23 Hugo
Hugo
Hugo and Eira had ridden hard for the rest of the day, passing through a handful of towns before they finally settled on somewhere
to stay as the sun was setting. This wasn’t where Hugo had planned to take them next, but an attack as brazen as the one they’d
encountered had him more worried than usual, so getting as far as they could seemed like the best solution. Hugo hadn’t ridden
that hard or that fast since he’d fled from the capital in the middle of the night all those months ago.
“You did good, Arthur,” he said as he patted the horse and gave him some water. Hugo had been watching Eira through stolen
glances, checking on her with brief touches. She hadn’t spoken since they’d been attacked on the road that morning, and he
could almost feel her brain working overtime as she processed what she’d done.
The vines had whipped up out of nowhere and fear had risen in Hugo as quickly as a tide.
He hadn’t seen magic like that since the culling of the witches, and part of him had almost forgotten how unbelievable it looked when elemental magic was cast around people who couldn’t use magic.
Each time a witch wielded magic like that it felt otherworldly to Hugo, in the worst possible way.
The betrayal felt worse each time Eira cast magic he hadn’t known she was capable of casting, though he had asked her to try.
Hugo had spent more than half a decade protecting Viscountess Westcotte before she fled Astrad, and she hadn’t told him anything
about her magical capabilities. He supposed it had been her secret to keep, but there was a closeness and friendship that
they had had together. Hugo had always thought, hoped, it meant that they told each other the truth about themselves . . .
not that Hugo had told her about his role in the budding rebellion. Perhaps he was a hypocrite.
He remembered dozens of nights, sneaking out of the Westcotte manor in the earliest hours of morning as he rode into town
to the Iron Empire’s secret meetings. They’d called themselves the Iron Resistance back then, and those meetings had been
so invigorating. The idea of being a part of something big, something that would shake up the status quo and change the world
for the better . . . well, it had intoxicated him.
Maybe he needed to be comfortable with the idea that they had both kept secrets from each other, and that maybe they both
still were.
Once situated in their room, Hugo found himself pacing anxiously as Eira sat on the cushioned chair beside the fireplace with
the rabbit on her lap, methodically petting the furry creature as she stared, unfocused, into the middle distance. He needed
to say something, and he had no idea where to start.
“Eira,” he finally began.
“I’m not made of glass. I’m just trying to process,” she responded, not looking away from the fire.
“You literally haven’t spoken since we left the . . . scene.”
“I don’t think we needed to kill them,” she said, staring into the fire, her hand repeating the same rhythmic patting of the
rabbit’s back, over and over again.
The rabbit was watching Hugo, looking at him as if she was trying to tell him that she was also worried about Eira. He had heard animals could sense anxious energy, and if Hugo could feel the stress radiating off of Eira, he was sure the rabbit could also feel something.
“Eira,” he said, moving over to where she sat and kneeling to look in her eyes, the heat of the fire warming his back. “I
would not have killed them if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.”
“I don’t . . . think you needed to kill them. They weren’t attacking us anymore,” she murmured, staring past him.
He realized suddenly that she was in shock, and he should have spotted it sooner. This wasn’t about the soldiers dying; it
was about how they’d been disarmed, and he’d still had to kill them because of what Eira had done. “Eira, I know you know
that sometimes violence needs to happen to protect people,” Hugo said, “This is one of those times.”
Her eyes finally met his, huge and wet and brimming with tears.
“This isn’t about me killing them,” Hugo said.
“It is, a little bit,” she whispered.
“This is about how you just used elemental magic,” Hugo whispered back, not unkindly. “I’m not sure if we’d have made it out
of there in one piece without it.”
“I just don’t know who I am anymore,” she said, so quietly that Hugo had to strain to hear it. “The magic felt so foreign
and yet . . . so familiar, and I couldn’t control it because I don’t know the spell to conjure vines like that. Except apparently
I do.”
“That door is going to stay locked until we can figure out who cast this memory magic on you—or how to break it,” Hugo answered
softly, taking her hand in his and squeezing gently.
“Hugo, how do we even find the witch who did this to me when I can’t remember where I even was before I arrived in Cilirien?”
