Chapter 30 #2
“They’re filled with terror and pain. Heat and acrid smells.
Fire splashed across the roadside.” Her fingertips stirred the air as if she were sifting through the thick, churning smoke of that night.
“The bitter smell of oil and rubber and metal burning. The stickiness of blood. Screaming… And much worse, the awful sound of silence… The Horned Gods slaughtered everyone else but us and Wes.”
She began fidgeting again. Youthful gestures as if she were uncomfortable in her skin, slowly rolling her ankles outward and then back in, fingers burrowing into her skirt.
“Graysen doesn’t talk about that night. Not really.
But for the few rare times when I asked about it because I was there and had questions of my own. ”
She took a step closer, her mouth pursed petulantly, daring us to challenge her. “Despite what you think of him, my brother has a great heart. A heart that had led him to warn my mother about what he overheard at House Novak. He told her the Horned Gods were coming for Nelle.”
My parents exchanged a stunned look.
“He could have stayed silent,” Ferne continued.
“Like so many Houses before him and let your family take the fall. But he was worried about Nelle. He’d known her secret since they met as children.
He knew she was other, and he never told a soul, not even my mother.
Not until that drive home from the Novaks, because he was terrified of what would happen to her if the Horned Gods found out. ”
Tears welled in my mother’s eyes. She leaned into my father, as if she could no longer support her own weight. She spoke so quietly I almost didn’t hear her say, “Byron, what have we done?”
Ferne ignored her, her voice sharpening. “My mother could have stayed silent too. But she didn’t. She warned you, Marissa. She told you Nelle was in danger. That your whole family was in danger… And what kind of hearts did you possess?”
Betrayal. She had no need to say the word. Our hearts were poisonous, selfish creatures.
My mother wept openly, and my father stroked her trembling side.
“My brother tried to protect us that night. He was just a kid facing Horned Gods. Brave. Stupid and foolish. They broke his body. Snapped his bones like twigs. They were about to kill him when my mother willingly sacrificed herself to save him.”
Heat stung my eyes, and a lump lodged in my throat as rapid images spun through my mind of the Graysen I’d known at the time. Boyish. Tall and lanky. Trying his best to defend those he loved against insurmountable odds.
“And then it was just me and my brother. A broken teenager. A toddler. And Mistress Lyressa.” She huffed a disbelieving laugh, flicking a hand toward the delicate yellow lace over her eyes.
“She liked the look of my eyes. ‘Pretty,’ she said. So she stole them for no other reason than that. Like they were a new piece of flashy jewelry she desired to possess…I passed out after she scooped the first eyeball out with her fingers.”
I pressed a hand to my chest as nausea churned like a turbulent sea in my stomach.
But when Ferne next spoke, her voice was softer. “I don’t remember what life was like before she left us.”
My breath caught. My parents didn’t know Tabitha was alive.
Left us could easily mean died.
I wasn’t sure if I should tell them? If it would weaken my father’s resolve to keep the Hjarte?
I froze with indecision.
“My father…” The words drifted apart as Ferne paused, mouth tipping up on one side as if considering what she wanted to say.
“I don’t know what he was like before everything.
Caidan talks about the kind of person he’d been, and I feel it in how he’s tried his best to raise us, to fill the void my mother left.
He tries to hide it, but I can feel how sad, broken, and guilt-ridden he’s become.
I don’t know who he was before all of this.
I only know who he is now.” She shrugged, toeing the ground with her shoe.
“It is what it is for me. I think for them, for my brothers… it’s harder. ”
Ferne’s life, growing up in the Keep without a mother—I’d shamefully never given it much thought. Not even when I learned her mother was dead. Not even when I found myself engaged to Graysen either.
For a moment I wanted to sink through the stone floor, curl into a ball, and weep at my self-absorption as a Wychthorn princess.
Ferne swept a hand to indicate all of us. “And look where we are now.”Indeed. It had been futile to believe we’d escape this. We were always going to end up here. Awaiting judgment.
I watched my father’s stoic expression crumple with remorse.
“My mother was the heart of our family. From what my brothers say, you were her friend. You visited her often. You knew what she was like, Marissa.”
“I’m sorry, Ferne,” my mother cried, tears streaking down her gaunt cheeks.
“I don’t care,” Ferne scowled, looking every bit the sullen, spiteful teenager.
