Chapter 24
Twenty-Four
Cara
Training with Kiegan was an exercise in being told, at length and with great specificity, everything I was doing wrong. It was the only time the half-orc was chatty.
“Again.” He frowned at me as he backed up.
I clapped my hands on my thighs as if that would remove not just the dust, but the callouses and pain. My arms were aching, but I managed to flash him a smile anyway.
“Yay!”
Sera slashed at my face. I ducked the blow and slipped inside her guard, but she was waiting. She never trapped me quite the same way twice in a row.
This time, she grabbed for the back of my neck, trying to drag my face down into intimate acquaintance with her knee. I blocked her, almost managing to knock her feet out from under her before she caught herself.
The two of us separated, space between us on the mat. I was breathing harder than she was, but it was still progress.
“Better,” Sera said.
Kiegan looked at me with the exhaustion of a man who has explained something many times and expects to explain it many more. “You almost had it. Which is somehow more pathetic than when we began.”
Sera was doing her best not to smile. “She’s better, Kiegan.”
“Better won’t keep her alive.” He gave me a look that suggested he was disappointed with everything about the way I had been formed. “Putting a kitten in armor doesn’t make it less soft and squishy.”
“If you call me a kitten one more time—”
“Kiegan is only annoying out of love.” Sera took the training sword from me and hung both of ours on the wall again.
He scoffed. “Kiegan is only correct. She keeps leaving you openings. She’s slow.”
“She’s new.”
“Oh, as long as she’s new. Surely her enemies will agree it would be unfair to eviscerate her.”
We walked back through the barracks together, the three of us in step. The comfort of our companionship settled over me. The emptiness in my muscles wasn’t pain yet. Some of the roiled emotions I’d felt after meeting Corbyn had faded, at least for now.
The antechamber was filled with shifters, their voices lost to the rush of the waterfall.
Evening light fell through the open ceiling in long, amber slants, thin at the edges, the last of the day spending itself.
I found a reason to slow down in it. To look at the stone work above the arches.
To notice the way the light bathed everything in warmth.
It was strange to think that after tomorrow’s Hunt, the other clans would leave us behind. I hoped Bismyth would not despise me. I hoped Fear would not always be disappointed in me. What a hero.
Kiegan looked back at me, then up at the ceiling I was studying with great interest. Then back at me once more. “Whatever you’re not walking toward, it’s still there.”
“Thank you, Kiegan. Profoundly helpful.” I was annoyed to be caught stalling, but I was reluctant to face Fear.
“Cara!”
The voice caught me mid-step. Hurried footsteps, too. I turned.
Maura.
My first instinct was to keep walking.
Sera tucked her arm through mine and asked quietly, confidentially, “Do we want to lure her into the labyrinth and murder her?”
“Not today,” I said.
Her look of disappointment was almost certainly a joke. Almost. I was never wholly sure with her.
But Maura was almost to us, and I didn’t want her to see weakness, so I faced her. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”
“I know.” She stopped a careful distance back. She probably stopped because of Sera, bristling beside me with violent intent, rather than any concern about me. “But I have something to say to you.”
“Then say it.”
“Not here.” She tilted her head toward the waterfall which was both beautiful and useful. It swallowed sound and kept conversations private. “Let’s go somewhere no one can hear us. But where you can leave if you want.”
I looked at her. “I can leave right now.”
“You can.” She met my eyes. She didn’t flinch from them. “Do you know all the ways that Fear tricked you?”
Kiegan, frowning, crossed his arms over his chest. He was clearly my self-appointed bodyguard now and would keep watch if I did entertain Maura. I glanced at Sera, who watched us with open curiosity.
The lobby moved around us. Clan members crossing the floor, someone laughing distantly in a corridor, the ordinary machinery of an evening, even though some of us might die in the Last Hunt.
I looked at Maura for a long moment. Long enough to check whether this felt like a trap and yet not long enough to know the answer.
Then I walked toward the waterfall.
She followed. I chose the spot, close enough that conversation would be swallowed by its steady crashing but also close enough still to Kiegan in case anyone attempted kitten-squishing. Maura stopped when I stopped, a healthy distance between us.
When I glanced back, Sera stood beside Kiegan with her arms folded. Both of them were watching us, ready in case Maura tried something.
“Talk.”
