Chapter 24
Chapter
Twenty-Four
ALLIE
A crate stood in the center of my room, as unremarkable as a wooden box could be. But magic vibrated from it.
It wasn’t just true Protectorate magic, thrumming around and through me.
It was home. Better days. Laughter, sunlight, and loud family dinners.
I closed my eyes, inhaled deeply, and placed my hands on my stomach as my own well of powers stirred. The familiar pulse pulled at me, drawing me closer.
I splayed my hands on top of the crate. No trickery brushed against my skin, no dark magic scratched at my senses.
The doubt was still there–Orion’s bruises on my neck hadn’t fully faded–but I knew Protectorate subterfuge when I saw it.
With a smirk, I ran my finger over the Family Heirlooms label, written in a weird text with too many swirls.
Dara had always been the best among us when it came to runes and glyphs.
The letters shimmered blue, recognizing my touch. The crate shuddered, once, twice, then split at the edges revealing three books hidden within.
Palaver books.
With an eager smile, I quickly laid them on my table, next to Evie’s mauve palaver, through which I’d been teaching her to control her powers and learning too much of the Clans’ heinousness.
I set them all in a circle around me and opened each carefully, as if I was grasping their hands gently like we’d done as children when we’d stare up at the stars, then sat down, excitement coursing through me.
Underneath the giddiness, a grim sea of worry swirled within me.
I had to tell them about Orion.
How stupid I’d been to trust him and how close to death I’d gotten because of it.
But, first, I wanted to make sure they were alright.
Slowly, ovals of mist rose from the blank pages.
Within them, my cousins’ smiling faces shimmered.
First Evie’s, with that same open smile she hadn’t lost, thank the gods, then Dax and his mischievous smirk, followed by Dara, with her unshakable gaze, and Clara, whose beautiful face was marred by the deepest frown I’d ever seen on her.
My eyes turned glassy instantly. I’d seen Evie and knew they were all alive and as well as any of us could be with the future of our Clan hanging in the balance, but seeing them breathing, blinking, shifting in their seats, cracked the wall of ice.
I gulped my tears down and simply enjoyed being surrounded by the only family I had left, even from miles upon miles away.
They’re alive, they’re alive, they’re alive , chanted in my mind.
I opened my mouth to speak, still used to being the First Daughter among them, but the words stuck on my tongue. Nothing could truly do justice to this reunion.
Clara beat me to it.
“I’m sorry my dad’s an asshole,” she said.
The silence suddenly crumbled with our relieved laughter. Even Evie giggled, and she’d barely met the man or faced Clan machinations.
“Glad you said it first, because it was literally hurting my chest to keep it inside.” Dax raised a glass of something amber in the sky and took a big gulp. “What the fuck is Silas doing, Clara?”
“Not listening to me, that’s what.” She rubbed her cheeks, her golden bracelets clacking. “He won’t see me, won’t talk to me, won’t answer any of my letters. I don’t know what to do. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said quickly as Clara’s fingers dug into her scalp, pulling at her golden hair. “Silas is his own man, with his own decisions. Stupid, destructive, conceited decisions. He cannot be reasoned with.”
“You–” Clara’s crestfallen face struck me right in my heart. In that moment, the feared Protectorate negotiator vanished, replaced with a young girl whose father was ignoring her. “He talked to you?”
She looked at me like she was begging me to say no and I felt rotten.
I could put on a brave face for them and keep my coat buttoned around my neck, despite the heat in my room, but I could not lie to them.
I nodded grimly.
Clara released a shuddered breath and fell back against the back of her seat, an austere piece of wood which looked to have been cobbled together from scraps. “I should have seen it coming.”
Just like I’d missed every warning sign before Orion’s trap snapped shut. “Don’t beat yourself up. I need to tell you–”
“Nobody could have,” Dara said at the same moment. She shook her head sadly before spearing me with her eyes. “Allie, I’m sorry for your loss, because yours is the greatest. Alaric was a great man and he will be sorely missed.”
