Chapter 12
Noth
Icouldn’t say I wasn’t hurt. Hiring a mercenary to hunt me down like an animal?
Not the ideal way to form an alliance, let alone deal with the thin mate bond between us.
I eyed my Pumpkin, wary for the first time.
The little sounds she made when she slept must have altered my brain.
I did love her murder attempts but I couldn’t deny I wanted more.
I was greedy but the hope of seeing love in her eyes would be gluttonous even for me.
Maggie’s face seemed uncharacteristically solemn as we walked together, giving the salamander a rest. Jax paced ahead of us where I kept an eye on him.
The ride to Allfenheim remained a few question-filled days away.
Tackling that blubber butt right off my throne was urgent, but I wasn’t sure if I still had to constantly watch my back.
I wanted us to strangle that man together, but Maggie had proven she was still out for revenge, no matter how many ‘sorries’ she had in her.
For once, she would need to come to me and not with a dagger in her hand.
Our silence lasted the whole length of the river she might have been planning to throw me into. Maggie fidgeted more and more until she broke.
“I…”
Her words died and my interest sharpened. Any attempt to communicate with me, no matter how bad, set a void pooling low in my belly. She was trying.
“Yes, that’s you,” I replied.
She waved her hand in frustration and I waited to see if she would cave or go on.
“So the woman in my village…”
Her voice faded again and I appreciated the reprieve to collect my thoughts.
Her nerves made me nervous. I suddenly didn’t want to have this conversation covered in the remnants of the fight.
Dirt, thorns and river water didn’t make the perfect setup for a ‘sorry, I basically killed your mom’ chat. We needed a fresh start.
I pulled a magic-laced cloth from the salamander’s saddlebags.
“Grab some carrots,” I told her.
I wiped down and snapped the cloth to reset it so Maggie could clean up as she ate. She washed her face and I couldn’t stop tracking her hand. I was in so deep that I momentarily froze, terrified I would annihilate what we had together.
So of course I blurted out, “I killed her.” My insides shook. “I killed your mentor.”
Great. Perfect. Maggie might still despise me after this with how badly I was botching it. But I was afraid once she didn’t hate me anymore, we would be nothing to each other. Why else would she stay in my orbit? She never cared that I was a King. My Nightmare wasn’t exactly made for snuggles.
She looked at me as if I were stupid. “I know. We locked eyes, remember? Why, Noth?”
We weren’t dancing around this anymore. I thought that would be the hard part, beginning, but Maggie looking at me like I had all the answers turned out to be harder.
“I never liked going to your village in the winter. It was always too cold and you never seemed to keep it warm enough.”
“I didn’t know you liked going at all. I don’t think I had ever seen you before that day.”
Of course she wasn’t making this easy. I fiddled with my carrot, then realized I looked foolish and ate it in one bite.
“I visited. I just didn’t want you to be awed by my presence…
or ask for things I couldn’t give you. I inherited that secret place as my responsibility and even if we hadn’t offered monsters for breeding for hundreds of years, remained under my care.
Rue’s house settled furthest from town, the closest to our border, so I always came to it first. She stood out in the middle of the woods, gathering Winter’s Bane from the trees. ”
Maggie picked at the hem of her tunic, lost in memory. “I told her to let me do it. Her joints would ache afterward in the winter.”
“That proved the least of her concerns. She collapsed in the snow right in front of me.”
Her eyes flew to mine. We both held our breath in that moment so I had no choice but to continue.
“It was the least I could do to carry her back to the cottage.”
That little house deserved the name. Warm, snug, brimming with drying herbs and happy livestock, I understood why Maggie found peace there. I told my two guards to wait outside. Even their easy grace would have disturbed the energy there.
“She wouldn't let me put her in the bed, so I set her in a kitchen chair.”
Maggie bit her lip. “It's always better to be attempting something than wishing you were doing something. I couldn't get her out of that kitchen chair either.”
Watching the old woman try to regain her heavy breath was painful, even when I had brought her water and a steaming pot of a concoction I couldn't name. As she breathed it in, some color had come back to her face, but not enough.
