Chapter 12
Prince Kinlear Laroux limped into the frozen night as fast as his broken body could carry him. The war had begun hours ago. Rumbles split the night, flashes of both Sacred and Darksoul magics echoing across the sky.
His breath was heavy in his lungs. His leg ached with each step he took across the snow. He was exhausted tonight, freshly released from another one of Alaris’ healing treatments he used to despise.
Now, he didn’t mind them. He got to fall through the black sky again and again, seeing the same visions his power promised. Seeing ones that had happened already...and ones that still hadn’t come true yet.
Until now, Kinlear thought, as a smile crept across his lips. I captured a raphon.
It had taken months of work. Months of research and conversations and in some cases, bribery, to get other Sacred to agree with what he saw fit. Gods, he was pleased, when the tortured darksouls revealed information he knew to be true because of his dreams.
They needed a raphon to get to the other side.
They’d captured one, so now, the very best of his visions could finally take shape for him.
“Sir! Take the horse, please!”
He ignored the young servant trailing behind him on horseback—his father, damn the stubborn king, never let Kinlear go anywhere alone outside the Citadel’s cold halls.
Not because he cared for Kinlear’s safety.
No, the King of Lordach sent a shadow at Kinlear’s back because he found the spare prince to be an embarrassment.
The latest Sacred servant, truly no larger than Kinlear’s pinky finger, would be there to scoop him up, should Kinlear’s sickness send him to his knees.
Sometimes, he swore he was back in Touvre. Young and weak and so unaware of the Veilborne power lurking inside his veins, until the gods sent Magus to him.
He still carried the Veilblade on his hip like a lifeline.
An anchor.
A promise.
“Sir, you’ll catch your death out here!”
“I don’t know that it’s me we should be worried about,” Kinlear said to no one, and tossed a smug look over his shoulder as the youngling struggled to guide the pony beneath him.
Gods, did his father truly think this boy could lift even a book, let alone a lifeless Laroux?
Not that it mattered.
Kinlear wouldn’t die tonight. He knew that with certainty. He’d seen far past this moment, and it would not be his end.
You didn’t see Soraya, his conscious hissed.
Ah.
That was a thought that often stung him. His shoulders sank a bit. His grip on his cane tightened.
To be a Veilborne was not to see everything. He’d learned that the hard way and quickly paid his own penance for it more times than he cared to admit, because he missed it.
Not just the large-scale facts, but the close-up ones. The details that truly mattered. If he’d paid better attention, if he’d just looked a little bit closer...
Maybe he would have noticed that Soraya was the distant shadow Arawn chased after in his dreams.
He hated his brother for not getting to her on time. For not saving her before she died.
It was easier that way.
Easier to place blame on someone else, to hate them for it...when the person most at fault was him.
Kinlear crested the hill and found himself in the shadow of the Sacred Circle. He shivered as the wind whistled between the towering obelisks. It bit at him, despite the warming runes he’d marked on his cloak with his Veilblade just hours ago.
He glanced to the right, where the battle went on. Where the Sawteeth stood beneath the shadowstorm...and the only way to see it was to look upon the Expanse. The place that brought about Soraya’s death.
If she were still alive, she’d be out there right now, beside Arawn. Slaying darksouls with her wind magic. Riding on a war eagle that Kinlear himself had trained, when he meant something to this war.
When he thought, for a few years, that he’d found his place.
How terribly wrong he was.
“I’m sorry, Sora,” Kinlear whispered now, his breath floating away in a cloud upon the wind.
He wondered if she was still out there, somewhere.
If the Acolyte’s army had found a way to revive her, and she was out there, right now.
.. fighting on the other side of a war she never fully believed in to begin with.
Her body was never found, when Arawn went back to gather her from the Expanse. And while Arawn swore she was dead, the last time he saw her... a part of Kinlear had always wondered, if perhaps Soraya had made it.
The darksouls often took who was left behind. There was always a chance.
“I hope you found your way there,” he whispered. “I hope you’re at peace, if you did.”
He could barely even think her name without pain, without guilt tightening his chest.
She had become his for a time, just as he foresaw in his dreams.
They were Matched a few years ago, and the time they spent together was the most Kinlear had ever known of romantic fantasy book bliss. But in the back of his mind, whenever he was with Soraya...when she was asleep in his arms, her face pressed to his penance-marked chest...
