Chapter 30
Nelle
This time my parents were accompanied by no one.
Not a single Wychthorn bodyguard stood in the room to shield them from the Crowthers or Valarie’s loyal cadre.
Any single one of them, Ferne included, could cut my parents down in a single blink and leave the surroundings splashed in crimson.
But I didn’t think they’d kill them. Not yet.
They needed them alive to get their hands on Brangwene’s Hjarte.
My heart almost burst with warmth and happiness, drowning out the sharp pang of hopelessness to see them.
I jittered in my outlandish heels, my fingers fidgeting with the tulle skirt.
I wanted to run across the room and throw myself into their arms—my mother, and all those lovely mornings we spent in her grand aviary; my father, who had always been my champion.
My mother’s bony fingers clamped around his forearm, not for reassurance, but to stop him from running to me. His posture was taut, his limbs rigid, and the same desperate need I felt burned in him too.
His blue eyes were silver-lined, and he brushed the moisture away quickly, scanning my face, the beastly fingers at my throat. Questions arose in his gaze. The loudest—are you alright?
I tipped up my quivering chin and gave him a tight smile, brightness filling my veins like sunshine. I was alive. And I’d make sure they stayed alive too.
I wouldn’t allow the Crowthers to possess Brangwene’s Hjarte and manipulate my parents further.
This plan of Valarie’s was going to fail.
Valarie arched a brow imperiously as she met my father’s steely gaze. Her lips parted—
But Ferne spoke first, her voice low and raspy. “I’ll be the one who speaks with the Wychthorns, Aunt Valarie.”
Valarie blinked, surprised, though she hid it well.
“Graysen’s not here to tell them what happened that night,” Ferne continued. “But I am.”
“Ferne, I’m not sure—”
“It’s my right to do this.” Iron strength ran through Ferne’s tone. “And I’ll do it alone.”
Valarie hesitated, staring at her niece with careful consideration. Valarie had been the one who wanted to wield me as a weapon to break my father so he’d sink to his knees and beg for mercy. Not for himself, but for me.
While she was lost in rumination, movement flickered in my periphery. I twisted around, just in time to see my father hurry across the large room. My heartbeat spiked in desperation to meet him halfway. I stepped forward instinctively—
But Valarie’s cadre surged forward, forming a wall between us.
He was forced to a halt after barely five steps. Fury creased deep lines around his mouth, and his voice lowered like an animal warning off a threat with a bark. “My daughter tried to kill herself. What is she enduring at your family’s hands?!”
My mother’s heels clattered on stone as she rushed to his side. She grabbed his arm, tugging him back. “Byron, please,” she begged, casting a terrified glance at a bodyguard whose hand hovered over a blade.
My father ignored her, shaking her off. He raised his palms toward Valarie, trying and failing to soften his tone. It still came out dark and furious. “Let me speak with my daughter. I need to see that she’s alright.”
Before Valarie could reply, Ferne’s piercing voice cracked across the room. “You give in to our demands, Byron Wychthorn, and you’ll be given that chance.”
She sounded so much like her aunt that a chill slithered down my spine.
Perhaps Valarie had the same thought too.
Her startled gaze cut from my father to Ferne, confusion clouding her expression as if she no longer recognized the girl at her side.
She placed a hand over Ferne’s, clinging to her arm. “Perhaps it’s better that I—”
“You will allow me to do this…alone.” Ferne interrupted, not unkindly, but challenge sharpened its edge.
Valarie hesitated with reluctance, but she nodded, gently unhooking Ferne’s arm from her own.
“As you wish. I’ll be right outside if you need me.
” She pivoted on her heels, the black dress flicking with her elegant stride.
Two guards followed her out, but the rest remained with Ferne, pulling back to stand as sentinels around the room.
Just before Valarie swept through the door, my father called her name. She paused within the threshold and slowly turned around to meet my father’s gaze.
Hurt haunted his eyes. His voice was a low rasp steeped in pain. “Valarie, this needs to end.”
Astonishment flickered through me. For a heartbeat, that bitter expression of hers thawed and that same hint of pain that stamped itself across my father’s features crossed hers too, and I caught a peek of what I’d seen earlier, someone lost within the machinations of their own doing.
