Chapter 29
Twenty-Nine
- LYRA -
Dinner comes and goes. One of the women is swept away for a private dinner with Cyrus.
Part of me is jealous, as I’m reminiscing about the way he swept the sugar off my cheek.
How his gaze floated from my mouth to my eyes.
That in the moment, it felt sacred. Like time had stopped—as if I were meant to be there.
I keep replaying it over and over, wondering if I should have done something.
If I should have leaned in a bit farther, settling in on the curve of his mouth for a silent invitation.
Even though I don’t know much about him, our conversation about character sticks in my brain.
I can only wonder if the other women feel the same draw as I do. If they have moments just as special as the one we had. I cling to the hope that they don’t. Even if part of that makes me selfish.
As we are led back to our rooms, Marcella tosses me a quick look. Reminding me about tonight.
After I’ve shut my door and slipped my shoes off, I pull the pins out of my hair, letting it fall in long waves down to the middle of my back.
As I pull my fingers through it, I avoid my reflection in the mirror, stride over to the window, and stare out at the mountain range drenched in shadow.
The starry sky beyond it is dazzling, with starlight peeking out through the dark clouds scuttling along the expanse.
I shift my focus back to that single paver I swore had been imperfect along the patterned walkway.
Waiting for the truth to emerge like the fog from a forest. I don’t dare look away from it.
I try not to blink and miss it. The longer I sit and stare, the more I wonder if my mind is becoming jumbled.
Perhaps whatever they used to wipe our memories did more than just that? What if it altered my consciousness?
Or…perhaps my disease is overtaking me. Whatever it is.
My mother’s warning echoes in my head. “I am so sorry you’ve been trapped with this illness. As much as it pains me to say, you must not share this with anyone else. You cannot marry, and you cannot have children. Do you understand?”
I sag back against the windowsill, leaning my head against the windowpane still staring at that single paver as I absentmindedly trace circles against the glass.
“I understand,” I had replied as a child, my voice small and timid.
But I’m here. Competing for the hand of King Cyrus. What does she think of me now? Is she angry I didn’t heed her warning?
No. I slipped off into the night once I had the opportunity, only leaving behind a note. That I was pursuing a path that might lead to a cure, and relieve the financial burden I had bestowed upon our family. That maybe it was our best chance of happiness—for all of us.
It was my fault we were penniless. I never could stop myself from blaming my birth.
I had no siblings—it was only me. When my parents discovered my illness as a toddler, they knew better than to have more.
It had been a challenge just to keep me alive.
The older my parents got, the harder it got for them to keep up on the family business.
My father developed a severe case of arthritis, to the point it pained him to move.
My mother, on the other hand, had her sanity begin to slip as I became a teenager.
The first time it happened was a surprise for us all.
She had gone missing one night. Vanished sometime after dinner.
My father and I were not worried until a few hours later, when we noticed she never returned.
We scoured the town for hours in the dark, and the more time that went on, the more we were convinced something awful had happened to her.
Perhaps she was taken. Murdered. As dawn began to break, we checked the western outskirts of Kilamber in the barren hills.
And there she was. The sky melting from black to orange with the sunrise as she turned to face us when we called her name.
She looked the same—and yet, her eyes were distant.
Glazed over in white. My father brushed me behind him as he tried to coax her to us.
Like she was an animal. Like she was wild.
Foreign words upon her lips that none of us had ever heard before.
It wasn’t until she touched his outstretched hand that the fog within her disappeared. Confusion settled, unsure of where she was and how she got there.
It was then we started to question if my illness was hereditary.
That perhaps I was unlucky it had presented itself so early on in life.
Starting with daydreaming. Pulled into a distant thought that sometimes I and my parents couldn’t get myself out of.
The shakes in my fingers, which eventually took over my entire body.
Fragments of words, of colors, of sounds and images.
It could be disastrous if the dreams struck while I was doing something that required my full attention. Like swimming. Or tending the oven.
But where my mother described nightmares in her flashes, I saw light. I called them “glimmers”. Because they were lovely—nothing of what my mother had described. She would see death and carnage, rotting flowers and blood.
And me?
I would see lush gardens. Birds flitting through the trees, and the warmth of sunlight on my cheeks. A river snaking lazily through a forest. The flipping of pages, with a neatly curved handwriting filling the paper.
But every time those glimmers visited me, it would drain me. To the point I would collapse and sometimes not wake for another day. My hands would shake, and we began to question if my fragility was from a lack of nutrition or something else entirely.
A shadow shifts out along the exterior of the castle, and I fling up, reaching for the window latch as Marcella scales the side of the walls to my room.
As I open the window, a fresh waft of chilled air greets me.
Once she’s close enough, I reach out for her, and she takes my hand before dipping down into my room.
As soon as she is on her feet, I close the window halfway to keep the room warm. “No bedsheet this time?”
She brushes down her gown. “No, I didn’t need the extra support. I figured I could make it here without it.” When she straightens, she asks, “Have you given my proposal any more thought?”
Devin’s warning rings in my mind. “She’s a snake, Lyra. She cannot be trusted. She will twist everything in her power to achieve her ends.” Then Aelia’s questioning of whether Marcella had threatened or influenced me.
“How do I know I can trust your word?” I whisper.
She scowls like she’s insulted. “You do realize out of everyone here, I might be the one you can trust the most?”
“And you say that because…?”
“Because, as I told you last night, I have no intention to marry Cyrus. And if you really don’t believe me…” she reaches down beneath her skirts and withdraws a blade that shines in the moonlight behind her.