All thoughts of my own treachery vanished as the sting in my eyes threatened to spill down my cheeks. I blinked rapidly and looked up at the ceiling. My family hadn’t yet seen me weak–I still wanted them to remember me as the feared Huntress they’d all looked up to.
I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, seeing me crumble would send a cascade of worry onto them. I missed him like the very air I breathed, but I couldn’t allow that pain to seep from me and taint their smiles, as tired as they already were.
There wasn’t much I could control about my situation, but this I could handle.
I had to.
“Thank you,” I said once the lump in my throat eased. “He is missed. Every day.”
Dax raised his glass, just like my father used to at the start of family diners. My chest throbbed with an ache I couldn’t voice. “May the gods receive him in their embrace as if he was one of them.”
“He shouldn’t have gone that way.” Clara shook her head, shadows crowding her lovely dark eyes. “He could have talked some sense into my dad.”
“It doesn’t help to dwell on the past,” Dara said.
Even though they all looked at me like the leader and Evie had been born first, Dara had the oldest soul among us.
Sometimes I felt like she was the one guarding our hearts, while I fought with the world to protect us.
“Alaric did great things with the time he had. To protect is to endure .”
We all chanted the same words–except Evie, the only one of us who hadn’t been raised on traditions and incantations.
I released a long, shuddered breath. I still couldn’t grieve my father properly. Doing so would mean truly accepting he was no longer here. That I had failed to protect him. Protect us.
I selfishly refused to face that reality outright.
Not now.
Not yet.
“Anybody know anything about Uncle Maksim?” I hated that my voice sounded so raspy. Mercifully, none of my cousins pointed it out–which meant they’d noticed and realized how much the mere mention of my father affected me.
Such a wretched pain couldn’t bring laughter, even in the Vegheara family; we’d been raised to mock the most frightening to lessen the impact, after all, and almost nothing was off limits.
“Alive and plotting too many beheadings to count,” Dax said. “He got wounded on Sanctua Sirena. Honestly, healing is the only thing keeping him from marching into Aquila and killing Silas.”
My smile widened, cracking more of the hollowness caging me. I could almost hear Uncle Maksim cursing up a storm and promising to hang Silas by the few hairs he still had on his head.
“He can’t risk it,” I said urgently. “Aquila has changed. For the worst.”
“I know.” Dax shrugged. “Don’t worry, I told him to wait for our signal before he does anything heroically unwise.”
“Dax…” A warning cut through my voice. “You’re good at what you do. Very good–”
He sighed dramatically. “I try, I try.”
“–but don’t risk your life. Aquila is dangerous.”
He took another gulp from his glass, watching me from above the rim.
By the time he set it down, his smile had vanished along with his entire loose, careless attitude which had charmed and tricked the entire continent.
The mischievous rogue was gone, replaced by the strategist I would never bet against.
Very few had seen this side of him–and we needed to keep it that way.
I licked my lips. I had to tell them about the trap. I had to reveal one of our own warriors had wanted to strangle me.
The truth lodged in my throat once more.
“I know,” he said. Even his voice had changed, turning as cold as the knife that could slice through marble. “But if Silas thinks he can steal your throne without consequences, he truly is as stupid as I considered him to be. With all due respect, Clara, of course.”
Clara waved him off, even as her gaze turned sadder.
I opened my mouth, but Dax shook his head. I knew too much about the famed Vegheara stubbornness to argue. “I’m not in Aquila. I’m being safe. That’s the most I can tell you while you’re in your lovely Commander’s domain.”
Of all the things I’d been excited to talk about with my cousins, he was not among them.
“I don’t like him,” Evie pipped up. “I saw him again today, strutting around the Capital like he owned the place.”
Wait–if he’d also left the crater today, how had he been able to reach the Capital so fast?
But I was not discussing the Commander with my cousins. Because they would see me blush and ask all sorts of questions I had no answer for.
“Evie’s been working on her powers,” I announced suddenly, pointing at her portal. “She’s been doing wonderfully so far.”
