Chapter 15
He was glad for the icy wind as he soared back towards the Citadel, clinging to Indriya like a damned child.
You fool, Kinlear told himself, as they soared through the Forest Gates and into the wards’ protective embrace. Still, the snow chased after their backs. What the hell is wrong with you?
For starters...he was him.
He’d screwed up his initial meeting with the woman by offending her about her birds. Of course she wouldn’t have wanted them to be called omens. And to make matters far worse, he’d left her with a damned wink in the end.
And Arawn, of all people, standing at her side like he owned her.
He used to do the same with Soraya...like he thought she always needed him.
But this woman?
She needed no one.
Especially not me, Kinlear thought. Not yet.
No, he could sense already...he’d have to earn it.
Indriya landed them inside the Eagle’s Nest. The cold was sapped away at once as the glass dome ceiling snapped shut, and just like that, Kinlear was in a whole different world.
He’d never loved the inside of the war mounts’ domain, for it reminded him a bit too much of Touvre.
Too beautiful to be made by anything but his mother’s kind of magic.
“Thank you for the ride,” Kinlear told Indriya, a bit too blunt, as he slid down from her eagle’s back.
“Aren’t you going to come with us?” Indriya asked. “To see Arawn again? It’s been far too long.”
Gods, everyone adored his brother.
Even if Arawn’s magic had fizzled to ash, after losing Soraya, something that very few Sacred ever experienced. It was heartbreak, Kinlear knew...because Arawn loved his Matched.
He couldn’t deny it.
Arawn didn’t even try, for to do so would be a lie, and Kinlear doubted Arawn capable. He hadn’t paid penance in years, not since...
He bristled at the memory.
At their broken bond, and a shattered promise made long ago, between young brothers...that they would always fight for the other.
Not anymore.
Arawn hadn’t been the same since Soraya left, but people still treated him as stronger than Kinlear. They still acted as if he was better to the core, as if they didn’t see that when it mattered most...
Their crown prince couldn’t even save the woman he loved.
So why would anyone ever think he’d be able to save them?
“No,” Kinlear said, shaking himself from his thoughts as he realized the Riders were still staring at him. He lifted his chin. “I will not join you. I wouldn’t be so foolish to even dare.”
He turned his gaze to the young squire who’d scurried over to the landing pen, already eager to help unsaddle Indriya’s eagle. But his eyes went wide when he saw Kinlear, and he knelt...as if to be a stepping stool for the sick prince to dismount.
“You have legs for a reason,” Kinlear snapped at the squire. “Use them and stand up.”
The squire yelped and scurried out of Kinlear’s way as he swept him aside with his cane, feeling for all the world like Magus.
He walked as fast as his ruined leg could carry him across the barn floors, the weakness and the cough catching up to him as soon as he entered the dusty space. It was terrible for his lungs, but Kinlear still loved it here.
This was his place, because it was the only place he’d ever done a thing of worth.
He took a sip from his vial to calm the quivering in his lungs and kept walking. Deeper into the barn he went, past rows of eagles already in stalls. They looked at him with bright, expectant eyes, as if hoping he would get right back to Minding them, as he once had.
Gods, I was good, he thought.
But by king’s decree, he would never Mind a war eagle again.
That was his fault, too, he supposed.
He hadn’t paid enough attention to his vial that day.
His cough was bad, even before an important fledgling Demonstration.
..but he’d not had time to go refill it with Alaris, for his limp had made him late to the Aviary already.
He could have told the Masters, but his determination outweighed his care for his own health.
He was ready to prove to them that he was the greatest Eagleminder in the Citadel.
Perhaps...the greatest Eagleminder of all time.
But his illness had other ideas that day.
It came on strong enough that Kinlear had passed out during his Demonstration.
He was sitting in one of the training saddles, and he’d tumbled sideways off the fledgling’s back.
His ankle had gotten stuck in the stirrups – so Alaris told him, later – and a cluster of Eagleminders had rushed to help his unconscious body get free.
The fledgling nearly killed one by slamming them headfirst into the wall.
Then it spiraled so out of control, they’d had to shoot the beast with the runed crossbow they kept by the barn doors.
The fledgling hadn’t been the same since. It would likely never make it to fly in true war, a waste of a hatching.
