Chapter Thirty-Eight
The days between the Festival of Arts and the beginning of the Great Feast are best described by their sound: the scraping of wood on stone.
From my window in the palace, it seems like every chair, table, stool, bench, barrel, crate, and cart in the kingdom is groaning along the floor and in the streets outside, arranging themselves in preparation for a meal that will somehow last for three days.
If this is the pared-down version of the Feast, I hate to imagine what the original intent had been.
I don’t know how we’re going to handle any more partying at this point. I’m surprised that anyone has the appetite for it after nearly three months of celebrations.
But I seem to be in the minority with that opinion.
No one can talk about anything but the meals that will be served, the delicacies from distant kingdoms and comfort dishes of home.
The freshly harvested produce and cured and aged meats, cheeses, vinegars, and wines.
The salty, the sweet, the fatty, the spicy.
It seems that every single person in court, from the servants to the king himself, has something they’re looking forward to.
For Ronan, it’s a seafood stew that Queen Claudia made for him once when he stayed with her on a visit to her home of Minar as a boy.
She had servants of her own and a talented cook, but she insisted on making the dish herself because she swore no one could get the broth quite right.
She rarely makes it these days, but Ronan has convinced her to honor Arnan with it for the Great Feast.
I’m looking forward to trying it, but it’s Typhon’s favored dish that sounds the most exciting to me. It’s a noodle dish from far away in Velmora with a spicy pepper that leaves your mouth numb when you eat it. Ronan thinks it sounds insane, but I’m so curious to find out what it’s like.
I get my wish and more when the Feast begins.
I’ve never seen so much food in my damn life.
Starting at dawn, the court files outside into the same courtyard where the ball had been held a few days before.
The endless scraping of chairs and tables has culminated in an unending sea of culinary delights.
After the court has their first meal, the palace gates are opened to allow the commoners to take part.
Ronan tells me the city’s plazas are filled with buffets like this one.
While the palace provides much of the food and most of the ingredients, everyone around the city contributes to the Feast. I ask Ronan if we can visit each neighborhood and try something from each table, and he loves the idea.
But he tells me he has something he needs to do first.
“Meet me by the northern entrance in an hour,” he says. “Come in disguise.”
I arrive at the gates just when he says, having changed into some of the trousers I bought at the market and tucked my hair into a flat cap. But Ronan isn’t there.
Soren is.
“Are we going to see Vesper?” I ask. Ronan-as-Soren is carrying a wooden box of some kind.
“There are some who can’t make it to the Feast,” he explains, shifting the box in his hands. “The old, the infirm. Vesper’s grandfather is bedbound.”
“Is there enough for all of them? Can we bring it to them instead of trying something at every table?”
“We can do both,” he says. He sighs, a deep, soul-affirming sigh that relaxes his entire body.
“Today, we can do both. I can’t tell you what a relief it is.
What this Feast means to me. It means more than any of the other Festivals.
I think I lost my faith in Arnan before any of the other gods, ridiculous as that sounds. Why would a god let people starve?”
I look around reflexively, still nervous about the way he talks about the gods. “They say it’s a test of faith. You said that in your speech to begin the Feast.”
“I said it because I had to. What kind of petty god needs to test us with starving children?”
I don’t have an answer for him, but I also don’t want anyone to report a man with Soren’s description to the priests, so I lead us to the shop where we met Vesper’s mother, asking about the food he’s bringing them along the way.
Vesper greets us at the door. She’s looking better already after bathing and putting her earrings back in. But the hollows of her cheeks are still too hollow, and I’m glad we have something with us to help remedy that.
I worry that when she sees Soren that she’ll blame him for what happened to her, but she hugs him instead.
“I didn’t tell them anything. They asked again and again what I was doing, but I made up something different every time.
It was like a game. They believed the first few stories, but eventually they figured me out. ”
“Did they treat you well otherwise?” asks Ronan.
“No, they damn well didn’t,” says Vesper’s mother, coming to the door.
“I have a mind to throw you into the street for what she went through because of you. But I won’t.
And only because you brought her back to me.
She said you were the one who told them where to go.
