my fingers met cold, slick stone, weeping with moisture, and from somewhere in the black around me came the sounds of others.
Coughing. Weeping. The small, hopeless noises of people who had long since stopped expecting to be heard.
A dungeon.
The creak of a heavy door drove a triangle of torchlight across the floor, and guards filed in with flames held high, the light leaping and guttering off the wet walls until I could see again.
And I wished, immediately, that I couldn’t.
I jolted back with a strangled sound, because there, right beside me, was the cause of all of this darkness…
Melanthe.