23. Max
Max
Missy found the closet before she found the bed.
Our rooms were across the hall from Aelindor’s door. A suite, with a room of my sister’s own inside it, a window seat, and a lock on the inside she would never once need to use. All the heirs kept rooms at Elenmoor. Now we did too.
She got three steps in and turned a full circle with her arms out to measure the space.
The doors stood open. Sweaters. Coats. A row of small shoes. Someone had gone to the trouble of finding out her size, quietly, before we ever set foot in this house.
Missy pressed her face into a hanging sundress and stayed there, breathing it, just to feel the fabric on her cheek.
“Max, feel this!”
“It’s soft.”
Two seconds later, from the window seat: “Look at that!”
“I see it,” I said, smiling.
The heirs had measured my sister’s deprived childhood and stocked a closet against it. Others might call that a small thing, buying clothes for a little girl.
I kept a ledger for every kindness.
“Can we always live here?”
“Until you grow up, and then…”
“I’ll never grow up!”
Before long, she’d start school with the other children of the fortress. A satchel. Lessons. No quota to meet.
Josette asked for the position of Missy’s nanny, standing in the doorway with her hands folded, the way people stood when they rehearsed a request they couldn’t afford to be refused.
“Let me take care of Missy,” she said.
She’d been with my sister since the dragon plucked them both off that bridge. She had no one left, and all that love with nowhere to put it, so she poured it into Missy.
We granted it. She was assigned a room on the mansion’s lower level with the rest of the household staff.
The big surprise was Desta.
Before Xander left with his entourage, she’d slipped away and pleaded with the Zodiac Covenant for asylum.
They detained her and put her through the vetting process and magical screening, a much milder ordeal than the dragon fire of the Sorting.
I wouldn’t have let Drakken put my friend through his fire regardless.
Not even if she’d turned out to be a spy.
For the second round they gave us an ordinary room.
A table, chairs, Stormglass lamps in the ceiling.
Nothing like the dungeon room Drakken once put me in, with the spotlight aimed at my face to blind me.
Nikolai took the chair across from us. Behind the mirror on the wall stood the other heirs and senior intelligence officers, and Desta sat with her back very straight.
There was water in front of her. It stayed full the whole time. I’d made my terms plain to the heirs before anyone sat down.
Torture my friend, or starve her, and I walk.
In the end she passed, and she passed because there was nothing in her to find.
No magic. No enhanced strength. No skill an enemy could have wanted.
She didn’t want to be a soldier either. She had an aversion to violence, she said, and that was the one claim in the file I didn’t need a test to believe.
“The kitchens, then,” Nikolai offered.
“I don’t know how to cook,” Desta protested. “I was a slave miner. Digging is all I ever knew.”
“And you learned nothing in the Haven?” Nikolai asked.
She shook her head. “I was low-level staff for Xander.” She didn’t call him the Saint anymore. “I didn’t get it at the time. I was bait. He kept me to get to Max.” The bitterness came up through every word. “In the Haven, they let me see Missy sometimes. Not often.”
The intelligence officers cross-checked her against my sister, and Missy answered every question twice and the same way both times. Xander had kept the two of them apart. On the rare visits he allowed, Desta had combed Missy’s hair and murmured the same thing every time.
“We’ll see Max soon. Don’t you want to see Max?”
And my clever sister, watched every hour of every day, had spied anyway, working what she could out of Desta while the comb went through her hair. All she ever got back was praise of Xander the Saint, recited like a catechism.
The conclusion came back the same from the heirs and from intelligence. Pawn. Brainwashed. Unwinding that would take time, but I wasn’t going to abandon my friend.
Desta’s hands on the table shook a little, and I placed mine on hers. She looked at me, her eyes misty. “You and Missy are all I have left.” Her voice went thin. “Let me be your maid, or Missy’s nanny.” She turned back to Nikolai. “I’m loyal to them. I can take care of them.”
“No,” Nikolai said.
Four princes, and Desta was the only thing I ever had to ask for twice.
Then a third time, walking backward down a corridor in front of Aelindor while he tried to get to a war council.
The other three caved. I knew they would, as they could barely deny me anything.
Drakken didn’t.
He vetoed her flat, every time, and he didn’t bother giving reasons. He’d grown so protective of Missy and me that he’d have vetoed sunlight if it got too close to us.
In the end, it was Missy who moved him. She walked in with her chin up, said Desta had been kind to her in the Haven, and told him he was being unfair. Drakken looked at my sister a long moment. Then he said fine, and it was done.
So Desta got the post. Companion to Missy, a second nanny of sorts.
However, she wasn’t permitted to live in Elenmoor. Not even on the lower level with the household staff, and she raised it every time she came to visit.
“The heirs listen to you,” she pushed. “I’ve seen how they look at you. Please, Max. All I want is to be close to you.” Her voice broke. “It’s just us now, with Rogue and Kaid gone.”
Rogue and Kaid. She laid their names on the table like a card she’d been holding all evening.
Even as grief rose to the back of my throat, I knew manipulation when I heard it.
Desta had been wired this way since we were children. She survived the mine by working out which lever moved which person. But you didn’t throw away your friends because they were flawed. And the five of us, Missy included, shared a bond that went down to the tunnel dirt.
I’d tried.
I’d raised the idea of Desta staying in the suite with Missy and me.
The heirs had shut it down fast and flat, and I respected the decision.
It was made for security and nothing else.
They weren’t going to trust her on the strength of an old friendship, not after she’d spent months under Xander’s roof.