He didn’t know. It was the piece he’d been struggling with this entire time—any witches that were performing memory magic would be in hiding, so searching for them would be difficult, even with Hugo’s .
. . acute witch-hunting skills. Eira wouldn’t be able to identify the witch that cast the magic on her even if they ran across her,
and she wouldn’t be able to point them in any direction that wasn’t Cilirien.
“What if we went back to Cilirien?” she asked quietly, derailing Hugo’s train of thought.
“No,” he responded sharply, with enough snap that Eira recoiled. Hugo instantly felt guilt pooling in his gut. She’d had enough
of a fright this morning; she didn’t need him to be scaring her now as well.
He watched as the concern and fear changed in Eira’s gaze, crystalizing into something new—determination.
“I understand that you think it’s a bad idea, but I don’t see any other meaningful path forward. How else are we supposed
to find any clues about who cast this hex on me? I could ask people—people I trust,” she bit back.
Hugo realized he was in for a fight. “I think we can find a way around your memory issues without going back to Cilirien.”
Hugo doubled down in a bid to convince her to his side.
“Hugo.” Eira smiled, pulling her hand away from his. “I want you to understand that I think it would be better for us to travel
together.”
She paused, and Hugo knew something else was coming.
“But I will go without you if I must. While I appreciate that it’s unsafe for us, I can’t continue forward and wonder if something
or someone there could help us. I have to go, and I’d like for you to come with me . . . but I will go alone if you won’t
join me.”
Her gray eyes bore into his, that oh-so-familiar mettle of hers behind them as she spoke.
In that moment she was Viscountess Westcotte again, in all her stubborn, commanding glory.
Hugo knew she meant it, that she’d go without him if she had to.
She had left him once already and gone out on her own . . . she’d do it again.
But going to Cilirien . . . it would be walking into a pit of vipers. If the bodies this morning somehow weren’t found, and
the soldiers who had attacked the tavern in Cilirien had followed them, then they may be able to slip in and out of town under
the cover of darkness. But Hugo had no ears to the ground, no contacts on the inside, no idea what the Iron Retinue’s network
was saying about them. Would the city guard in Cilirien report her to the knights who had been hunting him if they spotted
her?
If the bodies from this morning were found . . . well, that would be a whole other issue. Hugo hadn’t wanted to say it, but Eira’s magic had . . . burrowed. He’d tried to get the vines
off of the bodies so they just looked like murdered knights. The vines, though, they’d started to weave under their skin,
through their noses and out their mouths. He wasn’t ready to tell Eira, but if Hugo hadn’t killed those knights, he suspected
her magic would have killed them slowly and painfully. Hugo had encouraged her to try following her gut and give magic outside
of potions a real try, but did her lack of control make her dangerous?
He tried not to start spiraling, the rage and fear he’d consumed for years about witches creeping into the corners of his mind.
The months of leading witch-hunting expeditions were his most meaningful experiences with Eira’s kind, and they hadn’t exactly been positive.
He looked at her hands, her mouth. All the places she could use to cast magic were all the places he wanted to touch, to hold, to press his own lips against. He took a deep breath, settling his mind and reminding himself that what Lord General Kerrigan had taught him wasn’t actually true, that the things he’d done, he’d done because he was ordered to.
He thought of all the things lost without witches: elemental casters who had used their powers to create the finest armor and weapons in forges, witches who dedicated their power to putting out fires or ensuring crops flourished .
. . all things that were now harder in the Iron Empire’s world.
Hugo couldn’t let his fear win. He needed to trust Eira. Trust in her magic. “Fine,” he finally spoke. “We’ll go back to Cilirien,
but only to see if there’s something in your house that can help us or that indicates where you were before you were in Cilirien,
and we go in under the cover of night.”
“Alright.” She nodded, a wry smile tugging at her full lips.
“We do not talk to anyone, okay?” Hugo pressed.
“Understood.” Eira held out her hand for Hugo’s.
He took it, the soft skin on her hands a contrast to his rough and calloused ones. He feared what those soft fingers could
do to break him, magical or otherwise. Despite all of his fear about her capabilities, he still wanted to touch her—and her
hands were not enough.
“We have a deal,” he said, tying his fate to hers once more.