When Kinlear woke up, days later, from his own runic sleep...
His mother was there to greet him. It should have been his first indication that something was wrong, for it was the first time she’d come to visit the Citadel since she’d sent him away from Touvre without so much as a goodbye.
His father, old and shriveled and dying faster than even Kinlear at the rate he’d had to practice magic these days, was standing right beside her, though the two did not touch hands.
There was no love between them. Not for each other, and certainly not for him.
“What....what are you doing here?” Kinlear had asked.
“You’re done Minding the Eagles,” his father told him.
“You’re a danger to yourself and others,” his mother said.
He’d gone into such a panic then, that the Healers dropped him back into a runic sleep. When he woke...
Soraya was gone.
Gone.
His episode was her breaking point, he supposed. She was so tired of watching him suffer, enough that she finally did what she’d told Kinlear just before the Demonstration, a black book in her hands, and tears in her eyes.
She was thinking of running.
Defecting to the Acolyte, because she believed it could heal him.
“I will gladly bow to a power that can save you,” she’d told Kinlear.
He just never thought she’d do it.
It was so obvious now, the way it played all out in his dreams.
It’s your fault, his mind hissed again, for not caring enough to understand it.
He’d been so focused on the ending of his dream...that he’d forgotten to pay attention to the beginning.
So, Kinlear found himself here often, alone in the barn, after Soraya’s death.
It was where he once trained mighty eagles for flight.
It was where he once stole his first kiss with her, shortly after they were Matched.
Letters had first sparked their love, but when they were together, in person. ..it was electric.
To the point where, if he allowed himself to focus on those memories for too long, he felt as if he could hardly even think beyond the self-loathing that appeared.
You are Veilborne, he told himself. You are worthy in this place.
He sighed, and stopped to duck into a dusty storage alcove, setting his cane down beside a haphazardly stacked tower of hay.
This exact spot...
It was where he’d stood, his back up against the hay, when Soraya showed him a strange black book, and claimed the answer to their future together was in it.
We could live forever, you and I, she’d said. Wild and wonderful and free, so long as we join the Acolyte.
But it would never happen.
He would never be able to see past the promise of his visions...and it always ended with Kinlear on the raphon’s back. Kinlear...and her, the Ravenminder, soaring to kill the very thing Soraya wanted to bow to.
And even though Soraya was real, and right in front of him...
Kinlear still clung, each night, to that vision of the woman in his dreams. He couldn’t give up their future, a Veil-seen fate, for one of defecting, with his first love.
He would die a great prince, the savior of his kingdom.
...Or he would be stubborn enough to find a way to live in mediocrity until then.
Kinlear sighed now and sat down on the hay.
The alcove here was full of barrels and bags of shavings and buckets of extra grain. And, thanks to Past Kinlear, who often planned so perfectly ahead, it was also where he kept one of his many stashes of winterwine safely tucked away.
He scooped up a bottle, uncorked it with his teeth, and leaned his head back against the wall...
And drank.
He drank and he planned.
He thought of how he would shape his future, if he had the chance to live, if his illness gave him long enough to defeat the Acolyte before it stole him.
He imagined how he would speak to her, his Ravenminder, the next time they met.
Would he ask her name first, for he’d never caught it before, or would he go right to talking about the ravens?
Clever birds, I’ve always thought, he’d say, channeling his most princely exterior. Tell me, my Lady, what is it that you see in them?
He took a sip. It burned going down, and he smiled.
He would get to know her, as best as he could, without their interaction seeming like a challenge. He would be the perfect, polished prince his mother wished him to be.
He would be mysterious and charming and dreadfully clever.
He would make her want him.
The way no one ever had before.
Not even Soraya, for she’d only wanted to fix him, once she learned the truth of his condition. Their entire lives, she thought he suffered from something obnoxious, but certainly not fatal. And when she’d learned of that...he swore she loved the idea of healing him more than anything else.
You weren’t enough for her to stay, Kinlear thought, as he took another sip of the winterwine in his flask.
He needed it to numb his mind. He needed it to numb his very soul, for it had ached for years, after she left. He’d ruined his relationship with Arawn over it, for it was easier to cast blame upon someone else.
Kinlear’s soul ached even more today.