Chapter 28 #2
Their attending servant opened the door for her. “I’ve drawn the bath, milady. Ring the bell on the table if you need me.” She waited for Thia to nod before taking her leave.
Dess followed Thia into her room, hovering awkwardly at the door. “I can’t believe it worked.” He offered a hesitant smile that she perceived as an attempt to win her over.
“Getting in was the easy part.”
His face fell. “When do we grab Oskaren?”
Thia tugged on the small braid he’d given her. “I don’t know. At least with the guard’s info, we should be able to find her easily.”
“Aye,” Thran said, behind Dess in the threshold. “The building’s small. I saw stairs on the way in. I’m betting that’s the way down. It’s narrow. I wouldn’t risk it twice.”
She pursed her lips. “I think we should stay here until morning. We said we needed shelter, so they might be suspicious if we try the midnight shift change. Go just before dawn, and if you’re seen, you can just say I sent you in search of breakfast and assumed the kitchens would be downstairs.”
When the others gave their assent, there was nothing to do but wait. Agreeing to sleep in shifts, Thia returned to her room, angling for a bath. She had just finished and was settling down into a luxurious bed when Dess found her again.
“Can we talk?”
He looked so young, standing in the doorway with his shoulders slumped. She sighed. “Everything okay?”
He hesitated a moment, then slunk across the floor to hover beside her. “Are we?”
Ah. She tucked a damp curl behind her ear. “Why’d you do it?” She knew he had a thoughtless streak, but jumping headlong into danger wasn’t the same as stealing a map they didn’t need.
“I don’t know. I just….” He ran an agitated hand over his hair.
“There was some dastard holding it, dripping jewels while several children fetched gnawed bones out of a refuse heap. I just couldn’t shake the thought that he had to be in the king’s good graces to be that rich.
And then I started thinking about who he must have hurt to win that favor, and all that the king has done to us, and I just…
.” He grimaced. “Next thing I know, I’m snatching it out of his hands and sprinting for the gates.
I wanted to take something from him. Just once.
Maybe to prove I could, I don’t know. Despite all that’s been taken from me. ”
Thia had no words for that. She felt herself relenting, especially when he offered wide eyes and a hushed voice.
“Do you hate me?”
“Of course not.” She pulled her knees up to her chest. “I just want to get us all through this in one piece.”
“Sorscha says I’ve never met a situation I can’t make stickier.”
“Maybe you should learn to wash your hands.” He snorted, and the sound eased some of the tension. “Oskaren better be bloody grateful when this is over.”
Thia pursed her lips, thinking again of the girl’s words in their game. If that’s how he feels, good. “Dess,” she said slowly. “Oskaren is, I mean, I think she might—” She cut herself off. What if she was wrong?
He raised an inquisitive brow.
“How do you know the real Oskaren is truly gone?” she probed instead. After all the times he’d shut down when she’d broached the subject of his sister, she wasn’t sure he would answer.
Unsurprisingly, he became quite interested in the floorboards. Maybe it was a sign of his guilt, an attempt at a peace offering after getting them into this situation, but he took a shuddering breath. “You didn’t know her before,” he said. “You can’t see how much she’s changed.”
Thia leaned back against the headboard. She hedged a second inquiry. “What was she like?”
He sank into the chair beside the bed, blowing out a sigh.
“Brave. Kind. A real hero, my sister.” It was the first time Thia had heard him call her that himself, and his irony was palpable.
“From the moment we met, I followed her around like a stray mongrel—I guess that’s what I was.
Six years old with no memories, no family.
She was a few years older and better at everything.
Anyone else would have been annoyed; instead, she shoved a sword in my hands and taught me what she knew.
Told off anyone who had anything to say about my curse.
She’d just lost her own father. Maybe she had to put that pain somewhere, I don’t know.
But she chose me, and I worshipped her for it. ”
Thia had wondered about the girl’s other parent, in light of the nature of Haven, and what she’d said. You have a home to go back to. A pang of sympathy flashed through her.
“We were inseparable after that,” Dess continued. “At least until she left to take a job in the capital. I wanted to go with her, but I wasn’t old enough.”
“That was the last time you saw her before she was cursed?”
Dess nodded. “She returned to Black Forest three years later, heartless. I tried to talk to her—I of all people could have understood.” He absent-mindedly rubbed his shoulder.
“She wouldn’t speak to me. Wouldn’t even look at me.
It was like I was a stranger to her, not the brother she’d had for eight years.
” He grimaced. “I followed her into the woods one day so she’d have to face me.
I begged her to leave with me in search of a cure.
I even suggested the Losrohir. Anything to get my sister back. I’d have died trying.”
Thia’s chest twinged. “What did she say?”
He loosed a bitter laugh. “Nothing. She knocked me out cold. Gave me this.” He brushed back his straw-like hair, revealing a small scar just above his temple.
“When I came to, I was tied to a tree, and she was waiting. She told me she was leaving, and if I followed her, she’d kill me herself.
” He let the hair fall back into place. “That was the last I saw of her for a year and a half. When she finally came back and kept ignoring me, I gave up.”
Hurt simmered in the bunch of his muscles, chin ducked toward his chest. Thia detangled herself from the blankets and faced him properly. “That’s awful. I’m sorry.”
“Well,” he said, a bit stiff, “I’ve got you now.”
“You do,” she agreed. It suddenly made sense why he had been so quick to volunteer for this.
A kind of redemption, a girl he could save.
He’d tried to wear his hurt as anger, channeling it into some half-baked wish to kill the king.
But that wasn’t who he was; Thia had seen that from the start.
He was motivated by goodness, even if he tried not to be.
“Dess,” she started, after a moment. Then paused, thinking over her words.
She didn’t doubt his story, but there was something off about it.
If Oskaren really didn’t care, why knock him out, only to wait around to threaten him?
Why not kill him outright, or slip away immediately when she had the chance?
He seemed to follow the train of her thoughts, or maybe he was simply returning to her original question. “Whatever kindness you think you’re seeing, it’s a trick, Thia. Don’t fall for it.”
It was only a game. Oskaren had said as much herself. But Thia recalled the warmth in her expression, just before she’d clutched her chest in pain.
She didn’t push, though, only sat there beside him, thoughts tumbling, until they decided it was time to sleep.