A gleeful smile bloomed on Evie’s face. “I can even light candles now!”
As she rummaged for a candle in the background, the rest of my cousins sent me questioning looks.
“Mara and Fallor were idiots,” I mouthed. I wasn’t about to spill Evie’s secrets, even ones she didn’t seem all that interested in keeping hidden from the family anymore.
We watched as she excitedly lit the candle and made the flame grow with perfect control. I relaxed in my seat, basking in my family’s presence.
“That’s the Vegheara spirit,” Dax said with more patience and gentleness than I thought him capable of. “Soon enough, you might be able to crisp that Dragon of yours.”
All of a sudden, Evie got very serious, all clearing her throat and squaring her shoulders. I hated to say it, but she’d bloomed in the Blood Brotherhood Capital much more than she had back in Aquila.
“I actually wanted to ask you all about something I haven’t been able to find. Have you ever heard about the Quorilith Clan?” she said.
“That is an awful name.” Dax grimaced.
I huffed a laugh. “Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, does it?”
Damn, it felt good to talk about such simple things.
I wanted to sip from this peace for just a few moments longer, before I revealed Orion’s fate.
The masks.
The betrayal.
But Evie’s next question shattered whatever calm had been slowly drawing me back from behind the ice.
“Or anything about ritualistic Clan killings that involved slash–slashing someone’s throat?”
An ugly silence settled between us.
My heart began to pound.
“Why do you want to know?” I asked.
A thousand emotions, all of them painful, flashed across her face. “That’s how my parents were killed. The attackers slashed their throats and I want to know why.”
My legs began to tremble with uncontrollable shivers as the world tilted off its axis once more, dragging me in the whirlwind.
Evie’s parents' necks had been slit.
Orion had slashed his own throat.
All of them had been Protectorate.
The coincidence was too great to risk ignoring.
“I can ask Soryn,” Clara said. “He knows everything. He can recite the Code by heart. Every line. Who does that?”
“Do you trust him?” Evie asked.
“Not in the least,” she said without hesitation.
“Then best not to.”
“Quorilith,” Dara whispered. “The Clan that hid in the Forbidden Swamps, right? Super violent, super old?”
“You tell me, you seem to know more about it,” Evie said, leaning forward in her seat.
I did, too, listening to every word.
“Not much, they didn’t exactly leave written traces behind.
They were suspicious of everyone and the feeling was quite mutual.
Old scholars theorized they engraved their dangerous spells on the walls in their dungeons, but nobody has ventured into one of their sunken temples in centuries.
Nobody who came back alive, that is. They dealt in dark magic. ”
“How dark?” I asked. Because only wretched and filthy magic could have tainted Orion to such a degree.
“They only worshiped gods of death and lies. It’s said the water in their swamps turned red with the blood of the ones they sacrificed before battle,” Dara went on, entrancing us all.
“Legends say that’s why their temples fell.
Because the blood seeped into the ground and swallowed them up.
Others say the blood turned that place into a swamp, that it had been a beautiful, lush forest before.
Hard to say when that happened so long ago.
The Quoriliths seemed unpleasant, I haven’t studied their Clan all that much. I’d rather read about the Bone Bridge.”
Blood.
Orion had said something about my blood being important.
I’d selfishly thought he’d only been concerned about my veins–but I wasn’t the only one who carried the powerful Vegheara blood.
Dara jerked her chin at Evie. “But why don’t you ask your prince about it? He must know more and I’m sure they must have at least second-hand recollections hidden somewhere.”
Evie frowned. “Why would he?”
“Because his ancestors defeated the Quoriliths. The few survivors of their heinous Clan were absorbed into the Blood Brotherhood.”
In the disbelieving silence that followed, I couldn’t keep the truth hidden any longer.
“Orion tried to kill me,” I said, voice devoid of the ugly emotions I still refused to let bubble to the surface. “And if what you’re saying is true, we’re all in danger.”