Chapter Sixteen
Oath
I was in a bed, that much I knew.
I could not move for exhaustion, could barely distinguish dreams from reality, nor comprehend the passing of time. I didn’t have the energy or inclination to open my eyes, which seemed to be bound in cool cloth that my fingers were far too heavy to reach for.
And there were familiar voices at my bedside – but their hushed words were not intended for my ears.
“You should not be here,” said the gentler of the two.
“There’s time,” the deep and lovely voice replied.
“The coronation is tomorrow, Caelan,” the other insisted. Its name floated through the ashes and ruins of my mind; Roy. “If you were going to ignore the most crucial part of this plan, why did you come to me in the first place?”
“I came,” Caelan gritted out angrily, “because you’re supposed to speak for us. I came because you’re our Chief, and we needed guidance.”
“I was your parent’s Chief,” Roy corrected gently.
Caelan made a bitter, dejected sound that might have been a laugh.
“Yes, well, Brigid and I never really had a Coven to speak of, did we?”
Roy sighed, the sound both soft and pained. “You might again one day. Soon. It all hinges on these next few days; you know this.”
“There’s time,” Caelan said again, rougher this time.
“There’s time to ride to Kingsborough,” Roy agreed. “Just about. But you must still infiltrate the palace, find Brigid, get the King alone, take his skin –”
He broke off, his voice rising with more agitation than I knew him capable of.
“The longer you stay, the less chance we have, Caelan. You should have left hours ago.”
“And what if I had?” Caelan answered, straining to keep his voice low as it peaked with fury. “What about Fischer? I should never have agreed to your gods-damned confession, it did fuck all to deter him.”
A tense silence.
“You promised me you’d find him, Roy. You swore you could handle it.”
“I thought I could,” Roy said simply. “I chose the wrong form – how could I know he would run from a fellow Kingsman? He evaded me.”
“He evaded you. You could have overpowered him. You should have. You must be a hundred years old, there are thousands of skins you could have used–”
“A strong skin only goes so far,” Roy said, volume rising with a low thrum of power though his tone was gentle as ever. “Beneath it, I remain a tired old man who you dragged into this coup. I’ll thank you to remember that and show some gods-damned respect for your elders.”
The silence that followed was anything but respectful.
Even through the dark depths of my barest consciousness, I could sense the crackle of tension in all that was not said.
There seemed no end to that tension, but for all I knew it could have been moments or hours later, perhaps even a brand new conversation when Caelan finally spoke again.
“She could have died,” he said quietly.
Roy’s answer was distinctly pained. “I would not have let that happen. I have known Miss Roz for some time now. She cared for Tanner. For me too, when not many others bothered.” He hesitated a moment, then added; “And she is your soulmate.”
Shock rang through the black, and it was almost enough to pull me to the surface. But a warm and reassuring knowledge sang within me. It drowned out all else.
Because I had known this.
Had known it for a long time, heard the song between us even when its melody confused me. Now it soothed me; kept me company in the dark while my body and mind pieced themselves back together.
Soulmate.
“That is none of your business,” said Caelan.
“It is. Because you are my business, and she is yours. You have a duty to perform, Caelan, for the good of us all. Trust she will be cared for as one of our own, until your return.”
???
“Where are you going?”
My tongue was dry and heavy, and the words came out in a tumble of nonsense.
“What did she say?”
“Oh my gods, she’s awake.”
The voices by my side were not the ones I remembered, though they were no less familiar. My muscles responded belatedly and it took an age for me to reach the cloth over my eyes, even longer to pull it off.
I blinked several long, slow blinks before the face above my own began to take shape.
My father’s copper curls, the same brown eyes I shared with my mother, a soft, crooked smile I knew better than my own.
“Magnus,” I breathed. “Mags?”
His answering smile was tentative and achingly hopeful.
“It’s me, Roz.”
I burst into tears.
I cried a lot on that first day. I cried when it hit me that Magnus had returned, and when I realised he had come with Sorcha in tow. I cried when I learned we’d lost The Mage and Rose. When I felt that cold and empty space in my chest. When they told me that Caelan had gone.
When they told me where and why.
Magnus sat at my side for hours, and when I could sit no more, he helped me out of bed and we wandered slowly down the unfamiliar hallways to find Sorcha and Roy sitting in a bright farmhouse kitchen with a golden-haired man I didn’t recognise.
Silence fell between them all at my approach, but Roy was on his feet at once, rooting through the cabinets to unearth a gigantic bottle of whiskey while Sorcha drew me to the seat beside her.
