Chapter 47 #2
“Cheap silk. Frayed edge. Uneven stitch here.”
I lunged. The chains snapped taut and jerked both shoulders backward. “Give me the ribbon!”
Kaelros looked at me over it. “Tell me about the Lumina Codex.”
The rage went still. That is what he wanted. Not my Light. Not my Shadow. The Codex. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You lie very poorly for a girl with so many secrets.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“Wrong answer.” He folded the ribbon once, and my stomach twisted. “What does it tell you? Does it speak directly into your mind? Does it show you the past? Has it shown you Nirael? The Loom? What has it told you about the Starborn?”
“It told me to tell you to go fuck yourself.”
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know.” That, at least, was true. I had no idea what had happened to the physical Codex during the attack.
Kaelros studied me for a long moment before tucking Vareena’s ribbon back inside his coat. “The Codex was never meant to speak to everyone.”
My pulse jumped. His eyes narrowed.
“There.”
I cursed myself.
“A presence answered you when you woke.” I gave him nothing. “The Codex,” he said.
“Never heard of it.”
“It speaks inside your mind.”
“I do not know what you are talking about.”
“But you reacted.” Satisfaction sharpened his face. “And the cuffs reacted with you.”
Cold slid beneath my skin. He hadn’t known. I had given him the answer. “What do you want with it?”
“The same thing every ruler wants from an object that remembers what history attempted to erase.”
“Power.”
“Truth.”
I laughed, and the sound came out exhausted. “You expect me to believe you care about truth?”
“No. I expect you to understand eventually that truth is one of the purest forms of power.” He stood again. “And you are carrying far too much of both.” His gaze dropped to my hands. “Vareena Kamari.”
My body went rigid. “Don’t.”
“Light wielder. Council-bred. Daughter of a man who once knew your mother well.”
“Do not say her name.”
“Recently developed an unfortunate attachment to a Fire wielder from the Cindralith war clans.”
My vision blurred. “You don’t get to talk about her.”
Kaelros tilted his head. “Why?”
“Because you killed her.”
“Did I?”
“You sent them to the Sanctum.”
“For you.”
“You are a coward.”
His eyes sharpened, but not with anger. “So many names you think belong only to you.” He stepped closer. “Vareena.”
I pulled against the chains.
“Aurenya.”
My heart stumbled.
“Maerox.”
I stopped moving.
Kaelros saw it. “That one still hurts differently.”
I stared at him. “You know nothing about what belongs to me.”
“I know more about your family than you do, girl.”
“I know who they were.” My voice shook, but I refused to soften it. “Queen Aurenya Evanora was my mother. Maerox Veylan was my father.”
He went still for half a heartbeat. “You found the seal.”
My blood chilled. “How do you know that?”
“Kieran.”
His name struck like a hand closing around my throat. Kaelros smiled. “You really have no idea, do you?”
“About what?”
He moved behind me. I followed him with my eyes until my neck would turn no farther.
“Maerox was my closest friend.” For a moment, I forgot the chains.
Kaelros’s voice came from somewhere over my left shoulder.
“We were boys together. Trained together. Bled together. He stood beside me when I inherited a kingdom neither of us was prepared to rule. There was a time I trusted Maerox Veylan more than any person alive.”
“What did you do?”
“I killed him.”
No hesitation. I twisted as far as the restraints allowed. “You called him your brother, then betrayed him.”
“Yes.”
No excuse followed. No attempt to tell me Maerox had deserved it, that war made monsters of everyone, or that Kaelros had been forced into some terrible choice. The absence of justification made him worse.
“You’re a monster.”
“I have been called worse by people who survived less.” He came back into view.
“The Codex warned Aurenya and Maerox before your birth. Not simply that their child might possess unusual magic. They understood enough to know one of their daughters could become what Alareth had spent centuries trying to erase.”
“One of us?”
Kaelros smiled. “You didn’t know about the other one.”
I stared at him. “What other one?”
Shadow gathered between his fingers. My body recoiled before thought caught up. “Stay out of my head.”
“You have spent months looking for the truth. You broke into archives, followed a book that refused to tell you what you wanted, dug through records people died to alter. You wanted to know what happened to your family.”
“Not from you.”
“Truth does not become false because you hate the mouth speaking it.”
The Shadow touched my temples. Cold drove through my skull. The chamber vanished.
I stood inside a palace I had never seen, surrounded by white marble, gold banners, and smoke boiling along the ceiling.