And my former demon’s warning still burned like a brand.
She’s been in his house too long. Things change in the dark.
“I don’t have any power over the heirs,” I told her. “Not the way you think.”
“Try asking one of them alone.”
“Quit it, Desta. It isn’t my mansion. Be happy with the arrangement. I didn’t get treatment this good when I arrived.”
She let out a breath. “Fine. It’s just, we always stuck together, you know.”
And she always knew exactly where pushing me turned into losing me, and she stopped one step short of it.
So Desta was housed in one of the apartment buildings for civilian workers in Aelindor’s region, close enough to visit whenever we were in residence, with a roommate named Susanna.
Every catch-up visit, she steered us toward the heirs, and I steered us back to the Haven.
What Xander’s palace looked like from the inside. Who came and went.
Desta was Desta, opportunist to the marrow. I’d have trusted Rogue or Kaid with my life and never counted the cost.
With Desta I counted. But she was still my friend, and I still meant to help her find her way back.
“Okay, little viper. Time for bed!”
“Five more minutes.”
“You had it five minutes ago.”
“Then two more minutes, pretty please?”
“Not one minute, and I mean it!”
“Fine, but can you read to me, Max?”
“That I can do.” I ran my finger along the shelf Frost had filled and pulled down a fairy tale, Finn Everfly and the Bell Sprite. “We have so many picture books now. Too many.”
My sister giggled. “There’s no such thing as too many.”
The Fae major had brought my sister a whole library of titles, and I’d made a discovery of my own. I enjoyed them too. I’d never read a single storybook as a child in the mine. Apparently the appetite kept.
In the corner, Ross was already asleep in the plush dog bed Marco had found for him, curled into a ring of scaled nose and spiked tail, his little horns denting the cushion. Missy burrowed under her favorite blanket, and I read.
“On the night of the second star, Finn Everfly came to the window of every child who had ever wished to be somewhere else. ‘Flying is easy,’ he said. ‘You only need one happy thought, and you must hold it tight, tighter than a coin.’ And beside him glowed the bell sprite, small as a thimble, bright as a lantern. But far below, on the dark water, a ship with black sails had begun to turn toward the island, and on its deck a man with a silver hook grinned wickedly at the second star and announced, ‘Tonight.’”
I closed the book. “Now it’s really time for bed.”
“But you stopped at the cliffhanger!” She pouted.
“Yep, that’s the point of a cliffhanger.” I lifted a finger at her to stop her protest. “It’s getting late, and I have to get up early to train.”
“Why do you have to train so hard? You’re Aelindor’s girlfriend, and he’s a prince.”
I stared at her. My little sister was growing up too fast, picking up everything at the speed of a runaway train.
“Because we need to keep the fortress safe,” I said. “Keep you safe. No more BS.”
She gasped. “You said bad words.”
“Yep. More will be coming if you don’t close your eyes.”
She squeezed her eyes shut.
As I tucked the blanket under her, my hand hit a box. I dragged it out from under the mattress. French fries, cold and carefully hoarded, saved against a hunger that wasn’t coming.
I stared at the fries in my hand, and the mine stared back.
“Missy. There’s food now. Always. We don’t have to hoard it, and we don’t have to steal it. As long as we’re with the princes, nobody’s counting what we eat.”
“But what if the princes die?” she asked, her big hazel eyes opening and gazing at me.
Everything in me went still. My sister watched my face, and hers fell.
“I’m sorry, Max.” She was all tears in an instant. “Bryn, Jace, Rogue, Kaid, and the others all died. I don’t want the princes to die too.”
“Then we’ll keep them alive,” I said. “You and me. That’s our job now.”
Missy nodded, sniffling. “I’ll take this job very seriously.”
“Now close your eyes again and dream big, little viper.”
I kissed her forehead, turned off the light, and crossed to my own chamber.
My new room. A bed wide enough for four of my old bunks.
I lay staring at the ceiling, bone-tired and nowhere near sleep. Aelindor was one door away, across the hall. All four of them under this roof tonight, the closest we’d ever been.
In love four times over, and unable to touch a single one of them.
We moved around each other carefully now. Every near-miss of skin was the geas reminding me it was there, and the contract underneath it with my name signed in my own infant blood.
Yesterday, it seemed, I was a slave with a pickaxe and a number. One blink later I was this other woman. Free, coming into power, and in love.
In a bed that size, with nobody in it.
Urgent knocks came at my door, and Missy slid in.
“You forgot the square.” She pouted magnificently.
I knew what this really was. She wanted to sleep in my bed on her first night in a strange new place. Eventually she’d have to learn to sleep on her own.
Eventually could start tomorrow.
“Come up here,” I said.
Giddy, Missy scrambled onto the bed. We did the square, forehead to forehead, one good thing each, the breathing, the goodnights, and then she snuggled into my side exactly as she used to on our old cot in that mud cabin that was more hole than wall.
A moment later, small claws ticked across the floor. Ross had trailed her through the dark like a scaled shadow. He hauled himself up the hanging blanket with fierce, grunting determination and marched over my legs without a flicker of apology.
“Don’t snore, Ross,” my sister warned.
She was out in minutes, snoring her small, ridiculous snore. Ross joined in a beat later, the two of them a matching set.
I lay in the dark with her weight against my ribs. Missy safe and warm, her horned cub tucked under her chin, a roof, a table, people who loved us. Happiness, whole and real, even inside the blood contract’s invisible walls.
Somewhere between one of their snores and the next, they let me sleep.