Chapter 37 #2
He notices my approach and his gaze drops to the clasp I reset onto my cloak. His eyes lift to mine with an emotion I don’t have the time to identify. As soon as it’s there, it’s gone again, replaced with cool calm. He gestures for me to sit. “Play a round with me.”
We begin, but a few moves in, he grimaces.
“Your head is not in the game. What’s on your mind?”
“I had vivid dreams last night.”
Quin moves his vitalian.
“Us, in the future.” The vitalian topples over and Quin quickly corrects it. I continue, “Not king and vitalian, but closer than that.”
“Closer?”
“Mm. I’m around to annoy you daily.”
“Close indeed.” His lips twitch, probably at the thought of how he’ll make me suffer in turn.
I move the prince. “I always thought you’d be a difficult brother-in-law, but now I think the frustrations will be worthwhile.”
He huffs.
“Did you dream?” I ask.
“Definitely not about you being my brother. Make your move.”
I shift a pawn to the middle board. “When I woke it made me think of all our past interactions. There’s one I don’t understand.”
“One?”
“Why didn’t you want me to go to that island?”
He studies me for a moment before his eyes drop to the board.
“Your whole face drained when I mentioned wanting to go.”
“You’ve experienced it now.”
“The conditions are atrocious, but I don’t understand . . .”
He corrects the move I made with an instruction about reading the board a few steps ahead. “I have something of yours,” he says. “Hold on for five moves, and I’ll give it to you.”
“Something of mine, and I have to earn it?”
“Yes.”
I grumble under my breath and start calculating possible moves and countermoves.
A group of travelling scholars enter, calling for the best beer. Locals shift to make space for them, doubling up on smaller tables.
“Have you heard?” one says, “Our king has abdicated!”
It takes a full second before locals start whispering their shock.
The scholar continues, “He left his son to take his place.”
“At four years old? What kind of father would abandon his child?”
“What will this mean for the kingdom?”
“The high duke is regent until the boy’s old enough.”
“Can’t be worse than it was with the king.”
Quin sits stoically, expression hardened against the slander, a confident king who easily dismisses such trivialities. But at each hurled insult, I recall him exploding for the sake of his brother before his aunt Frederica; recall his pained roar to the heavens.
This is another act. The act of pretending not to care what others say of him.
But there is a tired, hurting man underneath. I leap to my feet. “Slander.”
Heads swing my way, and someone calls. “What’s he done for you that you defend him?”
“He . . .” I glower at them. “You’re wrong.”
“The last earthshake released a poisonous miasma through the forest. That area was the livelihood of at least six towns from Kastoria to Hinsard. People are struggling, and the king did nothing.”
An older man thumps the table in vicious agreement.
“Even the caves we mine for fungi have been affected. Our most valuable herbs are found there, but—if we don’t die first—each step inside is like fireants tearing through your body. Death is better.”
“And death is what we’re getting.”
“The king didn’t help. We can only hope the regent will.”
I meet Quin’s dark eyes. He subtly shakes his head.
Frustration clenches my fists. I want to shout, to make them see—“The king wants the best for you.”
They laugh darkly.
The loud scholar speaks up again, “The regent has redcloaks travelling to all corners of the kingdom plastering the way with wanted posters. The first time his face is revealed to the public.” He shakes his head. “What a way to garner fame.”
“What do you mean, wanted posters?” I ask. The regent already has control over the throne.
“There’s a reward for finding him.”
“Ha! Both vespertines and crusaders will be after him. He won’t have long.”
My stomach twists sharply. “You—”
Quin picks up his cane and crosses between me and them. “Enough. Let’s go.”
He jostles me up to our room, and as soon as the door closes, I drag him to sit. “Didn’t it bother you, what they said?”
Quin pulls away from a brow-crunching thought. “You used to despise me like that.”
“I . . . but . . .” I throw my hands up. “I didn’t know better!”
Mild amusement sparkles in his eyes. “You were so fervent in your hatred. Passionate.”