The king himself went. Can you imagine?”
“He’s so handsome,” says Vesper, her eyelids fluttering in a way that sends a jolt of jealousy through me. “I begged the guards who took us out of there to let me thank him myself, but they wouldn’t. I’m going to the palace for the feast later to try to find him, but first, there’s Grandpapa—”
“I have something for you for that,” says Ronan, trying to hide his blush by distracting them with the box. “For your Grandpapa.”
“Oh!” says Vesper’s mother, clapping her hands together. “Let’s see what you have there.”
She lets us come inside then, leading us up the stairs from the shop into a small set of private rooms. Only once we’ve entered does Vesper notice that I look familiar. “Aren’t you…weren’t you there too? Were you one of the shadow-born?”
“Me?” I ask, looking to Ronan. I’m not sure if I should tell them.
“I didn’t see many of their faces until the night God-King Ronan saved us. They kept us in separate cells so we wouldn’t work together to escape. Although we did manage it once anyway—Mery told me he talked to you, Soren.”
“He led us to the place. And then I convinced the guards to keep an eye on it. They finally saw someone go in there that night. It just so happened that Ronan was in the neighborhood, on the way back from the play.”
“Gods, can you imagine how it felt to see those guards of his show up? And then there he was himself, in all his finery, all covered in blood. I’ll never forget that. Not for as long as I live.”
Ronan shoots me a look that says he’s going to be insufferable about this later.
“Can I help you with that?” I ask Vesper’s mother as she removes something large and heavy from the box. A pot of stew with a lid that screws on to keep it from spilling.
“Not unless you’re fire-born,” she says, gesturing to the cold fireplace.
“Soren is,” says Vesper.
He must have told her that to explain his magic, just as I’d assumed he was nature-born when I met him.
I distract them with questions about the jewelry their shop sells while Ronan ignites some firewood with his light.
Vesper’s mother heats the stew on the fire, and then she insists we join them for a bowl after she feeds her father. Ronan offers to chop some vegetables to go in it, and to my surprise, he knows his way around a kitchen knife, far better than I do.
“From the battlefield,” he explains as I watch him. “Come here.” He waits until Vesper and her mother are distracted by the fire and pops a bite of radish into my mouth. It’s deliciously fresh, tangy with just a bit of heat. And the act of his putting it into my mouth, well…
“How are those radishes coming? We’re about at a boil over here.”
I bring them the chopped radishes as Ronan starts on some carrots, thinking that it’s a pity I can’t play suggestively with the carrots in front of him, and to my surprise and delight, that feeling is reverberated between us.
We both laugh, which I’m sure looks insane considering nothing has been said or done and we’re nowhere near each other, but Vesper and her mother are too polite to say anything about it.
I sit with Vesper while we wait for the vegetables to cook, listening to her tell the story of her rescue at least three times, with the king becoming magically more handsome in each retelling. Ronan’s ears are so red by the end of it, I’m sure she must have figured him out.
But if she does, she never lets on. “That’s the shadow-born for you,” I tell Ronan as we’re leaving the house. “We’re so good at keeping secrets, sometimes you can’t even tell whether we are or not.”
“That’s certainly true,” he says.
Then he pulls me into an alley and pins me against the wall, covering my mouth.
My chest tightens in alarm. My hand is reaching for my sword when he winks. “Remember this?”
“Fuck!” I push him, but he grabs me and pulls me to him.
He pins me against the wall again, an echo of the encounter from the first night we met, but there are no bells to stop us. He kisses me, and I melt instantly, my knees buckling. I brace myself against him for support, running my hands into his hair and onto his smooth, unscarred cheeks.
I break from the kiss, and he pulls back. “What’s wrong? Soren not doing it for you anymore?”
I trace the lines on his face, the deep scars that exist in appearance only. The skin beneath them bears no mark, but these scars are real.
These are the scars my mother’s people gave him.
These are the scars my mother gave him. Her actions. Her death.
I know it before asking. “When did this happen to you?”
He looks away. “A year or so into the war.”
“When my mother died?”
“Yes,” he says softly.
