40. Return to Auro
A t last, Viola’s month-long sentence at the Farm came to an end. She and her fellow knights boarded an airship bound back to Lysandra, descending down the beanstalk through the bank of clouds. It was a long, quiet journey, most of her comrades still drugged. It lessened the further away they got, people becoming more animated, talking excitedly about returning home and having a real bath and enjoying a couple of days’ respite before returning to the field. They spoke of looking forward to seeing certain people and eating certain foods.
No one spoke of where they’d been, or what they’d done.
No one could.
Finally, the airship came to rest in the harbour. The knights disembarked one by one, welcomed back by Captain Drakesbane and the rest of their friends. Heindrich was visible immediately, towering above the rest of the crowd. He opened his arms and ran towards both girls, swooping Freya up and placing her down only to yank Viola into his embrace.
It was the closest Viola had been to Freya in a month.
“How was it?” Heindrich asked them.
“Boring,” Freya replied.
Viola hesitated a second too long, causing the other two to stare at her. “What she said,” Viola echoed, unable to move her tongue in the shape of a better lie.
Heindrich seemed to register something in her response. A minute frown tugged at his brow, but he quickly shrugged it off .
“You must both be famished,” he said. “Come, I’ve got a little feast prepared. Bread, cheese, ham, pickled onions, a few pastries and jam—the real stuff.”
Freya clapped her hands, starting to follow Heindrich, but Viola lagged behind. The jam. The one with seeds, like they used to make back home.
The one not made by giants.
But how much of the rest of the food was?
Viola’s stomach turned sour.
“Viola?” Heindrich swivelled round.
“Actually, I’m feeling really tired,” she told them. “I think I’m going to go lie down for a little while.”
“You sure? We can bring you some food—”
“I’m fine,” she snapped, more forcefully than she meant to. “You two go on without me.”
“For food, yes. In battle, never,” said Heindrich, dropping into half a bow. “Rest up. We’ll save some for you.”
Please don’t. “That’s very kind.”
Viola watched the two of them disappear behind the stable block, and slipped into the barracks and back in her bedroom. She dumped her bag on the floor and collapsed onto her bed. The room smelled wrong, unfamiliar in the way things tended to turn whenever you were absent from them for too long.
Not that the room had ever really felt like hers.
The cracks on her ceiling reminded her of the scars on the giants’ backs. She closed her eyes in the quiet, but all she could hear was screaming. Images of blood and pain, of grotesque, swollen bodies, of dark, hollowed eyes, deep as the pit the knights hurled their remains into.
Viola couldn’t join Heindrich and Freya and slap on a mask like everything was fine. She wasn’t sure, after everything she’d seen, that she’d ever have the capacity to laugh again.
I should never laugh again, she chastised herself. What right had she to be happy after what she had seen… what she had done? If she ever laughed again, it would be too soon.
She wondered how long it would take before she felt something akin to normal, how long until the images only came every hour, rather than every minute. Could any amount of time ever scrub the memories from her mind or the blood from her bones? Viola wasn’t sure.
But one thing was certain: she wasn’t going to sit back and do nothing. She was born to fight… or to die in the process.
Nico must have seen her approaching, because he was out in the courtyard the minute she touched down, running towards her as fast as his leg would allow and stopping shortly in front of her like he wasn’t sure whether to embrace her or duck.
Viola wasn’t sure what she wanted to do either. A part of her was furious. Furious with the Crown, yes, but also furious with him—for not telling her everything, and for making her like him when he was keeping something back, for…
For making her happy, when such awful things were happening that not a soul in the world should have been enjoying themselves. She was angry because he was able to sleep at night and hadn’t done anything about it, not until now.
Viola slid off Blackberry’s back and hung in front of Nico, not speaking, not knowing how. Cordelia appeared, but she said nothing either, tugging Blackberry’s reins and taking him away from the two of them, like he was a child that needed to be shielded from the inevitable argument that was about to unfold.