The first body lay near a staircase, a man with his abdomen torn open so completely that his hands were trying to hold pieces of himself inside.
Blackness writhed within the wound. A woman ran past carrying a child, and a Shadowkin dropped from the ceiling.
Its claws opened her throat from beneath the jaw to the collarbone.
For a fraction of a second I saw white bone before blood struck the wall.
The child screamed. I tried to move and couldn’t.
“Stop.”
No one heard me. The palace shook. Light exploded somewhere farther down the corridor, and a woman rounded the corner.
For one heartbeat, I only stared at her.
She was beautiful, but that wasn’t what stopped me.
Gold hair had come loose around her face, half of it darkened by soot and sweat.
Blood streaked one cheek. Terror had stripped away whatever a queen was supposed to look like, leaving a woman clutching a screaming infant against her chest and running as though the world was ending behind her.
I had never seen her face before. The realization struck so hard I forgot to breathe.
The Codex had shown me fragments of Aurenya.
The fall of her hair. Her hands. The line of a body framed by Light.
Whenever I tried to look directly, the face blurred, turned away, or vanished beneath magic.
It had never given me this. Her eyes. Her mouth.
The small crease between her brows as she listened to the screaming behind her.
The shape of the woman whose blood had made mine.
The infant against her chest wailed. Me. My throat closed.
“That’s her.”
The memory did not answer, but I did not need it to. Queen Aurenya Evanora. My mother. The first time I saw my mother’s face, she was running for her life.
Then a child screamed through the smoke. “Mama!”
Aurenya stopped.
Another scream followed. “Mama!”
My mother turned toward the sound, and a man caught her arm.
I didn’t know him. His hair was dark and curling loosely around his forehead, his formal coat half burned along one sleeve.
Blood ran from a cut at his temple. The shape of his mouth caught at a memory I couldn’t place at first. I had seen that same mouth recently.
Far too often. Vareena. He didn’t have her face, not exactly, but the resemblance sat plainly in the shape of his brows, the stubborn lift of his chin, the way one corner of his mouth pulled tighter when he was afraid.
Whoever this man was, he looked enough like Vareena that cold settled beneath my ribs.
“You have to go,” he said.
“She’s not here.”
“I will get her.”
“No.”
“Aurenya—”
“I cannot leave her!”
The baby against her chest started crying harder, and suddenly I was crying too. My mother looked down, then toward the corridor. Toward the child she held and the child she could hear but could not reach. I watched her understand. She shoved the baby into the man’s arms.
“Take her.”
His face drained of color. “Aurenya.”
“Take her.” My knees nearly folded even though the memory held me upright. “Get her beyond the Veil.”
“Come with me.”
Another scream cut through the smoke. “Mama!”
Whatever remained of the queen vanished from Aurenya’s face. She was a mother hearing one of her children beg for her. She grabbed the man by the front of his coat.
“Take her somewhere no one knows her. No record. No trail. Nothing. Do you understand me?”
“Aurenya—”
“Promise me, Vare.”
His face crumpled. “I promise.”
My mother looked at the infant in his arms. At me.
Her fingers touched my cheek. I stared at her face because I could do nothing else.
At the curve of her mouth, the shape of her brows, the tiny crease between them.
Ridiculous details. Useless details. Everything I had never been allowed to know. Then she kissed my forehead.
“I am so sorry.”
My chest split open. She stepped back.
“No, go with me.”
The man ran with me clutched to his chest. My mother turned toward the screaming child, and the memory dragged me with her.
Aurenya reached a chamber half consumed by smoke.
A little girl hid beneath an overturned table, no more than three years old, one knee pulled tight against her chest. Dark curls clung to a face wet with tears and soot.
Blood stained one sleeve that didn’t appear to be hers, and her mouth trembled as she tried to swallow another sob.
Then she looked up. Violet ringed her eyes.
My stomach dropped. I knew those eyes. I had watched them narrow across the Crucible.
Had seen them hard with contempt, cold with calculation, bright with anger.
Never swollen from crying in the face of a terrified child calling for her mother.
But they were hers. They were unmistakable.
I stared harder and suddenly saw everything else—the sharp little chin childhood hadn’t finished carving, the dark curls, the shape of the mouth, the way her brows drew together as though even at three she resented being afraid. There had to be another explanation.
“Mama!”
Aurenya dropped to her knees. “Nes.”