Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
Malakai
He’s as much of a coward as his father.
We should have killed you both years ago.
Warrior Prince.
Those last two words had a power over me that I didn’t care to admit, beating me down more viciously than any captor ever had.
They were all I heard the entire two days and nights that it took us to get back to Damenal.
Every breeze whispered them as I sat upon my mare’s back.
Ombratta’s hooves clapped out the rhythm of them.
As I stumbled through the palace now, the squeak of my own boots against marble cried them into the night.
I’d tried—I swear I tried. I hadn’t wanted to go on the raid. Truthfully, I hadn’t wanted anyone to go. Too many risks lurked out there.
But not going was admitting what was wrong with me.
Besides, Ophelia was going, and I’d left her alone before. Not that it had mattered that I was there. Once we got outside these walls, I shrank within myself. Barely spoke to anyone the whole time, even when they tried. Even when I felt her inquiring if I was all right through the Bind.
And once I’d heard those two words—Warrior Prince—well, then I became fucking useless.
The entire journey home I was drunk off the pain of my memories. They’d ripped open my past and thrown it back in my fucking face.
And I’d crumbled.
Ophelia had tried to talk to me when we returned to Damenal, but I’d locked myself in the bathroom. Brought my father’s dagger in there and just stared at the damn thing.
I didn’t know how to talk to her about this. There was nothing she could say anyway. Nothing anyone could say would block out the cracks of whips against flesh or the tearing, burning, sticky blood trailing down my skin. The jeers, the taunts, the unremorseful abandonment of my life—
And that was why I found myself in the lower level of the palace, knocking on Santorina’s door.
“Come in,” she called. She looked up briefly from the book she was hunched over. “I assume the raid was a success given that none of you are bleeding out on my floor right now?”
“Mm-hmm.” I grimaced, but it wasn’t technically a lie. The attack was successful despite my failures.
I didn’t want to admit that the Engrossian prince had fed us good information. Valuable information, even. Everyone had been right. He’d wanted to help us, apparently.
He’d saved—
No. I wasn’t ready to admit that one.
I still didn’t trust him. Grinding my teeth together, I pictured his arrogant face. I couldn’t help noticing all the things he had in common with my father. Spirits, he may have been right about this raid, but why had Ophelia been so eager to believe him? We didn’t know him, didn’t understand him.
“Then what can I help you with?” Santorina shut the book, the snap pulling me out of my spiral. I didn’t respond for long enough that she turned up the mystlight lantern on her desk and lifted it, white light falling across my face. Her round eyes went rounder still. “Are you all right, Malakai?”
“I need…help.” It hurt to say. It was the first time I ever had, and the words scraped through my throat against my will. “Something to distract me. The memories. They…”
I couldn’t explain it. Couldn’t describe how the torture I’d undergone for two years plagued my waking and sleeping hours. I kept it at bay around the others normally, but it was becoming harder. And in situations like the raid, with the moonlight bouncing off of polished axes, it was impossible.
“I’m not sure what you think I can do for you.” Apology weighed the edges of Rina’s words.
“Please.” It was a stiff plead. Near begging. “Just…anything.” Anything to shut up the echoing taunts of the Engrossian Warriors so I could steal a few hours of blissful oblivion.
Santorina searched my face, battling with herself. She wouldn’t give me anything that could hurt me, I knew that. But did she worry that helping me avoid my memories would inadvertently cause damage? Spirits, maybe it would. But I didn’t care. It was worth it.
Finally, she exhaled.
“You have very dark circles under your eyes,” she observed. “I can give you a tonic to help you sleep. But just enough for one night. That’s it.”
I’ll take it, I nearly burst, but I didn’t want her to see my desperation. “Thank you.”
Rina nodded, lips thin. “Sit while I make it.”
While she went to work measuring and mixing ingredients I didn’t recognize, I looked around her workshop.
Stacks of healing tomes lined the shelves, jars both full and empty scattered throughout.
Herbs, liquids, powders, crushed petals and leaves, it was all neatly organized in labeled boxes and drawers.
Everything, down to the freshly sharpened daggers hung by the door, was decided with care.
“What are you studying?” I needed to talk, to keep my mind from observing how the light reflected off of those weapons.
Rina looked at me, then back down. “Curses.”
“Why curses?”
She looked at me again, considering, then thought better of whatever she was about to say.
“It seems like something one of us should know about, considering the Engrossians employed them before.”
“That was the sorcia, though.” The dark witch from the Northern Isles whom the Engrossians had somehow recruited to their side, despite the fact that the sorcia usually remained impartial on affairs of the warriors. “And they haven’t interfered with us since.”
“Still, you never know.” Rina kept her gaze on her work, expert hands flying about the table, knowing where everything she needed was without looking up.
“You like it here?”
She nodded, voice more open than before.
“I like having a space where I belong and a purpose. The same reason I always liked the Cub’s Tavern, but this is better.
That never quite felt right.” She set her concoction over a mystlight flame and turned to me.
“Let that boil and when it cools you can take it.”
I nodded. “Do you miss Cub’s?” We’d spent many nights at her parents’ tavern before the war, and damn if I didn’t miss it myself.
Rina contemplated, cleaning up her station. “I miss it because it was my parents’ dream to create a haven for us. I miss it like I will always miss home, but I don’t miss it beyond that.”
“You don’t ever wish you could go back to that life?”
“No. I thought I might when we first decided to stay in Damenal. I thought I’d regret it.” She dunked a rag into a bucket of water and wiped it across the counter. “But that was my parents’ dream, not mine. It was my time to move on.”
Time to move on. I swallowed those four words. Why did they twist my heart? Fuck, my chest hurt. I rubbed my palm across my sternum and cleared my throat.
“Are you going to expand here?”
“I’d like to train more to heal, but I have other things I’d like to do, too.” She looked around the workshop, lost in thoughts of her own path, her own dreams.
What was it like to have options? I’d never known. My whole life, I was meant for one thing. Until, suddenly, I wasn’t. And now there was nothing left for me but the ghosts lurking in my nightmares, crowding my every thought until my vision spotted, my palms sweating.
I needed to get out of here.
A soft bubbling signaled that the tonic was done. Rina removed it from the flame, bottled it, and handed it over. “Be careful, okay?” Worry settled in her eyes, but I ignored it.
“Thanks,” I said, leaving her workshop and downing the tonic as I went.