Chapter 2 #2
I swallow, blinking my eyes clear. ‘I hoped to find the Book of Mysteries. I wanted to—’
‘Stars above!’ He brings his fist down on the bed an inch from my hand with a loud crack.
I start back, the manacles slicing my wrists, drawing a yelp from my lips.
I take a breath. This is my last chance. I have to make him understand.
‘I’ve done everything you asked of me, Father: taken the veil, resisted my powers, tried to keep out of sight and mind.
But I can’t do this. I can’t allow myself to be bound, not to Astrophel, not to anyone, not while I still carry this affliction.
Allow me to search for the book. Allow me the chance to purge myself. I-I wish to make amends.’
His face darkens. ‘I told your mother not to fill your head with this nonsense. The book is lost, the rumours it contains a means to revoke the brand, a fiction, like so many of those ancient tales she cleaves to. There is no way to cleanse you. If there was, don’t you think I would have found it?
’ He sighs and turns away from me, starts running his fingers along the elixir bottles.
‘After everything you’ve put your mother through, I can’t believe you’re pursuing this idiocy, that you’d risk yourself – risk the future of the Stellarion dynasty – with so little thought.
You’re only tolerated in Meissa because I make it so. Because you’re my only living heir…’
His voice snags on the word ‘living’ and I wince, in spite of myself.
My fault.
‘Do you know what the mountain-scum would do to someone like you? It’s not safe beyond the wall.’
I pick at my ragged cuticles. ‘I’m aware the chances of a cure are slim, but… but what if the Stars favour me? I could become a true heir to you, bind to a man I can respect, a full-blooded member of the coterie, someone worthy of siring the Stellarion line.’
He whirls on me. ‘I brokered the match with Astrophel, entwined your initials myself in the Silver Book. You’re spoken for on my orders.
’ A muscle jumps in his throat as he sweeps a row of bottles crashing to the floor.
‘Lord Caelum was a patriarch of The Nine – he died a hero. That’s why I pronounced Astrophel heir to his father’s name and lands, despite his bastard-birth.
And he’s more than risen to that honour. He’s never once let me down.’
The unspoken ‘unlike you’ hovers between us, cutting as the blade of the great broadsword that hangs at my father’s side.
Ever since Astrophel arrived at the palace, a gangly boy of nine, he’s been the son my father always wanted.
Elevated by my father to ward-of-the-court from the Low Lands where he grew up, concealed from prying eyes, with his equally lowborn mother – an air-refugee if court whispers are to be believed – Astrophel’s made up for the five neverborns before my birth, and the one that came after.
The one that almost made it, the one they know for certain was a boy.
To think I once looked forward to Astrophel’s arrival.
With no living siblings and so few children born to the court, I hoped his coming might spell an end to my solitude.
Two lonesome children – we should have been playmates; we should have been friends.
And there was a moment – brief but precious – when it seemed all my prayers had been answered.
But Astrophel soon realised I was a pariah, turned his back on me in favour of self-advancement.
Time and again I was forced to watch as my father showered Astrophel with affection: the family heirlooms he gifted him, no thought for his daughter; the rides around the city I wasn’t permitted to join; the visits to check on Astrophel’s progress at the Asteum, though he never once enquired how my studies progressed with Izarius.
‘He’s willing to accept you, do his duty to the Throne, despite your taint. He’s more than you deserve.’ My father pauses. ‘You’ve already taken one son from me; you’ll not deny me another.’
I bite back tears. ‘And what if our son is like me?’
Bile rises up my throat, hot and bitter. A monster in my own image.
His lip curls. ‘A risk we’ll have to take.
You saw to it I have no other choice.’ He tilts my chin.
The clamp of his long fingers is punishing.
‘Mark me well, Leilani. You say you want to make amends? Then provide me an heir to assure the succession. Refuse this binding, and you’re of no further use to me.
You’ll be shipped to the Veiled Sisters in Galtair.
Locked in a cell, forced to take a vow of silence and endure nightly mortification of your flesh, in expiation for your sins.
You’ll never see your mother again. Do you understand?
There’s strife brewing, and I would have the Stellarion line secure. ’
His aura flickers black. Fear. Not an emotion I associate with my father.
What in the Stars is he afraid of? Rumours of unrest beyond the wall?
Invasion by the Outrealmers? For a moment I allow myself to believe that fear is what makes him cruel.
That his need for dominance, his cruelty, is a twisted form of love, that the losses he’s endured have bred a warped desire to protect me.
That this is why he is the way he is. For a moment, I consider telling him of the whispered warnings, my concerns about the Elemagi’s defensive charms, that he’s worrying over a future we might never live to see.
Then his eyes turn back to me, cold as flint, and the words decay on my tongue.
‘When the Queen learnt of your disobedience.’ He spits the word out.
‘When she learnt of your capture, she collapsed. Healers had to revive her.’ His voice softens.
I catch a glimpse of the gentler man he once was, before my powers manifested, before my mother’s illness.
Before… ‘You know how weak your mother is – how delicate her condition remains. I would have thought you’ve blood enough on your hands already…
’ Never before have my father’s eyes – those pale-grey markers of coterie inheritance and privilege – looked at me with such hatred.
Except, perhaps, the night my brother died.
Guilt slithers my belly. I’m glad he hasn’t guessed at my mother’s involvement in my escape.
After the horrors I witnessed growing up, the Queen blames herself for my terror of childbed.
That’s why she agreed to help me run away to the Asteum, despite the love and duty she bears my father and her own warm feelings towards Astrophel – the boy she tended as a son during his time at the palace.
She’s aware my magic is growing stronger, how I’ve barely been able to keep food down for dread of the binding my father is insisting upon, and what that binding might result in.
That’s why she gave me her blessing to go in pursuit of the Book of Mysteries, to seek the answers she herself sought all those sunrings ago, when Flamefever caught her in its merciless grip.
She knew it was that, or I’d wither away.
‘Guards will escort you back to your chambers. You’re to remain there till the night you come of age, when the binding will go ahead as planned.’
I try to protest, but he raises a spindle-fingered hand, the one bearing the starred-sapphire Regent’s Ring, silencing me.
‘Must I remind you what happened the last time a member of the Stellarion bloodline refused their appointed match and let their heart overrule their head?’
I stiffen. He almost never mentions Noelani, the ancestor whose silver blood I inherited.
His question is purely rhetorical and brings our exchange skidding to an abrupt halt. This is an argument I can’t win.
Noelani’s decision to bind herself to Zale Aguado – an Outrealmer – serves as the ultimate cautionary tale.
It was soon after the ceremony that Arden Incenzo, a powerful Elemagus from the eastern realm of Oralia, unleashed the Sickening.
Their ill-fated union a starbinger of all the evils that came later.
My father rises. ‘You understand what I expect from you?’
I want to fight. I want to beg. But I only nod, my throat so tight it’s hard to breathe.
‘Don’t disappoint me again.’
My father stalks away, taking his lantern with him, plunging me back into darkness.
I hug my knees tighter, ignoring the sharp pain flaring in my wrists as the manacles dig deeper into bruised flesh.
The door slams. My father’s footsteps fade to silence.
I tried. I failed.
Condemned to a loveless union with a man I can’t even respect, forced to wait as my cursed powers ripen, living under constant threat that Shadow Lore will lure me to its dark embrace. That way madness lies. Madness and untold danger.
Spoken for. Done for. It’s one and the same.
My life over, before it even had a chance to begin.