Chapter 23
Twenty-Three
Fear
The door to my chambers was unlocked, which Maura would have expected. I knew her from the sounds—her stride down the hallway, the way she paused in the doorway to survey it as if she had any right—before I turned from the window.
“You’ve redecorated.” In her voice was the strain of trying to sound easy and almost succeeding. “Or have you begun to read novels?”
I turned to find her holding one of Cara’s books, turning it in her hands.
Her eyes moved across my desk, which now contained several crystal jars containing nuts, candies, and cookies.
Cara was always interested in nibbling on snacks and never asked for them, so I’d ordered a selection to see which one disappeared first.
Her gaze roamed over the rest. Golden and silver jewelry draped from the bedposts, glinting in the sunlight. The stack of extra pillows and thick, fluffy blankets I had accumulated since I knew she would be coming to my bed, turning it into a nest.
She didn’t comment. She moved to the window instead, settling into the frame in the way that had always been hers: hip against the sill, arms loosely crossed, as if she were settling in for a long talk. “Obsidian is boring.”
“Most clans are.”
“It’s all fucking. They’re always fucking each other.
It was diverting at first, but now it’s become dull.
I want to fight for something.” She glanced at me sideways, and there it was: the familiar sharpness hidden in the banter, the blade she’d always kept in easy reach.
“I’m wasted, Fear. You know I’m wasted.”
“Wasted or not, you’re housed and fed and alive. I called in a favor to get you shelter in Obsidian, if you’ll recall.”
“I recall.” Her voice had dried up. “Though Obsidian now questions if that favor was a favor for me or a trick of yours.”
“Is that so?”
“There’s talk in Obsidian about some enchanted knife.” She sounded casual as she laid down the book. She moved to the wall by the window, leaning against it with her arms crossed.
I gave her a pointed look. It was insulting to us both, really, pretending that there was anything casual about this conversation. “There’s always talk. Shifters’ interests are—as you pointed out—fighting, fucking, and running their mouths.”
“Obsidian was sent by the queen. They didn’t include me, of course. I don’t belong anywhere now. But perhaps if they had used me, they’d have brought back the knife.” Her gaze narrowed meaningfully. “Perhaps they would have recognized the thieves.”
“If they had a mission, they should have used you.”
“You’re not going to tell me anything.”
“There isn’t anything to tell.”
She made a sound that was almost a laugh. “There it is. Always the polished liar.”
She pushed off the wall and moved to drop onto the window seat. The movement brought up a renegade wave of memory, a wish that things could be the ways they were before.
But nothing can be put together the same way again once it has been shattered by betrayal. I knew that better than anyone.
She was too close to me now, though we had sat this close a thousand times before Cara, to nurse each other’s wounds or lean together when drunk or whisper behind the backs of other shifters.
She tilted her head to look up at me, and this close, I could not ignore the strain in her face, the way the ligature of her throat tightened.
“I didn’t mean to hurt her as badly as I did. You know that.”
“I know.” The words came out soft, though my decision would not.
“I thought she would be fine.” Her mouth pressed together. “She can be strong. I misjudged how much—” The sentence dissolved. “I misjudged.”
“Yes, you did.” She had misjudged Cara’s mortal fragility, and she had misjudged what Cara meant to me.
Which was not, and had not been since I first met her, entirely the promise of Lightbringer.
“That’s all you’re going to give me.”
“What would you like me to give you, Maura?”
The question landed more directly than she’d expected. I watched the slight adjustment in her expression. She had come in with a shape for this conversation, and I had stepped sideways out of it.
“Honesty,” she said finally.
The week before, I’d felt a rush of sympathy, seeing the way she sought Bismyth. Until Cara flinched. That small involuntary motion had made my decision. I would always choose my wife. “Honesty. About what, specifically?”
“About why you won’t…” Her jaw worked; any suggestion of things outside of her control bothered her. But finally she spat the word out. “Allow me back in Bismyth.”
“You know why.”
