CHAPTER FORTY
THE SEVENTY-YEAR LIE
I was a child when I lost my mother. At ten years old, I arrived on the Kylers’ doorstep, sobbing about how my mother was dead and I was all alone.
The tears I shed were true.
The story I told was a lie.
Ajalique Selane smiles as she directs me and Kaidren into her home. Just as she does every month when I come to visit. Just as she did the night Arliss Vale was killed.
Her tired eyes are warm, and her smile is genuine, but there’s no tenderness in her gaze when she looks at me. Not anymore. Not since I erased all memory of my existence from her mind. Not since I’ve returned to Ophera, month after month, to ensure those memories remain lost.
Aja hurries to the fireplace, desperate to give us warmth. Not because I’m the daughter she loves, but because I’m a wealthy guest and she thinks she’s supposed to.
The first time I returned, I told her I was Remira Kyler, daughter of her former lover Mathson, here to bestow small gifts and tokens of his affection.
She flushed and trilled when I arrived at her door with a basket of food and expensive winter clothes, courtesy of “Mathson.” She didn’t question it.
Aja has a childish kind of hope that died when she had me. Without me, it’s back.
I keep my wrist covered when I see her, so she never knows I was born in Ophera—in this house, in fact.
With its scuffed wooden furniture, windows with bars, and sparrows inked onto the walls.
They’re the only decoration. Sparrows are Aja’s favorite, so she took a jar of ink, and together we painted them onto every drafty wall to make it feel like home.
“Please don’t,” I say as she reaches for her sparse collection of firewood. “We’re fine. Save it for the next snowstorm.”
“If you’re sure,” she says hesitantly. She always does.
“I hope you don’t mind that I’m here so late, and that I brought a . . .” I glance at Kaidren, unsure what to call him. “A friend. Would it be all right if we stayed for the night?”
Aja looks surprised, but not unhappy. “Of course.” She tilts her head to one side. “Did something happen? Is Mathson all right?”
Kaidren bristles at the question but doesn’t say anything.
He’s smart enough to bridle his curiosity for now.
It infuriates me that Aja’s first instinct is to ask about the piece of scum who hasn’t thought twice about her since her supposed death.
I give a thin smile. “He’s fine. We just need a place to gather our bearings for a few days.
And you don’t have to worry about feeding us. We have food.”
Aja looks relieved. “Perfect.”
“I’m sorry I don’t have any gifts for you this time.”
She waves me off. “Don’t worry about that. Your company is gift enough.”
She means that. It fills me with a warmth that has nothing to do with magic.
There are only two rooms in this house: the main room and the bedroom.
When I lived here, the bedroom was mine.
My mother had a mattress she sometimes dragged before the fireplace at night.
Most nights, when she was between men, we shared my bed, because it was warmer to huddle together and I used to get nightmares.
She would sing lullabies into my ear to soothe me.
On nights when my dreams were especially terrifying, we’d go outside and watch the stars.
She’d make up stories about them. How they were watching us right back and protecting me, even in my sleep.
Tonight, Aja takes the bedroom and leaves Kaidren and me in the main room with a spare blanket. I refused her offer of firewood, so I do what I did as a child—use magic to heat the embers in the hearth.
For a few minutes, Kaidren and I sit in silence, soaking in the warmth, before he heaves a dramatic sigh. “That woman is your mother, isn’t she?”
“Yes.” It comes out softer than I intended.
Kaidren waits, expecting me to explain. When I don’t, he nudges his shoulder into mine. “Are you going to make me ask? I thought your mother was dead.”
I hug my knees to my chest, refusing to look away from the hearth. “She doesn’t remember me.”
“Seemed like she remembers you just fine.”
I shake my head. “She thinks we met for the first time seven years ago. She has no idea I’m her daughter.”
Kaidren stills. “You took her memories. Like the cart attendant.”
My body feels heavy as I nod. “Yes.”
“Why?”
It’s a good question. I’ve never had to articulate the answer before.
When I was a child, my mother lied to me constantly. She told me we weren’t hanging precariously over the edge of financial ruin, that she was sure we had enough food to survive to the next week, that the men who came and left didn’t break her.
I could always tell when the stories she wove were crafted from smoke and dreams rather than truth. For her sake, I accepted them. I pretended to believe her with a smile on my increasingly gaunt face. Until she lied about eating.
It started when I was nine. She worked two jobs, but her hours were irregular, I was growing out of my clothes faster than she could keep up with, the costs of food and our home were ever rising, and it all combined into the simple fact that there wasn’t enough.
Not for both of us. So, she’d feed me and lie about feeding herself.
“Don’t worry, Mira. I already ate,” she’d say as she set a piece of stale bread in front of me. It was hardly a meal, but I didn’t complain because the heat in my belly told me it was more than she’d eaten in days.
The lies kept coming—“I ate before you woke up”—and I watched her wither away. Her skin stretched tighter and tighter over her bones, and her dark, glossy hair lost its shine.
My heart was breaking, and I was fuming. The man who’d made me, and cost my mother her stable employment in Virdei, was cozy and fed at the top of the mountain.
We needed a miracle, and the best miracles came from magic. I started collecting tshira before I had a plan. Took bits of it from wherever I could. Stole it from the stalls of charlatans and siphoned it from sledges returning from the mines.
It took months, but honestly, I was surprised how easy it was. Even then, I was a girl made of shadows. No one looked at me twice as I took what I needed. Finding the lies to fill the tshira was even easier. My mother lied all the time, with cruel men who lied right back, and to me.