She was a contradiction of two selves. Older than she should be with the weight of responsibility thrust upon her, yet younger at this moment too, as if she were on the verge of stomping a foot and melting into a tantrum.
“It’s too late for that. You spent years pretending you didn’t even know her. ”
She lifted her chin, anger feathering lines around her puckered mouth as she blazed with righteous fury. “We want something from you, and you’re going to give it to us.”
“It will destroy my family,” my father shot back.
“We want it, and you will hand it over!”
“Brangwene’s Hjarte,” my mother breathed.
“Yes. Brangwene’s Hjarte. You’ll do this because you owe my mother.”Her voice softened, deepened with a meaning only I could decipher. “Do it, and I’ll allow you time with your daughter. A final goodbye, if you will.”
A final goodbye clanged through me.
This wasn’t just for my parents.
This was for me.
She was giving me one last moment with my family because in a couple of months I would be auctioned off and die.
“But if you don’t give me what we want…” Ferne angled her head toward me. It was a simple enough gesture for my parents to understand the threat.
“You can’t hand my daughter over to the Emporium,” my father begged.
I couldn’t let them give up Brangwene’s Hjarte.
Not for me.
It was on the tip of my tongue to reveal the truth. That this was all a ruse. That the Crowthers were never going to go through with it. But someone else spoke before I could spit it out.
“I have it!”
It wasn’t my father who had spoken. It was my mother.
“I have Brangwene’s Hjarte!”
Shock cracked along my bones.
My mother, for once, had defiance burning in her eyes. Not for the Crowthers. For my father.
“Please,” she begged Ferne, pressing her hands together. “Don’t hurt her. Don’t punish her for what we did.” She gestured toward the interconnecting door. “In there. Open it. You’ll see I brought it.”
“Marissa… what have you done?” my father breathed.
Her gaze snapped back to his. “What you refused to do.”
A guard opened the door, and I caught a glimpse of a tall four-poster bed draped in gray and silver brocade before a tall man, distinguished in an artful, roguish way, blocked my view as he pushed a trolley into the room.
“Thank you,” my mother said to the man who ruled the Emporium.
Zielenski flashed her a devilish grin, more a baring of sharp teeth than a smile.
I glared at him, worried that he knew too much. The Crowthers now possessed Brangwene’s Hjarte, but he was the one who could destroy my family. I slid a foot sideways and planted a hand on my hip, vibrating with attitude. “How do we know he won’t double-cross us?”
Zielenski cocked an eyebrow. “My silence is assured, Miss Wychthorn. I am, after all, a businessman first. And your mother was more than generous in purchasing my discretion.”
He wheeled a large iron box into the center of the room and left it on the trolley, inclining his head as he retreated.
“I’ll wait in the other room. Let me know, Miss Crowther, when you need it transported to your vehicle, and I’ll deliver it personally.
” He gestured back the way he’d come. “There are ways in and out of the Emporium known only to me.”
And with that, he strolled back through the doorway, leaving us alone.
The iron box, dented and dull with age, sat between our two parties.
I released a tight breath, both intrigued and afraid.
The box was formidable in size and battered as if something feral had once clawed at its walls.
Several bodyguards approached, easing it off the trolley and carrying it to the long boardroom table.
They lowered it onto the polished wood. Two stepped back while the first undid the metal fastenings on the reptilian leather straps that bound it shut.
Ferne approached carefully, a hand extended, fingers making a slow trilling motion as if casting her senses wide to map the space in front of her.
He lifted the lid, and a wicked punch of dark magic exploded from the box like a racehorse bursting from a starting gate.
Shimmering streams shot upward and outward.
Ferne’s loose hair lifted in the surge. Power swirled through the room, teasing tendrils from my elaborate hairstyle and the sheer tulle of my dress, rocking the elegant artwork and antiques crowding the fire’s mantel.
I rose onto my toes, leaning forward, eager to see Brangwene’s Hjarte.
Lying on a cushion of soft leather was Brangwene’s warhammer.
Whatever it had been forged from looked like blackened metal, molten in the way it undulated like flowing lava, its crust cracked to reveal orange heat beneath.
A ponderous th-thud, th-thud, th-thud vibrated through the room, shivering along my bones.
Brangwene’s own heart had been infused into the ancient weapon.