I bury my face in my hands. “Anytime I think of what I said, what I did back then . . .” I drop my hands, meeting Quin’s gaze with a pained scowl. “If you’d told me who you were from the start, you wouldn’t have heard those things.”
“You’d have simply thought them instead.”
“Exactly.”
Quin flicks the side of my head and I rub it as if it hurts.
I sigh. “Listening to them made me feel frustrated. And ashamed. They are me, only half a year ago.”
“Three months ago.”
“You’re not helping.”
Quin tilts my chin and holds it as he observes me. “You asked me earlier why I didn’t want you to go to that island.” His expression is a mix of earnestness and bitterness. “Shame.”
I frown, and his fingers glide off my chin.
“I couldn’t save my mother. And the conditions there . . . It’s proof of all those things you said about me. I can’t take care of my people. Can’t take care of my family. I am useless.”
“But it’s because—”
“It doesn’t matter. The people on that island are suffering. Like the rest of this kingdom.”
I ball the edges of my cloak. “If they knew how much you’re doing to change that.”
“Sincerity doesn’t feed you.”
“That’s why you let them say those things?”
“Six months ago, I would have been irritated.”
“Three months ago.”
Quin looks at me, and I mouth we’re even. He continues, “Now I understand. If a mother doesn’t feed her children, the children will cry. If a king doesn’t feed his people . . .”
I stare glumly, stomach all kinds of tight. He’s right of course. Those people downstairs are suffering.
Only, Quin is suffering too.
I wish . . . ugh. I glare at him. “Why do you make me feel such strong, conflicting feelings? It literally makes me shake. Look.”
“You have a way of getting on my nerves as well.”
“Aren’t we a right pair?”
Quin is silent. He stares towards the windows, the open books on the table. At the sight of scrawled letters and diagrams, my mind jumps. Quin’s image, pasted on walls all over the kingdom.
I swallow. “It’s a trap, isn’t it? If you’re recognised, crusaders will slaughter you on sight.”
The lines of Quin’s face tighten; a nearly imperceptible twitch in his jaw.
“Or vespertines will capture you for the reward,” I murmur. “But it’s money that won’t come. You’ll be made to pay with your life.”
Quin’s mouth is one grim line.
Cold rushes over me. I’m numb as Quin shifts to his belongings at the end of the bed. “What will we do?”
He plucks something from beneath the folds of fabric. “This belongs to you.”
Wood framed with riverpearl.
Warmth pulses to my fingers when he presses it into my hands.
“I asked Florentius what he wanted as a reward, for helping us,” Quin says. “This is what he wanted.”
The soldad. I’d left it behind, on the island.
My dream, handed back to me. I turn it over. Stamped. I’m a complex-medius vitalian.
I grip the soldad hard. I suck in a nervous breath. “Why are you giving me this now?”
“You’d have passed your exam under fair conditions.”
I rub my thumb over the fourth stamp. “Why right now, Quin—”
His hands shoot out in quick succession, hitting my acupoints in a pattern.
He steers me lengthways over the bed and crouches in my frame of vision, one hand tight on his cane. He meets my eye squarely, with an intensity that would have pinned me in place without the paralysis-inducing magic.
“If I’m discovered, they won’t only kill me.” His voice is quiet, almost a whisper, but the words carry a commanding weight. “You will understand.”
My throat tightens. We’ve fought this fight before. But this time, there’s finality in his tone.
I can help!
He shakes his head, rising stiffly with the aid of his cane. He slings his things over his shoulder without looking back. “You will drag me down.”
My jaw aches with the will to yell at him.
“I’ve left money for you. Plenty to start a good life. When things have settled down, I’ll send word to your family to find you.”
He snicks his way to the door.
In my head, I roar at him, the trapped words bubbling up until a hot tear spills out the corner of my eye. Don’t you dare leave.
His hand hovers at the doorknob for a moment. But he doesn’t turn. Doesn’t look back.
He shifts out of view, the door shuts, and silence swallows the room, making the air feel colder, heavier. I glare at the wall, my chest aching on curses. I’m willing him back just so I might shout them at him.
But he doesn’t return. He’s gone.
And I’m alone.