Chapter 31 #2
“The soul is only cursed by the material weight of such things,” her mother had said, as she’d sparred with her warriors, taking on two at a time, sweat running down her porcelain skin.
Only her lips showed any flush from her efforts, her silver eyes glinting as though polished.
“Death is the only true freedom, daughter, remember that.”
Then she’d knocked both of her guards unconscious, striking one on the back of the head with her elbow and then launching off of his back as he fell to kick the other in the temple.
And they’d only been sparring. The captain of her guard had laughed—that deep warm laugh of his that had always brought a smile to her mother’s face.
The captain was here too. In the corner, in a tomb of his own, carved in silver and painted in his likeness, his narrow amber eyes, the crooked angle of his nose, the cleft in his chin.
Magda stood before the gold painted face of her mother. She ran her fingers over those full crimson lips.
“Hello, Mother. I’ve come back.” She hung her head, her hand drawing back into a fist at her side.
“I know you’ve been disappointed in me. I’ve been disappointed in myself.
But . . . that’s not entirely true. I know you would’ve considered it a disgrace that I was beaten and exiled, not given an honorable death.
But . . . I was relieved. I was happy. Happier than I was here.
You always said death was the only true freedom, but I felt free when I was exiled, Mother.
It wasn’t life that was the prison. It was this life. ”
She glanced over at the captain, who gazed down at her with those empty painted-on eyes, forever watching over her mother’s tomb.
“Cavan,” she said to him, though it had been many years since she’d even thought about him.
He’d been executed for treason. Yet, in her final rites, her mother had requested that Cavan's body be moved to the spot where the Radiant's most trusted servant was placed—often her Prince, but not always. Magda had been so young when Cavan had been tried and killed that she couldn’t recall what acts of treason exactly he’d been accused of, only that her mother was never the same after his death.
Not that her mother had ever been light-hearted, but after Cavan was gone, Magda didn’t remember seeing her mother smile in the same way as she had when he was alive.
Magda gazed up at the captain’s dark eyes, the echo of his laughter rising from the forgotten depths, her mother’s smile . . .
Magda looked back down at her mother.
It had been done quietly, she knew, Cavan’s body moved from its burial plot to her mother's tomb here. At the time she'd been too caught up in plotting her next move to give it much thought.
“But you loved him, didn’t you?” Magda murmured.
In one of those scintillating moments of revelation, the past suddenly became clear.
“And he loved you.” She sat back on her heels. “I remember now. The arguments you had with Father and the counselors. Father must have realized. That’s why Cavan was executed . . .” She searched those foggy depths of her memory, pulling forth the names of her mother’s counselors at the time.
Magda had only been four or five, but their stern faces came back to her. Moren, with the hooked nose, who died from a fall from the gallery at the library, a broken neck. Uli, the dashing one, also found dead. Stabbed by his lover in a jealous rage . . .
She lifted her head and looked down at her mother.
“But it was you, wasn’t it?” She rose to her feet.
“You killed them all, didn’t you? One by one.
” She looked back up at Cavan. “For him. Because they made you execute him. You always told me never to let anyone too close, to keep my guard up. Your head, your heart, you said, never let anyone into them. But you did.”
She thought back to her father, with his bright blue eyes. He'd drowned while taking his daily morning swim in the sea, before even the captain had been executed.
“You killed him too. Didn’t you, Mother?”
Her fingers touched the stone above the likeness of her mother’s breast. It was strange to realize all of this now, so suddenly.
In hindsight, it all seemed so obvious. She wondered how widely known the truth had been at the time.
Not that it mattered to anyone now. Murder was practically a sport in noble Pixie families.
She supposed she should’ve hated her mother for killing her father, if that’s what she had indeed done—and Magda didn’t doubt her mother had been capable of such a thing.
Her mother had not become Radiant with smiles and votes and pretty speeches like a human politician.
Spilling blood was the only way to win the right to reside at Stonehigh.
She skimmed her mother’s cheek. “I forgive you, Mother, if you forgive me.”
She threw all of her weight against the top of the sarcophagus.
The lid ground and groaned. Dust shifted and ran off the old tomb in gray streams and puffed up in the air, coating her tongue and gagging her.
The musty, dry odor of the mummy within, tinged by the pungent aromatic herbs and oils that anointed her mother’s linen-wrapped corpse, was strangely sweet.
A mask, another golden image of her mother’s face, appeared through the wafting drifts of dust. The mummy had been clothed and heavily ornamented.
Her hands, laid across her belly, were clad in her finger-knives.
Magda lifted her left hand, the pinky, the broken ghast blade.
With a downward push and a twist, while her thumb engaged the locking mechanism, she was able to detach the sheath from the rest of the knives.
She laid it down on her mother’s sunken chest and then grasped the gold bracer on her mother’s wrist, performing the same push, twist, and pop on her mother’s left pinky blade.
She held it up. The sheath was tarnished from disuse, the figure, a rather unimpressive one, a slender tree.
Snapping it onto her own pinky, she put her empty ghast blade sheath in place of her mother’s and then leaned over the edge, planting a kiss on the forehead of her mother’s death mask.
“I hope you are happy and free,” she said.
She shoved the lid back into place.