“You trusted me for years. You trusted me with more important missions than training a mortal, and I never—” She heard where that sentence was going and stopped it. “I’ve earned my place.”
There it was. Still her arrogance. More important than training a mortal when that mortal—when Lightbringer—was more important than any one of us. And most of all, that mortal was mine.
“You hurt her. She flinches away from you. She deserves to be safe and at home in Bismyth.” And at my side.
“You’re never going to move past one mistake.”
I looked at her. “Is it one mistake? Or is it who you are?”
She absorbed that. Her anger was visible. “She doesn’t know what you did. Does she? All of it. From the beginning.”
Her threat was clear.
“I’ve unwrapped my secrets for her, Maura. She knows I plotted for her sake.”
“You mean you told her enough to satisfy her.” The words landed with a quality I didn’t like. “You found her because she was dragon-marked. You’d been looking for her for years before you found her. You weren’t drawn to her. You were drawn to how she could serve your plots.”
“It began one way. It has become something else altogether.” I didn’t like to expose how I felt for Cara, not like this.
“Has it?” she demanded, her brows arched. “Do you truly love her? Or have you made yourself love her, because it keeps her close?”
“Don’t speak to me of what you cannot understand.” My voice was cool, but still calm. “You cannot fathom what I feel for Cara.”
She would find a way to imply just that to Cara: that I loved her for what she could be, not for what she was. Corbyn had not helped. I had seen the wound open up under Cara’s tough skin when he called her Lightbringer, the fool.
Before that, she had looked at me so tenderly when she admitted no one had ever chosen her as I had.
“No, but I can fathom what she feels for you.” Her words were hot, filled with bile.
“You’re not going to tell her about the past, because if you do, you might lose her, and if you lose her, you lose everything that truly matters.
You’re waiting, aren’t you, until you can offer her so much you’re sure she won’t walk away?
Until you’re sure she won’t abandon you as you were by everyone who sees the cruel, manipulative truth behind all your charms.”
I’d known this cruelty was within her. It still cut. She was right in the way partially true things were right, seeded with just enough truth to make the rest land.
I let the silence hold. “Are you done?”
Emotions chased each other across her face. I’d given her nothing; she’d known I would give her nothing, and now she reckoned with being right about that too. “Allow me inside again, Fear. I’ll keep your nasty little secrets. She’ll forgive me.”
“She’ll try. But I won’t.”
She nodded once. The movement of someone confirming something they had already suspected and were done disputing.
“And would she flinch away from you if she knew you gifted her those nightmares? If she knew you were the reason she felt as if she were burning alive before the recruits’ Trial?
You inflicted more pain than I ever did. ”
My anger—and underneath it, the impossible desire to remake the past—that she had provoked would have been invisible to most people.
But a knowing, satisfied smile ghosted over her lips, reminding me it was not invisible to Maura. She had spent years learning to read me, and I had spent years letting her.
“I caused her suffering, but no damage. You almost killed her with your arrogance.” I reminded us both.
“Don’t sell yourself short, Fear. There’s still plenty of time for you to kill her with your arrogance. We all know she can’t yet fly. Until she does, Bismyth can’t leave the Trials. You are stranded here by her weakness.”
“Do you think threatening me will bring you back into our family?” I chose the words carefully, cruelly. “Go back to Obsidian.”
“I’m not wanted in Obsidian. Not truly. I’ve been abandoned by them and by you…. Though I have always been loyal to you, you are not loyal.”
If she fancied herself abandoned, she had told herself a story I was not going to successfully wrench away from her. There is no point in arguing with someone who had devoted hours to lovingly constructing their justifications into castle walls and spires, sealing themselves inside.
Her gaze fell from my face to my feet, and I realized at the same time she had that I had moved away, creating distance between us on every level. Her gaze flickered back up, and in her shadowed eyes were both pain and the promise of pain.
“Maura.” Command in my tone; whatever other emotions were beneath it, I did not want to examine.
“I’m going.” She stood unhurried, though the tension was still etched in the line of her neck, the strain of her jaw.