I gathered up all the deception in my life and stockpiled magic in the tshira. Then I used it to rid myself of the only person in the world who loved me.
Losing her took every scrap of tshira and all my waning energy. As she slept, I held my small, trembling hands to her forehead and sobbed myself dry.
I didn’t have to fake the tears I wept at the threshold to the Kyler manor when I told them my mother was gone. When I told the father I despised that I was alone, desperate, and devastated.
For that first year, I lived in constant fear Mathson would figure it out. I shouldn’t have bothered. Opherans starve and freeze and die. It’s our lot in life, and Mathson easily accepted that the same fate befell my mother. I think he only regretted that I was spared.
“Remira.” Kaidren’s voice rouses me from my thoughts. “Why?”
“She was dying.” I sound hoarse. “We were out of food and money. She could only afford to feed me. Whenever she told me she’d already eaten, I knew she was lying. She would have died if I hadn’t left.”
“It’s been seven years. Are you going to keep the truth from her for the rest of her life?”
I don’t have an answer, so I don’t give one.
He sighs. “That wasn’t an attack. I’m genuinely asking. One true thing?”
It’s the first time he’s asked me that and expected an answer to a direct question.
My voice is pathetic and feeble as I say, “Do you know what it feels like to have unequivocal proof that the person you love most would be better off if you never existed?”
Kaidren’s mouth falls open, horrified. “That’s not true.”
“It is.” I tighten my arms around my knees.
“Memory magic isn’t permanent. I come here every month to make sure she never remembers.
Maybe I’m horrible, but the first time I returned, I thought—I don’t know—that maybe she’d be miserable.
That she’d feel there was something missing.
” My throat tightens, and my vision blurs with tears I refuse to shed.
“She was happy. Happier than I’d seen her in years. ”
Every day for seven years, I’ve told myself it was worth it. Mathson and Yelina hate me, my brother treats me like a servant, and the mountain I used to dream of is crueler than I ever imagined. But it’s all worth it if Aja finally has enough.
She doesn’t know to love me anymore. Seeing her smile at me with kindness and not affection cleaves my heart in two, but it’s worth it—it has to be—because once upon a time, I was loved by someone who wanted nothing from me.
Even if she doesn’t remember, I’ll hold on to those memories tight enough for the both of us.
“I’m sorry.” Kaidren squeezes my hand. “Truly. But you have to tell her.”
I don’t think I could handle it. Letting her memories return, watching that flicker of recognition ignite, seeing how much she loves me—and then watching the reality of all the misery my existence causes her settle in.
I want her to be happy. But there’s a small, awful part of me that wishes she was as miserable without me as I’ve been without her. As much as I miss her, the only thing worse than watching her life improve without me would be watching it worsen again with my return.
“We’re not here to talk about Aja.” I keep my secret fears to myself. “We need to discuss your father. Whoever killed him is the same person who framed me, and they blackmailed Selva Sixmen into resigning from the Honorate.”
Kaidren wants to push the subject of my mother further, but with a resigned nod, he accepts the new topic of conversation. “There’s someone blackmailing the Honorate besides the Shadow Queen?”
I tell him about the imposter Shadow Queen and her threats surrounding Selva Sixmen’s wife.
Kaidren’s brows shoot up. “You thought that was me?”
“It made sense at the time,” I say defensively.
“I’m flattered you think I’m so diabolical.”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to point out that he’s spent the past two years poisoning his own father, but he continues before I can. “If you’re right, that means Flynn isn’t really Selva’s son.”
“I can’t prove it. I don’t even know for sure that Neveah had an affair, let alone who it was with.”
Kaidren looks thoughtful. “What if it was my father? Think about it. The fake Shadow Queen killed Arliss and blackmailed Selva—but what’s the connection between them?”
There isn’t one, far as I can tell. The only thing that connects Selva and Arliss is that they both used to be Honorate.
Unless Neveah Sixmen had an affair with Arliss Vale and birthed his son—Flynn.
“When Arliss first got sick, he spent months trying to find himself an heir,” says Kaidren. “He wanted anyone but the Opheran bastard he’d already fathered. Eventually, he was sick enough to settle for me, but he was known to sleep with a lot of women. Even married ones.”
The logic is sound. But it’s still just conjecture. “If Neveah had an affair with Arliss,” I say slowly, “that would make Flynn . . .”
“My brother,” Kaidren says. I can’t tell from his tone how he feels about that.
“Even if we’re right, it still doesn’t answer the question of who killed Arliss.”
“Selva?” Kaidren suggests. “If anyone found out Flynn wasn’t his, then he wouldn’t have an heir.”
“Can’t be,” I say. “Arliss’s killer was blackmailing Selva.”
The real question is, who would care that Flynn was Arliss’s son? Who would care enough to kill for it?
I study Kaidren. His brow is furrowed, lost in thought. “Maybe,” I say slowly, “we can find Arliss’s killer another way. I can’t imagine there are too many places to buy kishori. Where did you get it?”
“Here in Ophera. One of those shops that sell the illegal goods my aunt Jules likes.”
It raises another question that’s been weighing on me. “I was wondering about that. Jules was adamant about hating Virdei. If she doesn’t want to join the decurio, why does she collect magical artifacts?”
“There are more uses for magic than dying as a soldier,” Kaidren says. “As I’m sure you’re aware.”
Fair enough. “Do you think you could find the shop that sold you the poison again?”
“I think so. But I doubt the shopkeep would tell us anything.”
I grin. This part is easy. “I’m good at interrogating people. A lie is just as useful as the truth—so long as you ask the right questions.”