I turn his face to look at me. “Because my mother died?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” He had told me what happened with my father. Why conceal this? Why leave a secret between us?
“I thought you knew,” he says. “Or that you would have guessed.”
I should have guessed. “Adria said all of your guards died. All except Taran.”
Ronan leads us to a stone bench at the end of the alley. He takes off his hat but keeps Soren’s face.
“There were many terrible days during the war. Some of them…some are hard to even think about, even now. But that was one of the worst.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” I say. But I can sense there’s a part of him that wants to talk about this. That wants to remember it, given that he still wears Soren’s face.
Ronan sits for a long moment before he speaks.
“My guards aren’t just my guards, as I’m sure you’ve seen by now.
They’re my friends. They were my father’s friends, people I had known all my life.
They all died that day. Not on the battlefield, not in a blaze of glory.
But defending me. It’s what they were sworn to do.
It’s what they trained their whole lives for.
But to hear it happen to them one by one?
To watch my light flicker into nothing in the shadows, leaving me blind to what was happening, the only sound their dying screams?
That was the worst day of my life. The worst day until the day my father died. Until the day your father died.”
Shadow nullifying light. Or light nullifying shadow. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
But not mine. Not ours. Ours seem to strengthen each other somehow.
My mother’s shadows could have stopped his light, though. The shadows of her men did.
Gods, we’d taken so much from him. We’d taken so much from each other.
No more.
“After everything, I can’t believe you didn’t hate us all. How could you even think of giving me a chance?”
“I did hate you. For years, I hated every last one of you. But it’s like I told you. I’m trying to change things. And having you around makes it all the easier. You’re different, Sylvie. You’re not to blame for any of what happened.”
“I’m not different,” I tell Ronan. I can’t lie to him any longer.
Whatever it costs me, whatever it costs my family, I can’t let this continue.
I can’t let Adria and Seth have their war, and I can’t count on myself and Larus to be able to stop them.
Not when they’re my parents’ children. I know now what my parents were capable of, and I know Adria and Seth are just the same.
I will not let this kingdom go to war for the sake of the love I have for my brother and sister. For the love I have for Larus and all of the rest of our House.
I will not let this kingdom go to war for my sake.
I’m so sorry, Ronan. I love you, and that’s why I have to break your heart.
“I’ve been lying to you. I’ve lied to you since we got here.
We did come to kill you. I know you know that.
And I know you know it changed for me, but it didn’t change for Adria.
I thought I could stop her, but I can’t.
And it’s worse than that. We weren’t just trying to kill you.
Adria and Seth are planning a war. An invasion.
An infiltration and siege, by land and sea.
I’ve delayed it; I’m trying to stop it—”
“What?” Ronan sits upright, dropping Soren’s face. “Sylvie, if this is some kind of a joke—”
“Why would I joke about this? I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.
I thought I could stop it. I tried. I didn’t want them to die.
” I wipe away guilty tears, furious with myself for crying when this is my fault.
“I didn’t want to lose anyone else. But I already lost them.
I don’t want anyone else to die for my family.
I don’t want to see Adria on the throne.
I don’t want another war, even if they lose.
I’ll tell you everything. Everything I know.
Ronan, please. Please believe me. I need you to believe me. ”
He isn’t looking at me. He’s staring at the ground, completely frozen. And I can’t feel him. I can’t feel a single thing coming from him. It’s like we’re nowhere near each other.
It’s like he’s walked away from me.
“Ronan?”
“Let’s go,” he says. He doesn’t reach for me. “I’ll convene the war council. I need you to tell them exactly what you’ve told me. And anything you can think of that could be useful. That could stop this.”
“I will,” I say.
And though it tears me apart, I don’t reach for him. I don’t deserve his comfort. I don’t deserve his pity, and I certainly don’t deserve his love.
But I’ll do this anyway, even if he never looks at me the same way again.
Not just because I love him, although I do.
But because it’s right. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from him, it’s to do the right thing no matter the personal cost. It was a hard lesson, a painful lesson, but it’s one I’ve finally learned.
I only hope it isn’t too late.