She added, with the gentleness of someone extending an undeserved courtesy, “She deserves to know who she is to you. And that if you’d wanted her to hear it from you, you’d have told her by now, Fear. ”
Cara was still with Kiegan and Sera, and I needed to meet her there.
I had just come out into the hallway when the doors to the stairwell hit the walls hard enough to crack the plaster on either side.
Eight of them. Obsidian, masked for now but identifiable by their glossy black chest plates, the contempt in the way they moved.
Maura went still halfway down the corridor. I wished I could see her face. I wanted to know if she was surprised or not in the brief flash that she could not have hidden.
“Out of our way. We’re retrieving stolen property.” The one in front said it as if he expected it to work.
I flashed a smile at the Obsidian shifters who were filtering down the hall toward me. “Back up out that door, and we can pretend this never happened.”
They didn’t, but the four of them looked at each other. When they had to check with each other, the confidence was unconvincing.
Maura stood there uncertainly, and I raised a hand to shoo her away. Not your fight, Maura. Not anymore.
Hurt flashed over her face. But if she had not entered as a decoy, then I did not want to burn her place in Obsidian.
Az stood in his doorway. When he glanced at me, I shook my head. Not yet. No need. They had to come one by one, because the hall was narrow for two abreast to swing a sword. I could manage one at a time and none at my back.
“Must we?” I asked, and one of the shifters’ blades came for my throat before I had fully finished the sentence.
This Obsidian, holding his blade to my throat, was the largest of the pack. That must have given him confidence before he was eye to eye with me. His eyes narrowed, ready to strike if I moved. Or so he thought.
His wrist broke cleanly. Then my elbow met his throat, and he went down.
His sword was now mine.
The second one was faster. He’d expected the first to take longer. The miscalculation cost him half a second, which was more than enough.
I threw him into the wall.
Anayla, who had also emerged in the entrance to the common room behind them, winced as the wall cracked. “Messy.”
“If you wanted to search my rooms, you should have asked,” I told the third. “Now you’ll have to crawl out of here.”
The third hesitated. He looked at the two on the ground and then at me as if he wished very much he was somewhere else.
Rees shot past Anayla, and the fourth shifter made a sound I had not previously associated with trained warriors. He tried to run, but Rees was on top of him.
“Don’t kill it,” I said. To Rees, not to the shifter.
Rees sat on him. This was generally sufficient.
The third one still wasn’t moving. His eyes cut past me to the corridor beyond. As if he hoped the mission had been satisfied without him bleeding.
“Clean them up,” I called to Bismyth urgently. “They’re a distraction. They’re coming through the windows to search our rooms.”
Asrael passed me in two strides. Dairen swore from somewhere deeper in the rooms. There was a crash, the clean ring of steel, Dairen swearing again at a higher volume. Someone shouted from the far end of the corridor.
I ran for my own quarters.
The curtains moved in the night air. Drawers on the floor. Papers scattered by their rough work emptying hiding places.
The chest was open, but that didn’t matter anymore. The contents were safe with Ander.
Two of them looked up in the midst of ransacking my room.
They went out the window instead of toward me.
I crossed to it as they plummeted toward the ground, then found their wings.
I returned to the hallway, curious to see if Maura had run or stayed.
There was no trace of her. The remaining Obsidian shifters had been unable to walk out; one was crawling, and several were being thoughtfully assisted by Bismyth.
Maura had been in this room many times over many years, and she knew where I kept things. Had she extended me the courtesy of telling me what I owed Cara—or had she extended Obsidian the courtesy of a distraction and an unlocked door?
Rees appeared in the doorway, bloody around the mouth, looking profoundly pleased with himself. He stepped over a drawer, circled the room once, and sat down in the middle of the floor as if he had sorted all of this satisfactorily.
“Good dog,” I said.
You always did prefer long games, Maura had told me once. She’d sounded admiring then.
But I felt as if I were the one being played in the long game, because all of this had kept me from Cara.