“You’re back,” Nico said dumbly, still frozen in his place. “How was—I mean, how are—”
“How did you know?” she said. “How did you know what was happening?”
Nico paused. “It’s a long story,” he said, “but there were… signs. I mean, you grew up on a farm. You lived not far from the Farm. You must have realised that it wasn’t large enough to feed everyone?”
Viola swallowed. The truth was that the thought had briefly crossed her mind, but she’d quickly quashed it. She’d quashed it after Jax visited, all smiles and charms, and told them of his exploits, and insisted they would still need good farms like the Brightstone’s to supplement the produce. She’d believed him. She’d believed everything Jax had ever said.
“I visited them,” Nico continued. “Not hard to fly a shadow through the mists. I needed to confirm my suspicions. I didn’t stay long.”
“This was your plan all along, wasn’t it?” Viola said, the words finally falling out of her. “This is why you didn’t leave me to die. Because you wanted an ally. Someone who could go to the Farm and come back, knowing the truth. An ally on the inside. ”
Nico looked down. “I want to deny it,” he said. “I want you to think that I just enjoyed the pleasure of your company, and slowly began to think you should know. That I wanted to share it with you because it seemed like the right thing to do.”
“But?”
He caught her gaze. “I don’t want to lie to you,” he said. “The truth is that I saw you lying there in the snow, and I had an idea. So yes. I saved you. I brought you back here. I manipulated you. I made you… care for me.” His throat caught on the world, like of everything he’d ever done, this was the crime he was most ashamed of. “The latter wasn’t part of the plan. So much of it wasn’t planned. I never wanted to hurt you. That much is true. But I knew it would. That didn’t stop me. Much like I couldn’t stop myself caring about you, either. However much I wanted to.”
He took a step closer. “And I did want to stop. I wanted to stop so badly. I wanted to stop liking you almost as much as I wanted you.”
He was almost beside her now. A hand rose and fell between them.
“I’ve wanted nothing in this world as much as I want you.”
Viola swallowed. “But what do you want, Nightshade? What do you want me to do now that I know? Because if you want me to help liberate the giants, then of course—”
“I don’t want your help with that,” he said sharply.
Viola drew back. “Come again?”
“Obviously what is happening with the giants is awful, and obviously it should be stopped, but that’s not my goal. Or my motive.”
“Then what is—”
“I want the entire world to see exactly the sort of people your monarchs are. I want to take away everything from your King Jax because none of it is his. I want people to see him for the fraud he is. I want him to lose everything and know it was me who took it from him. There’s no goodness in me, no noble goal. You’re mistaken if you think there ever was.”
Viola would rather have faced a blade than the tone in Nicodemus’ voice, than the knowledge that he knew what was going on with the giants and hardly seemed to care. But beyond the sharpness, beyond the anger was something else.
Pain.
“You warned me before about King Jax,” she said quietly. “What did he do to you?”
“What do you think?” he responded, turning his cheek towards her.
“He— he did that to you?”
“Yes.”
“But you were only a child—”
“So was he. Old enough to know what he was doing, though. ”
Viola swallowed. She tried to imagine King Jax—who had always been so good to her—being the one to leave Nico in the rubble. It was not an easy image to conjure. She immediately wanted to make excuses for him, to say that there must have been a misunderstanding, to ask if Nico provoked him… but the questions fell flat.
She’d seen the giants. She knew what he was capable of.
She’d just believed Nicodemus was capable of so much better.
“So… that’s it,” she summarised. “Just revenge against the person who maimed you?”
“I’m not like you,” he told her, avoiding her gaze. He waited for a moment. “I’m still waiting for you to start screaming at me.”
“I might do,” she said. “Tomorrow. Tonight I am too tired for screaming.”
Nicodemus nodded, still not meeting her gaze. There was no acceptance in her voice, no cause for optimism on his part. Her tone was one of exhausted resignation. “Will you stay the night?” he asked. “There’s not much daylight left.”
She shook her head. “I can get back with time to spare.”
All of Nico’s words seem to have run out. He bowed his head, turning back inside.
