Chapter 6 Cassiel
Idon’t miss the guard. How could I? I don’t even know what she looks like. We’ve exchanged only a handful of words since she arrived, and besides, I don’t like her.
Part of me argues that it was decent of her to eat my food just to get Mother off my back—but let’s be honest, she had an entirely ulterior motive there. She’s only here for the food.
Her thighs are nice, though.
I squirm at the memory. In the whole week Thornvale’s been with me, I’ve touched her only twice—once when she handed me the soap, and the second time when I grabbed her thighs, thinking she was Runara. Why did it have to be her thighs?
“You could have grabbed a lot worse than my thighs.”
Stars, that shouldn’t have provoked any kind of reaction in me.
The truth is, until that moment, Thornvale was more ghost than girl, barely real, easy to ignore.
It’ll be harder now.
My thoughts are interrupted by the arrival of my brother, Evander. He knocks twice, announces himself, and steps inside after I admit him. He’s better than Mother, who just walks right in like the literal queen she is.
Evander is older than me by three years but carries himself like someone twice that, like someone already wearing the crown and capable of bearing the full weight of it.
I may be the one with golden hair, but Evander is the golden child.
He’s been riding into battle since he was fifteen.
He’s a master swordsman, has a reputation for being fair and diplomatic, and has the respect of all who work with him.
I’d find it irritating if he weren’t so damned pleasant.
He crosses the room in a few strides and drops onto the bed beside me. A moment later, I hear the shuffle of boots as the relief guard slips out, the door clicking shut behind him.
“Evening,” I tell him.
“It’s barely afternoon.”
“Is it?”
“I refuse to believe you’re this bad at telling the time.”
I admire his confidence in me, but the truth of the matter is that I really do have no idea. Time is shapeless, days are long. This is all I know.
“How’s the new guard?” he asks, when I say nothing in response. It’s a less annoying question than the usual how have you been?
Still annoying, though.
“Thornvale, isn’t it?” Evander stretches his arm along the back of the bedframe, almost touching me. “I heard she made quite the impression on Mother. Bested four of Captain Fellwood’s best. He wasn’t thrilled about that.”
For some reason, I quite enjoy the image of Thornvale wiping the floor with Fellwood’s favourites—even if I’ve no idea what she looks like.
She’s reasonably tall for a woman, I think.
She’s stood close enough beside me for me to judge that much.
I suspect she has long hair; it brushed my elbow once.
She’s probably muscular, given her profession. Beyond that, I don’t care to know.
She’s got nice thighs, too.
Shut up.
“Cass?” Evander prompts. “How do you find her?”
I exhale through my nose. I don’t want to talk about Thornvale. She’s an interloper, an unwelcome shadow in my already dim world. But I know Evander will keep badgering me until I give him something.
“She’s all right,” I say, rolling my shoulders against the pillows. “Doesn’t coddle. Doesn’t push. Doesn’t talk unless she has to.”
“And?”
“And what?”
He makes a sound that’s entirely too amused. “You’re deflecting.”
I frown. “Am not.”
“You are. Which means she’s gotten under your skin.”
I tense, suddenly remembering the warmth of her thighs under my hand, the way her voice curled around that insufferable comment.
The way she made me smile.
Evander hums knowingly. “Interesting.”
I scowl. “Not interesting.”
“Quite interesting.”
“Nothing about her is interesting.”
He leans in, and I can hear the grin in his voice. I lift a pillow and smack him with it.
Evander laughs. I lower my arm again, and we lie for a moment in silence.
I quite enjoy moments like this with Evander.
If it wasn’t for the warmth of the sun drifting through the curtains, I could easily believe it was simply night time, and the two of us were camping somewhere, swapping stories beneath the moon.
“She’s… impertinent,” I add. “Unmannerly, too. She stole my peaches.”
Evander laughs. “Your peaches?”
“Yes. I’d finished eating them and she just scarfed them down before Anne could collect the trays—”
He seems to find that terribly amusing.
“It’s not funny!”
“The peaches would have been wasted otherwise—”
“They were still my peaches!”
Evander is full-on chortling at this point. I don’t see what’s so funny about it, but I’m also aware that I sound like a petulant child.
He sighs as his laughter falls. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance I could convince you to come out for a walk with me, is there? It’s a lovely day—”
“No,” I snap. Why should I care how lovely a day is, when I can’t even see it? I did try, once or twice, to go out after the accident, as soon as my eyes had stopped hurting. I wanted to prove that everything could be as before.
It wasn’t.
I couldn’t work out where anything was. I tried to recall how everything looked before, but I couldn’t even remember where the stairs were.
It was a horrible feeling, my cane slipping off the steps.
I had to rely on others around me to see me safely outdoors.
It was an agonisingly slow walk, one that would have taken me only a couple of minutes before.
Outside was hardly any better. I could feel the sun on my face, but little more. The space taunted me. Nothing to hold onto, nothing to keep me tethered except the cane in my hand.
It was a horrible feeling, having a cane. It’s still here in the room, somewhere, but I haven’t used it since.
My own home had become a stranger to me.
“The fresh air will—” Evander insists.
“No,” I repeat, more forcefully than before.
Evander takes a moment. “A game of chess then, perhaps? I’m sure we could—”
He’s tried to play chess with me before. I gave it a go, once. I can paint a decent enough picture in my head of where everything is if he describes it to me, but it takes so, so long. His patience with me was sickening.
“I don’t think so.”
Evander sighs. This is not the first time we’ve had this conversation. I’m not sure it’ll be the last, either. Everything we used to do together vanished along with my sight.
“I have something to ask,” he says, sobering.
“If it requires leaving this room—”
“It doesn’t.”
“Well, let’s hear it, then.”
He shifts beside me. “There’s been movement in the western wood.”
“The fey?”
He shakes his head. At least, I think he does. His head moves on the pillow beside mine. “A fey creature, we think. Some animal that doesn’t understand our laws.”
I sigh. In the old days, the two of us would ride out there together with a small lance. We’d camp on the outskirts, following its trail, form a plan.
I’d form a plan. I look at what the creature was and work out what it was and how to take it down, whether it was worth trying to bring in alive, or how best to attack it without risking life.
I can’t do any of that now.
“You want my advice?” I query.
“Always.”
The word makes my heart sink.
“I’d need to be there,” I tell him, gritting my teeth in frustration. I’d need to see.
“We can ride out, take a carriage—”
I turn over in bed and squirm under the covers. There’s no point in burying my face. “No.”
Evander doesn’t leave. “Cass—” he starts.
“Go away.”
Evander shifts towards the end of the bed. His feet hit the floor. I think he’s looking away from me, but I can’t be sure.
I despise everything I can’t be sure of, and there’s so much, now. So much I’m unaware of. So much darkness.
Finally, Evander stands. He moves towards the door. It creaks open. He hovers over the threshold, his silence deafening.
“I miss you,” he says, his voice faint. “We all miss you. This staying shut up here…” He inhales. I imagine his fingers balling into fists. I imagine all sorts of things, because what else is there for me to do?
“You lost your sight, Cass. Not your mind.”
The door closes shut behind him, leaving me in silence, with only his words for company.
I know I didn’t lose my mind. That’s the worst part of it. My mind is as sharp as ever, infinitely aware of all I know and all I don’t and all I’ve lost.
Sometimes, I really wish I’d lost my mind instead of my sight.