Chapter Thirteen #3
Helspira frowned as she poked small holes in her scarf with the tips of her already-growing claws.
Ben’s admission churned within her mind.
She writhed at the thought of his extended misery.
Hypocritical, given that if she went through with the banneret’s plan, she might be responsible for his ultimate demise, but after his confession, she questioned how much he wished to continue living.
Still, he didn’t deserve to be duped into death. He deserved a peaceful passing, not a horrified final moment of realization that he had been tricked should anything go wrong with Vessik’s assassination. But the people of Nyllmas deserved something too—safety.
Choosing one life over the whole of a kingdom, how did Sikras make it look so easy? Helspira bunched the scarf’s fabric into her fist and bit her bottom lip. “Can I ask you something?”
“Always.”
“Everyone keeps saying you could’ve ended all this so easily.
And, pardon my saying, but you chose four years of suffering for an entire kingdom instead.
I know you love Ben. I know you love your wife, and there’s comfort in her continued existence—undead or otherwise—but .
.. how did you make that choice so easily?
How did you know it was the right thing? ”
A rare flicker of solemnity drove the whimsy from Sikras’s face. “I don’t know if there’s a ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ But I do know ability is not synonymous with responsibility.”
The eerie sincerity in his words sent a ripple of discomfort through her. “You could’ve saved thousands of people,” she said more shakily than she would have liked.
“By sacrificing the few people I care about.”
“But your entire kingdom needed you.”
Calm and collected, Sikras reclined on his palms. “You don’t have to tell me how you survived Chthonia.”
Helspira balked, head flinching backward. “Excuse me?”
“I know how you made yourself useful to your oppressors. Chthonia is lawless, predominantly lacking in both ethics and morals. Uninvited touch makes you uneasy. Dancing was once forcefully performative. I can put two and two together.”
The memories hit her like the hooves of an angry horse. Helspira gripped her scarf until her fingers tingled, voice cracking. “Wh—what does that have to do with anything?”
“You were a child, Hels. And even if you weren’t, just because you could do those things”—anger rose in his voice, but he tempered it with a slow, patient exhale—“just because you were physically capable, and you thought they were necessary to your survival, your parents’ survival, doesn’t mean they should’ve been your responsibility.
Life is supposed to be made up of choices not obligations. ”
Her bottom lip trembled. A cold wind blew the fragrant scent of midnight lavender their way, but the well-known aromatherapeutic did nothing to relax her. “I did what I had to do to live.”
“That’s all any of us are trying to do. That's all I’m trying to do. Yes, people have died. Yes, it’s selfish. But it’s my life. And without Benjamin, I have nothing.”
Helspira searched his face. Those last three words, whispered with desperate sincerity, transformed Sikras from the fabled necromancer of Nyllmas’s past. In the shadows of night, she saw him for what he truly was: not the Glowing Cat’s Eye in Death’s Darkness who wielded the full power of Enos but the broken man who had lost so much and was wholly, deeply terrified of losing what little he had left.
Why, exactly, did that make her want to throw herself at him with the full force of a two-tailed bog mongrel at the height of its heat cycle?
Claim him. Make him yours.
Her heart thundered in the same pulsing rhythm of distant, croaking frogs, loud and incessant. Damn her demonic impulses. But oh, how good it would’ve felt to just reach out, gently touch the side of his face, and—
“If I’m being honest,” he said, severing her thoughts, “it’s not just Benjamin’s life and Imri’s existence that’s stayed my hand these last four years.”
When did her palms get so sweaty? Helspira wiped them across her leather armor, nonabsorptive as it was, and steadied herself with a breath. “What else is there?”
“I don’t want to kill Vessik.”
Lust turned into confusion, and her jaw dropped. “I’m sorry, you threatened to murder innocent townsfolk for causing Ben some mild anxiety, but you draw the line at slaughtering the man responsible for killing him? For killing your wife? For killing you?”
“It’s not exactly a popular stance”—Sikras shrugged—“especially with Vessik’s legion brutally murdering more civilians with each passing day, but ... as long as he’s alive, there’s hope he could change. Hope he could go back to the way he was.”