Viola waited until he was gone before she turned back to Cordelia, still hovering in the shadows like she hadn’t overheard everything.
“You knew, didn’t you?” Viola asked. “About his plan?”
Cordelia nodded, keeping her head bowed, the shame stark across her features. “I didn’t like you when you first came here,” she said quietly. “I didn’t like you because I didn’t like his plan. And then I didn’t like you because I could see that he did, and I knew he was going to get hurt. And then I really didn’t like the plan, because I liked you, and I didn’t like that you were going to get hurt too.” She paused, moving her mouth around, as if trying to dispel a taste that didn’t agree with her. “That was a lot of likes.”
Viola clasped Blackberry’s reins, one hand against his saddle, not yet sure she wanted to mount or wanted to leave. Would she feel better if she turned around and yelled at him? Was it even him she was mad at, or her own crushed beliefs and expectations?
Or was there someone else—someone else who had betrayed her, and the rest of the country?
Someone else she needed to speak to.
Cordelia hovered by her side. “Are you going to be all right?
Viola lifted herself into Blackberry’s saddle. “I’ve been through worse.”
Nicodemus returned to his study, wincing as he stretched out his leg. It was bothering him more than he cared to admit. He ought to soak it, or rub it with some of the ointment Cordelia had prepared for him, but he found he lacked the strength to do either.
He leaned back in his chair. Perhaps it wasn’t either of those things. Perhaps, tonight, he wanted the pain. Tonight, he deserved it.
He’d imagined telling Viola a hundred times. He’d imagined her finding out. He’d envisioned the screaming, the yelling. Her hurling things, breaking them. Attacking him. He’d braced himself for all of that.
Somehow, her silence was worse. Her quiet acceptance, almost like she’d been expecting this the whole time. If she’d never trusted him, there was nothing to break.
Sighing, he got up and moved down the corridor towards her room. He’d spent yesterday cleaning it, partly for something to do, but also in case she’d wanted it tonight. It would be far too presumptuous to believe she’d want to share his.
His. Hers . Somehow, the room had become hers, a part of his palace he let her take over, inhabit, taint with her presence.
That wasn’t the only thing of his he’d given, though he didn’t want to admit. He could reclaim this room. He could fill it with other things, or remake it entirely.
The other thing she’d taken, he would never get back.
He stared out of the window like he could still see her flying away from him, and would have done anything to face her wrath rather than her sadness. Anger and hate were the easiest emotions. He cursed the fates that had brought her to his door, and ever let him feel anything else.
Cordelia arrived not long afterwards, hovering in the doorway with words on her tongue.
“Speak your piece,” Nicodemus instructed. “You always do.”
Cordelia crept up to his side. He didn’t look at her, instead staring out of the window.
“I read a lot of books,” she told him.
Nico frowned, unsure where this was going, although he’d grown used to Cordelia starting in the middle of a conversation over the years. She’d circle back to the point eventually. “You do. ”
“Not as much as you, of course, who reads like there’s a prize to be won, but I read. It helps me understand people better.”
“Is there a point to this?”
“It’s just that, in the books I’ve read where the protagonist is annoyingly morally superior and they feel betrayed by a mentor figure, they always confront them about it.”
Nicodemus froze. Viola wouldn’t. It was far too dangerous—
But then, Viola had never shied away from danger.
It was entirely possible that she wasn’t going to be so reckless, or that she wouldn’t confront Jax immediately, but there was absolutely no way that Nico was wagering her life on that assumption.
Nicodemus was moving before he even fully knew what he was doing.
“Nico—”
“Don’t try to stop me,” he said.
Cordelia caught his arm. “It’s almost sunset,” she told him, her voice quiet.
Nicodemus hesitated for all of a second. He knew that. He knew that, and it didn’t make a damned bit of difference. Viola was in danger. If he couldn’t get her out of it, he’d fall into it with her.
Cordelia seemed to understand this too. “I’ll get you some flares and shadowgems.”