I bit my tongue hard enough to draw blood, but it cleared my head. “She was sick, Maggie. Very sick.”
Maggie’s face creased with confusion. “What do you mean? She didn’t tell me she was sick.”
“She had The Crux, Maggie.”
An easy enough wasting disease to hide, but still just as fatal. My world slipped a little as I waited to see if she would believe me. I didn’t realize how much I needed this.
“That can’t…”
A memory surfaced in her mind as Maggie’s sorrow flooded the bond in a torrent. She turned away in a rush, hiding her face in her hands, stopping in the middle of the road. No tears fell, but she shook. When she turned back, her teeth were bared and I had never seen her look more frightening.
“How did you get from a lingering illness to a sword in her back?” she snarled.
“She asked,” I said simply, throwing up my hands in a helpless gesture.
“She asked you to run her through?”
“She-”
“Rue.”
“Rue,” I amended, “had a sigil to make it painless and clean. It had spread to her heart, Pumpkin.”
“Death,” Maggie whispered.
A painful, messy death where the illness slowly drained your mind, your sense of self while it worked slower on your body.
“I wouldn’t let anyone else do it. It was my honor. She didn’t want you to have to take care of her one day soon. She didn’t even want you to walk in and find her like that. I promised I would bury her.”
Her hands balled into fists. “All the magic you have, all the power and your stupid plants, your shadows and you didn’t have something to help her?”
I knew the pain too well. When my parents passed, I asked the same thing of Yaya.
Maggie hauled back and slugged me right in the chest. The muscles flexed beneath her skin, corded tight with an awful tension.
Luckily, she only half understood how to throw a punch and my breath only came out in a slight wheeze.
It was okay. I could take all of her anger.
I wanted to soothe this hurt, to help her fall into the present because there was nothing either of us could do about the past. Helpless against her fury, selfishly, I needed her reassurance that we would both put this behind us.
“There was nothing to do.” My soul constricted, my voice on the edge of pleading.
Her silence dropped my heart into my boots.
“Okay,” she said.
That was it? Okay? I poured out the truth of one of the worst days of our lives and I got one tight word? My own fury rose up to match hers.
“Why did I bother saying anything? I should have let you keep failing to kill me.”
Maggie flinched and I regretted it, but neither of us would budge. She visibly struggled to collect herself, opening her mouth to say more but started walking again. I was proud she made the effort to communicate.
“I understand you did what you had to do,” she ground out. “There’s no revenge to take if Rue asked you to do it.”
The words felt right, but the tone sounded wrong.
“You don’t believe me?” I asked.
She turned on her heel and faced me. “It’s not that.”
Not even our confessions turned out to be simple. The conversation unraveled before me.
“Then talk to me like an adult. Use your words like you should do with your sister. I can understand words pretty well, but not if you don’t speak them.”
My words spilled out with regret. It was a low blow, but admittedly I was angry that I wasn't swimming in her immediate adoring absolution.
“Don’t scold me like a child. You basically just told me my mentor didn’t trust me enough to tell me she was dying. It’s a lot to process, Rat Face.”
We fought all the time, but not like this. I wanted to make a joke, or fuck her silly, but I cracked open my heart instead.
“Come here, Pumpkin.”
As if she saw the gaping wound before her, she came into my arms without complaint for once. I lifted us up onto the salamander to string her across my lap bride-style and rock her.
“What are we going to do now?” she asked, her voice muffled in my chest.
“You can cry now,” I told her.
Relief flooded me when I loosened something in her. Although she remained silent, my shirt grew wet. Maggie shook in my arms, clutching my hair as she burrowed further into my embrace. She drew my long curtain of hair around her like a cloak and I let her hide.
I kept up a stream of chatter, for her pride, for mine.
The stiff grip on my hair hurt, but I didn’t move.
Though it didn’t go how I imagined, we bled the festering wound between us.
I didn’t want to hope for more when my crown still kept us apart, but it was a start.
One that cinched the spell Maggie drew tight around my heart.