There was a silent conversation transpiring between my father and Valarie, one I couldn’t understand because I didn’t hold a cipher to their secret language.
What the hells lay between them?
Was this more than formidable foes?
My father’s mouth opened as if he were on the verge of saying something else, but it remained on his tongue when her face hardened into her usual cold, austere expression. “It’s too late.”
And then she was gone, swallowed by the shadows of the Emporium as the door shut softly behind her.
Now it was just us. Ferne and I stood near the long boardroom table. My mother, clutching her vial of poisonous pills in one hand and a handkerchief in the other, pressed close to my father beside the twin couches facing each other across a low coffee table.
Ferne bowed, slow and formal. Her dress was modest and youthful, one I might have worn at her age. She was sixteen years old. And when I thought back to myself at that age, I’d been childish and wild, and dare I say rather spoiled.
But Ferne… Though she was still a girl, gaining confidence in herself, there was something she carried about herself that was beyond her youthful age. Sorrow.
Confliction wedged itself within my chest. While Ferne would strive to gain what she needed for her family, I needed to protect mine. The Crowthers deserved the Hjarte in some ways—gods knew my family had wronged them—but I couldn’t let her claim it if it put my parents at risk.
I stood beside her, waiting for her demand.
Silence blanketed the room.
Silence, but for the tick-tock, tick-tock from an old-fashioned clock above the empty fireplace, keeping time like a heartbeat.
Silence was a living, breathing entity. Almost like the Emporium itself. The ancient building’s curiosity plucked at my skin, probing and prodding to discover just what I was, and now it turned its mind’s eye to Ferne, almost seeming to lean in as if eager to hear what would spill from her lips.
The ribbons at her back swayed as she shifted her weight. Her hands were linked at her middle, and one thumb scratched anxiously at the other. She opened her mouth, hesitating for a long moment, before she spoke. “I don’t remember my mother. Not in the way you all do.”
A wounded sound crawled from my mother’s throat, and her legs buckled beneath her. My father caught her, supporting her frail, trembling frame. Tabitha had been her best friend, and she would have spent countless hours with her and baby Ferne.
Ferne stiffened, angling her head away from my parents, refusing their pity.
“The memories I have of her are vague impressions. I was too young to remember her face… Or the sound of her voice.” And I imagined that her memories of Tabitha were held in her mind as distorted images seen through a pane of glass, cloudy with dust. “It seems my childhood was exactly like my mother’s.
She suffered from amnesia and lost both her mother and all her memories too. ”
Oh gods. I hadn’t known this.
“I hear about my mother all the time. My aunt describes how she looks and all her favorite sayings. My father tells me of the things she loved to do with us or by herself. My brothers share with me all the cherished moments she had with me when I was a baby… But I-I…I don’t remember any of it.”
My heart stumbled an awful beat at her confession and the pained half-smile, the gnawing on her bottom lip as she averted her face further as if embarrassed by the truth.
Inhaling deeply as though swimming up and breaking the surface of a lake, her lips wobbled into a wide smile and her nose scrunched as she said, “Smells, that’s what I remember most about her. Roses and the smell of rich earth and crisp greenery.”
Her voice took on a dreamy quality as she tugged on the long ends of her hair.
“Sometimes I get hit with it when I’m walking outside in the garden.
Sometimes I sneak into her closet just to sit in the space with the faint scent of her still clinging to her clothes.
My father…he does the same.” Sadness bled across her features. “But I don’t remember her.”
My eyelashes fluttered shut as anguish threatened to devour me whole.
Ferne tensed, then addressed my father, her tone sullen with condemnation. “Byron Wychthorn, the simple whisper you breathed into Master Sirro’s ear to distract the Horned Gods from your daughter and save your own family, resulted in the utter ruin of mine.”
My mother bowed her head, stifling a mournful cry behind her balled handkerchief, while my father squared his shoulders, carrying the heavy burden of blame as he’d always done since he’d made that fateful decision all those years ago, and met Ferne’s accusation with quiet stoicism.
“I dream about that night.” She paused, muttering, “Dream,” with a bitter shake of her head. “Nightmares, more like.”
I knew Graysen suffered nightmares so dark they stole his sleep, but I had never considered Ferne might experience them too.