She did not hesitate, and her words came out like a blow being swung. “Fear looked for years for anyone with the mark, anyone who could be what you are. That was why he flirted with you, why he kept you with him, why he charmed you.”
“He told me.”
Something shifted in her face. She had expected her cruelty to land more successfully. Then, she rallied. Triumphantly, she demanded, “Did he tell you about the tracking spell?”
“I know about the tracking spell.” Her fury at that could almost have been laughable. “A caster tried to kill me. Fear found me in time because of it.”
I watched her reconsider her route. “You’re not angry.”
“I’m not dead thanks to his plots. I might not be enthused about his deceitful ways, but I am enthused to be alive.” I knew what the queen had made him, and I believed perhaps he was different beneath the layers of deceits.
The two of us studied each other. Maura’s eyes had narrowed. “Did he tell you about the nightmares?”
The nightmares. Her words struck me like a blow, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe. I had questioned the nightmares, but I hadn’t wanted to believe Fear could have done such a cruel thing.
Then I managed to ask coolly, “What about them?”
“Do you know the nightmares were an enchantment?” She was watching my face carefully, and now she looked pleased with herself.
I hated that she looked pleased in some distant part of me that was not reeling. I hated her; I hated her more than I had ever hated anyone in my life.
Except, perhaps, for Fear.
No one has ever chosen me the way you do.
Had that feeling been the result of his trickery too?
“Something he arranged to make sure you believed the story, to make sure you stayed. The burning you felt? The nights you woke up thinking you were dying? That was his work.”
“Prove it.” I told her, my voice cold. I was proud of that. “Prove to me that I shouldn’t trust the husband who has taken care of me over the bitch that beat me half to death.”
The way she smiled, thin and cruel, told me she had an answer. “He used an enchanted coin.”
A memory rose for me, and with it, my breath hitched. Rees darting into my room, Fear bringing him back out. I’d been annoyed by Fear going into my room, but he strolled out so quickly, toying with a coin. I’d felt then that he was up to some trick.
I made myself offer her a tight, disbelieving smile. “Why are you telling me?”
Her face dressed itself in prim self-righteousness. “Because you should know.”
I laughed in her face, though the sound ripped into ragged pieces. “That’s not why. You don’t give a damn about me, and I don’t see how betraying Fear’s plots gets you back into Bismyth. You’re here for revenge, and you’re happy to hurt me if it hurts him.”
Her mouth twisted as if she were tasting something bitter. “I did what he asked me to do for years. Anything. I would have died for him.”
My stomach hollowed. I glanced at Kiegan, and he took a step forward, protectiveness flashing across his face. His reaction warned me I was too transparent.
“I was too rough with you in training, and I know that. I know what it cost you and I know what it cost me. But I tried to keep you alive after. I went for the healer.” She faltered. “I thought there would be something on the other side. That I could earn my way back into Bismyth.”
She looked past me as if she were looking into the past, her face painted with grief. “There’s no hope of winning Fear’s forgiveness. There never was.”
I looked past her to Sera, who made a gesture of confusion. I was confused, too, both by the conversation and by the unsettling feeling I had about Fear’s tricks.
“He cares about you and you betrayed him.” I couldn’t trust her either.
“He cares what I’m useful for.” There was something raw and broken in her voice; true or not, she believed what she was saying. “Same as you. The difference is you still believe in him.”
My nails were biting into my palm. I forced myself to unfurl my hands from fists. “I’m not sure you’re trustworthy.”
She laughed, short, sharp. “No. I’m not. I’m angry and hurt, and I want—”
She had broken herself off. Her gaze flickered up past me, and I followed it up to Bismyth’s door.
Her hand lashed out, and I automatically blocked, expecting an attack; she managed to seize my arm and lean in close. She went on, not caring that I had misread her movement as an attack. “He’s going to keep things from you. He always thinks he knows better. That it’s not a betrayal.”
She released me to swirl her cloak over her shoulders. “But only you can decide if you have been betrayed.”
A Bismyth shifter ran across the floor and spoke briefly to Sera and Kiegan, who raced toward us, urgency written across their faces.
Maura backed away from all of us, her hands rising to her shoulders in a placating gesture. The same arrogant smirk she wore so often was back in place, like a too-small shield.
“We’ve got to go,” Kiegan growled.