And we drank.
And they talked.
Magnus, most of all. He told me of the months he’d spent trudging through the countryside, making a bid for the northernmost shores of Qyelles to find passage to our father’s old home on the Isles.
But he’d never made it; a deathly flu had cut him off at the knees when he finally reached the dockland village he’d been aiming for.
“It felt like penance,” Magnus said quietly. His grieved expression didn’t sit right on the soft lines of his face. “It felt like the price I had to pay for leaving you here alone.”
“I wasn’t alone,” was all I said.
Sorcha met my eye, and smiled her sweet smile.
When I looked back to Magnus, he had his fingers entwined with the golden stranger’s and the small, intimate gesture sparked ghostly warmth in my empty chest. I didn’t have to wait long to hear the man’s part in this story.
Magnus glowed as he told me how he’d found solace at the home of a widowed fishwife and her extremely handsome son, Will.
The man – Will – grinned at Magnus’s phrasing, and with his face lit up like that…
I could only wonder if he, too, held an ember of my brother’s magic.
The thought sent a searing pain through the core of me. The emptiness gnawed at my insides, and I found myself chasing it with a glass of whiskey. Another. And another.
I wouldn’t talk about Caelan until I was four whiskeys deep.
“Why?” I finally asked them, the word thick and slurred.
Nobody answered at first – it was a broad question and Magnus had already told me what he’d learned while I was healing.
It had re-written so much of what I’d assumed.
Caelan had not been the one to suffer the King’s dungeons and escape; that was Brigid.
This much, I realised, Caelan had told me himself if I’d ever stopped to consider it.
A young man with peculiar tastes and just enough power to see them sated.
He had her thrown in a cell.
Magnus filled in the rest, mending the spots in that mental tapestry I’d stitched together too quickly.
How Brigid had hidden among the royal court for years under various skins, collecting intelligence and biding her time.
How Caelan had orchestrated the Kingsmen’s arrival in Stormsby so he could seek Roy’s counsel for their silent coup against the soon-to-be crowned King.
How he had met me and realised what I was – and what I was to him.
He’d lost focus then, because of me. Fischer had slipped past him, and people - Tanner and Johnny – had paid the price for our brief, stolen bliss.
“Why did he go?” I said again, louder. I knew how I sounded; petulant and selfish.
But the words were clearer the faster I spoke, my simmering anger burning through the whiskey, and I could not stop.
“Why couldn’t someone else take the King’s skin?
Why not Roy, or - or Brigid? Why him, why my – why Caelan? ”
My voice cracked on his name, and Sorcha shifted hesitantly closer, but did not speak.
She glanced at Magnus, who could only shrug helplessly.
They had been beyond the borders still, Magnus and Will having travelled for weeks after word first reached them of Stormsby’s plight, Sorcha still fighting tooth and nail against her mother’s will.
The three of them turned as one to Roy, who stood apart from us all, leaning in silence against a clean wooden countertop.
He regarded me with soft, sad eyes, but his voice was firm when he finally spoke.
“He swore an oath a long time ago,” he said. “An oath to protect.”
“To protect who, Roy?”
Roy did not flinch from my blistering glare. “Everyone.”
I shook my head, throat thick and sore. “I don’t understand.”
“I do,” said Magnus quietly. To his credit he was not cowed by the scowl I flung his way. “You know I understand, Roz. You know why I ran. Who among us wouldn’t be better off? The late King was a monster. His son is –”
He shuddered.
“He grew up with those dungeons for his play yard. His father’s prisoners were his favourite toys. We’ve all heard the stories; the things he did to those poor people.”
An image came to me; a frightened girl with only a pretty jewelled knife to fight off a prowling beast. My Flame reached out a ghostly tendril of barely-there warmth, a half-hearted comfort to soothe the pain in my chest. Of course Caelen could not abide it.
Of course he would seize any opportunity to end the rule of the family who had brutalised his own — and so many others.
I lay my head down on my crossed arms.
Sorcha’s hand was a gentle pressure between my shoulder blades; so familiar, and yet it brought me no comfort. I feared that nothing ever would again.
“They’ll have crowned the new King by now,” said Roy when the silence stretched too taut. I lifted my head to the thud of a fresh bottle hitting the table. “Let us drink to his health.”
He held my eye as he filled my glass and nudged it toward me.
“And his safe return,” he added softly.
I stared at him for one long moment.
Then I knocked back my drink.