20. Renard #3
Below the title is a spell, clearly cobbled together from any number of taboo or forbidden texts. Even without magic, the utter wrongness of the words seeps up to me from the paper. In the margins of the page are more notes, more observations from Arden.
Life does not return. It seems to persist without nourishment. The kingdom need not eat if hunger itself is made irrelevant. If the gods want us to starve, I shall wield their power against them.
For a moment, I cannot move—my suspicions have been confirmed, but the reality of the situation is far more devastating than I’d given myself permission to believe.
The curse on the crops… the food that looks perfect but doesn’t nourish or satisfy…
the people starving, and Arden’s eagerness to send me after the Blight Mother…
his insistence that spilling her blood could, and would, end this curse.
But this isn’t a curse from the gods, and it never has been.
The Blight Mother was sent down not as a punishment—but as the only thing powerful enough to undo one man’s folly.
Arden. It’s Arden. It was always Arden—my wretched brother’s ambition bleeds across these pages in damning black ink.
I’m not certain how long I stand there, but long enough that when the door creaks open behind me, much of the shock has worn off—though none of the horror. Disgust and despair war within me, and were I a weaker man, I might vomit from the chaos swirling in my guts.
Arden stands in the threshold, one hand resting on the iron latch, lantern light warming the fine bones of his face. He’s surprised to see me—that much is evident from the delicate lift of his brows. They drop almost immediately, drawing down in extreme displeasure.
“Renard,” he drawls. “How disappointing.”
“Yes, well, disappointment seems to be a family trait,” I snarl, the parchment crinkling in my angry fists.
His gaze drops to the parchment in my hand. “Ah.”
“Ah?” I repeat, rage and disgust and—embarrassingly—betrayal warring in my mind.
“I had rather hoped you’d perish somewhere more… useful,” he says, picking at a stray thread on his sleeve.
I huff at that, the sound bitter and low.
He steps inside and closes the door softly behind him, and it occurs to me that he’s still remarkably, maddeningly composed.
Then again, I’ve never known Arden to be afraid—he only every viewed his punishments or consequences with the same sort of detached curiosity.
Even now, he acts like we’ve found each other in a library after supper and we’re about to discuss the weather.
“You look terrible,” he says, his lip curling. “And you smell even worse.”
“I never had a problem getting my hands dirty when it was necessary to do so. And I never had the luxury of offloading it to anyone else,” I growl.
His eyes cut to mine—the blue darker and sharper, carved out of sea ice.
“The difference between us, Renard, is that I accepted blood on my hands as part of my role. For a former First Knight, you never seemed to get used to that part.”
My hand itches for the dagger at my belt, but the room is small, Arden is not alone in this castle, and Vireth is still below. Killing him now may satisfy some broken thing in me and doom her all the same. I force my fingers to loosen around the parchment before I tear it in half.
“Gods, Arden. What did you do?” I rasp. There’s an edge of desperation in my voice, almost as though I still cannot believe it. Mayhap that is why I need to hear it from his own lips.
Arden sighs, irritated. “You could never see the bigger picture, could you? You always make everything sound so black and white, when our world is all varying shades of gray. It’s a rather primitive outlook, you know.”
“What did you do?” I repeat, louder this time.
He crosses to the shelves and idly adjusts a row of jars, ensuring the labels all face out. He lifts a shoulder in forced nonchalance.
“Well, no one was doing anything satisfactory, so I attempted a solution.”
“A solution?! You turned our food into poison!”
“No,” he says, turning sharply. “I didn’t poison anybody. Poison kills. This preserves.”
“Preserves?!” My voice nearly breaks on the word. “You’ve preserved nothing but the appearance! Women and children are starving in the streets! Your own soldiers can barely hold a sword up with all that flagging strength.”
“The spell did not behave as I’d hoped it would,” he admits, crossing to his desk and scanning his own notes.
“But I’m convinced the principle is sound.
Crops were withering in the fields, so what could stop them from doing so?
I’ll admit that the execution was somewhat flawed.
‘Life Everlasting’ is a misleading title, perhaps. There are ways one might describe it.”
“Blight,” I say.
His gaze lifts.
“There,” I continue, my vision going red at the edges. “I’ve described it.”
His mouth flattens. “You always had a flair for the dramatic—especially when you were puffing up with your overinflated righteousness.”
“This is your fault!” I bellow. “You played at being a god while you should have been repairing old alliances. You subverted the natural order of things, and then when you failed, you fed that failure to the kingdom.”
He rolls his eyes. “That was a creative solution to a surplus of goods, simply distributed during a shortage.”
“You exported them,” I spit.
He scoffs. “To Morsell! A good-for-nothing mountain town that could help us pay for the exported food we needed. And it contained suspicion—concealing the fact that we alone suffered. Had others learn of our misfortune, neighboring powers would circle like buzzards. A weak kingdom invites conquest—you know this better than anyone.”
“You are a coward,” I grit out, hands flexing with the need to throttle him.
He smiles faintly. “What’s the saying? ‘Takes one to know one’?”
The blow lands because he means Elena, and my sons. Their last day in this realm was a day I was not there. It’s a cowardice I’ve lived with for years, and will toil beneath until I breathe my last.
“How many?” I ask, pushing the memory down and pressing forward. “How many died before you understood what you’d done?”
His lips purse in a thoughtful expression, and I wonder how long he’s been mad— if it crept up on him through the years, or if it was always there, hiding just behind his eyes.
“That depends on what one considers death,” he says finally.
I move before thought can restrain me, seizing him by the front of his cloak and slamming him back against the shelves hard enough to rattle glass. One of the jars of miscellaneous bones drops and shatters, and bones spill across the floor.
“How many?” I snarl.
For the first time, his composure cracks enough to show disgust.
“Get your hands off me,” he hisses.
“How many children, Arden? How many mothers? How many men—both young and old? How many farmers did you blame for bad yields while it was your spell cursing their grain?”
“Enough!”
My grip tightens, anger threatening to choke me.
“Enough?” I echo.
“Enough to know the work can, and should, be done better. This version now requires something of a correction. Errors were made, yes, but I believe next time I will be able to start anew. I think I know where I went wrong…”
“You are mad!” I spit. “This cannot simply be corrected, Arden!”
“Of course it can.” He looks at me then with something like pity, as though I am too stupid to understand his grand designs. “That’s what you never understood. You see failure as a grave. I see it as information.”
“There will be no next time, Arden—of that I assure you,” I threaten.
“I see a kingdom,” he continues, ignoring me. “I see beyond one single sobbing mother, one empty bowl, one sentimental old knight handing out bread from his little farm and pretending he has solved hunger because the line at his door happens to be shorter than the line at mine.”
The words hit their mark, and by the triumph in his eyes, it is clear that he knows they do.
“You don’t get to speak of hunger,” I say. “Not while you sit above it, high up in your crumbling castle while your ruined kingdom falls apart beneath you.”
“Ah, would that be the same ruined kingdom that you abandoned?” he fires back.
Silence crashes between us, yet another blow landing in my most vulnerable place. The guilt from simply accepting his exile—from refusing to challenge it—will haunt me until I can right things.
“You left,” Arden says, sneering. “You wrapped yourself in grief, played the martyr, and left me with the kingdom you were too broken to hold. ‘But Arden, I was exiled!’ Bollocks to that, dear brother. I did you a favor! Admit it—you were relieved.”
I release him as if burned. He’s right—I hate him, and myself, for it. But he’s right. Yet I am here to atone for my failures, and he is still trying to dress his up as necessity.