A rare bubble of fury burst inside her, and Helspira shook her head. “People like Vessik don’t change, Sikras. People like Vessik pretend to love you, and then rip out your eye when your vulnerability is lowered.”
“Cecil was a prick. Vessik was never a wicked man. He’s not evil, he’s just ... unwell.” Sikras turned away, knuckles white from how hard he gripped the scythe’s snath. “And it’s all my fault.”
She tried and failed to catch his gaze, the confession birthing more confusion than she already harbored. His fault? Impossible. Murderers were not created, they were born. Weren’t they?
“It didn’t happen all at once,” Sikras murmured into the darkness.
“I’d been gone for three months fighting one of Saelihn’s wars.
After I merged with the Cat’s Eye, she often contracted me out as a weapon in hopes of forming alliances, establishing relationships with more powerful kingdoms, that sort of thing.
And I just left Vessik here. I shouldn’t have left him, I .
.. I would’ve seen the signs if I had been around.
He looked out for me our entire childhood, made me better, kept me from becoming the monster I should have been, would have been, but .
..” He shook his head. “I couldn’t do the same for him.
By the time I returned, he was ... different. ”
Helspira pulled her knees against her chest. “You don’t seem like a monster to me.”
“You didn’t know me as a kid.” The shift in Sikras’s voice happened suddenly, steady poise crumbling to erratic inflections, each shallow breath looking more like a panicked gasp for air.
A muscle twitched in his jaw, and he let out a strange, raspy laugh.
“Any good in me was all him. He saw dry sand and still planted a seed. He always believed in me. Always. I want to believe in him too. That he’ll come back.
That he’ll get better, the way he helped me get better. ”
Instinct compelled her to grab his forearm, and his tensed muscles gave away his stress. When she squeezed, some of his tension relented.
“He stopped me from killing my parents, you know,” he continued, fixated on the shadowy tree line. “Can you imagine that? Little ten-year-old Sikras, plotting to stab his mother and father in the eyes as they slumbered.”
Helspira couldn’t hold in her gasp, and she withdrew her hand. “You wouldn’t have—”
“Oh, I would have. I had it all planned out. Durwin first, because he was stronger than Udelle. I needed the element of surprise to get an upper hand on him. Udelle was the heavier sleeper too. Slimmer chance she’d wake mid-assault to stop me.
Dark clothes to blend with the shadows. Rusty blade coated in a concoction of toxins I’d made from various plants.
If the swings didn’t kill him, the poison would. ”
Madness coated his words the longer he spoke, and Helspira’s heart thundered with each additional sentence. She swallowed. “Back in Everferd, y—you said they were dead, your parents. You didn’t ...?”
He arched a brow, a brief look of confusion on his face before he looked away.
“Right. No. Thanks to Vessik, they were spared death by my hand. Vessik was a child himself, but he showed me how to be ... better. He was such a good person, Hels. My inspiration. And then everything just”—he gesticulated an explosion with his hands—“burned to the ground. Physically and metaphorically. Shortly after I had returned from the latest war Saelihn offered me up for, I discovered the almshouse had been torched. Vessik used to read to the children there. I remember being terrified that he had been hurt, or ... I didn’t feel his soul in Enos, so I knew he had survived, but I couldn’t find him anywhere.
It was chaos. Displaced families, acolytes and clerics sent to lend aid, defenseless children, all ash and dust.”
The almshouse? Helspira had heard tales of the one that stood before she and her parents had occupied the current building, but beyond learning that it had burned in a fire, she hadn’t heard much else.
Voice raw, Sikras continued, the words spilling out, as if he had bottled them inside for years.
“Vessik arrived at our home later that evening, covered in blood. I thought he’d been attacked.
I tried to usher him inside. He said, ‘No, no, Sikras, you’ve got it all wrong, I’m not the victim this time.
I’m the hero.’ And that’s when I smelled the smoke on his clothing. ”
A shudder rattled Helspira’s core. She said nothing.
Sikras’s jaw tightened. “‘What did you do?’ I asked him. And he whispered with a smile, ‘I gave them peace.’”
The wind carried the eerie phrase away. Helspira gave his arm another comforting squeeze. “I’m so sorry.”