Sometimes, he imagined he was holding her.
The other woman.
The one whose scarred face he knew, but whose name evaded him.
His dreams still ended with her. Always her.
She was strong and she was lovely and she was – someday – to be wholly his.
It made the pain of losing Soraya hurt less, despite the guilt that ate at him, day after day. Soraya left because she wanted to save him.
The Acolyte has power the gods do not, she’d promised, on the day before she defected. It’s all here, in the book!
She’d showed him the pages inside, but they were empty.
She wanted the Acolyte to heal Kinlear of the very illness that was a part of his magic. He felt that they were intertwined, because just like Magus said...magic always required a price. Kinlear hated it, of course. He hated the sickness, the cough, the weakness in his leg.
They were the anchors that had dragged him down, for years, into what he called his eternal pit of misery.
But without his illness...
Would he still have his visions?
Would he still be a Veilborne, able to see such wild and beautiful things...or would he simply be Kinlear Laroux...the spare and powerless twin?
Regardless, Soraya wouldn’t see reason, no matter what he said. So, he thought the truth would be strong enough to make her stay.
He’d told her of his dreams, his gifting...his strange, unpillared magic. He’d told her everything...except for the bit about the other woman in his dreams.
He’d focused on what mattered most, instead: his mission to kill the very Acolyte she longed to meet. He’d seen it. He believed it, with every fiber of his Veilborne being.
...and she didn’t.
He loved Soraya. Truly, he did. A part of Kinlear had died with her, that night on the battlefield.
Sometimes, he still pulled her old letters back out, ones he’d kept from his time in Touvre, and cried as he reread them.
Sometimes, he imagined what it would be like to hold her just one more time.
To hear her laugh and snort if she laughed too hard, and then make fun of her for it. ..as he always did.
Gods, he missed the beauty and the chaos between them.
But what he felt for her?
It was nothing compared to the way he felt when he was in his dreams, doing the impossible. Riding on a raphon, towards his foreseen destiny, strong and capable...with a woman who fit.
So, he let Soraya go.
He pried her from his heart, stashed away her letters, and took the hating between himself and Arawn, because when he found his scarred woman...it would all be worth it.
Every damned tear.
She would fill the void Soraya left behind when she defected, chasing a dream Kinlear did not see or understand.
It would all happen soon.
He sensed it.
He just had to get a raphon in place, had to be ready when this mysterious Rider arrived to join him.
A cry suddenly rang out in the distance, echoing off the hillside.
With painstaking effort, Kinlear reached the Forest Gates that led to the Citadel’s exit. He stepped between the towering Gates, sucking in a breath at the fizzle and pop that slid over his skin despite the heavy cloak he wore.
Gods, it had been ages since he’d been away from the wards.
Another step, and the protective magic of the Five released him. There were plenty of Knights across the clearing here—he’d required several for phase one of his plan. But he still felt alone as he approached.
Wolves howled in the distance, hungry for blood.
I am Veilborne, he told himself. I am not afraid.
A happy side effect, when death was always chasing him. He limped past ancient graves piled high with snow, looking at the names of those buried and long lost to time. They were all covered up by winter’s kiss, but he felt nothing for them. Kinlear didn’t give a damn about the dead.
He cared about the living.
He cared about everyone remembering his name when he was gone, a name tangled with hers, whoever she was...so that his memory existed forever.
So that he would always be more than just the Spare Prince.
And it started, here and now, with the captured raphon.
A few steps more – and Kinlear came around a thick cluster of evergreens, bows weighed down by pillows of white, where a circle of runed stones marked the trap.
His breath left him in a cloud of white.
“Gods be damned,” Kinlear whispered.
A darksoul rider was dead at his feet.
It was sprawled awkwardly in the snow, mere inches from his toes.
He hadn’t seen one...since he’d slayed his own monster.
The darksoul version of himself.
That was another part of his visions he wasn’t sure of. It had been like looking into a morphed mirror, and where most things he saw were clear...a perfect glimpse of his own future...
That part was not.
Still, Magus had considered it a test. He’d passed it. And he’d never seen his monster again.
Now, Kinlear frowned down at the darksoul in the snow.
“Bastard got what it deserved,” said a voice.