I fumble backward, holding my hands out between us. “What, you’ll kill me?”
“No, you fool,” she hisses and opens her hand, the dagger lying flat in her palm.
“If you don’t trust my word, that’s alright.
Because I don’t trust your word either. Which is why we’d do a blood oath.
We won’t have enough time to naturally trust each other.
So if we make a blood oath, we'll be bound by more than just our words.”
“And if I refuse?” I ask quietly, looking down to the blade in her hand. “Then what? You’ll kill me? You’ll…undermine me in the trials so I’ll fail?”
She works over her bottom lip, shaking her head slowly. “I want you to make the choice because the pros of binding yourself to the oath outweigh the cons of not making it. It’s immoral to force someone into a magical blood oath. That much I hope you can trust.”
I search her eyes. Wanting to find the right answer there.
Her brother’s reputation terrified me for years.
Even if I refuse and no ill will is held against me by her—will I regret not making it?
As much as I love Aelia and the rest of the women I’ve befriended here, I imagine as time goes on and the competition dwindles, it may turn friend into foe.
At least this way, I know for certain if Marcella and I were the last two standing, she’d surrender her position to me.
And seeing her in the trial—her skills are unmatched.
Besides, can I really trust Devin? I know nothing of the man—other than the fact he’s harboring the secret of my illness. From the king.
“If we commit to a blood oath—” I clear my throat, and the tension tightens it. “You’ll protect me and help me through the trials?”
Her eyes flick back and forth between mine. “Yes, and once you win the hand of Cyrus, you will pardon my brother.”
“You do see how that’s problematic, right? He’s a murder—”
“It was revenge!” she snaps. “No one bothered to explain that the priest tortured Connor’s lover to the point of death before him, while also imprisoning and torturing him for eight days, Lyra. Eight!”
She shakes her head to wave off the heavy breaths lifting her chest. Quieter, she continues, “You pardon him, and I’ll see to it that I guard him for the rest of his life, if that’s what it takes to help you sleep easier at night. I promise.”
Sucking a breath into my lungs, I hold it and nod, holding my hand out to her. “Alright. I’ll do it.”
She flicks a look from my open hand to my eyes, then hands me her dagger.
I rest the pointed tip on my palm, fighting against my instinct not to spill my own blood. The pounding in my head returns, slow and a pulse at first, until it’s caught in a rhythm. My hands shake, lightly then more furiously as I try to drag it a half inch. But I can’t budge.
“Here,” she mutters after a few silent moments. She wraps her hand gently around mine, pushes down, then drags the blade two inches across my skin. Leaving a bloody trail in its wake.
I wince at the hot pain. The throbbing in my skull competes with the new sensation in my hand. I mumble, “I could have done it myself.”
“You were shaking,” she supplies simply as she makes her own cut on her palm. Once she has her dagger sheathed beneath her skirts, she holds out a hand. “This is your last chance to change your mind, Lyra.”
Flicking a quick look between her hand, my own, and her eyes, I tense my jaw and step forward. Grasping her hand with the utmost determination.
I can’t help but let out a strangled cry as pain rips through me, far sharper than the blade had been. She shushes me and I bite down on my tongue.
What have you done?
My knees buckle under the pain. I’m curling into myself on the ground, still holding her hand. The pain in my head explodes into a flash of imagery. Overwhelming enough that it’s like trying to sip water from a white rapid river and nearly drowning.
A forest of creeping fog.
Blue roses scattered across a hill.
Someone’s warm hand holding mine.
A mirror shattering.
Aelia laughing at something I had said.
Standing in a building with the roof caved in as it rains.
Blood being scrubbed from a bed.
A man thrusting into me as he has me pinned up against a tree.
The gardens wilting and rotting.
A woman in a nightgown leaping off a balcony in the night.
A river with two crosses.
“Lyra?” Marcella’s voice snaps me back into reality as she lets go of my hand. She’s crouched down before me. Brown eyes locked on mine, nose scrunched. “Did you just…”
I’m a panting mess, unable to get more than a word out. “What?”
Her eyes widen, lips drawing into a line. There’s a distant look in her gaze before she shakes her head and stands, offering to help me up.
I take her hand with my uncut one, standing on shaking legs. Blood is trickling down my arm, threatening to stain the white marble below. I walk to the bathroom, and she’s a few paces behind. When I’ve washed off my blood in the sink, I step back and allow her to do the same.
Like a thread is tied between my chest and the mirror, there’s a strong tug. Demanding my attention. Like someone’s watching us. I glance up. Nothing is there.
Nothing but our own reflections.
Marcella sighs after she shuts off the faucet and turns to me, leaning back against the vanity counter. “What did you see?”
I shake my head slowly, and she crosses her arms over her chest. “Lyra, there’s no other explanation for your eyes. I know you saw something. Don’t try and fool me. You were shown a river with two crosses?”
My mouth drops open. “How did you…?”
“You muttered it toward the end. Were they new visions, or have you had them before?”
“What are you talking about? They were just…daydreams?” I laugh. “Little flashes of…random things that mean nothing. Just…imagination.” But her words settle into me. Knitting a truth into me that I quiet.
She cocks her head to the side with narrowed eyes. “Your eyes were white. Completely glazed over. The only people that happens to are Seers. What you’ve been experiencing is rare, but not unheard of. They aren’t daydreams—not even close. They’re visions. A peek into the future.”
I shake my head, not wanting to accept it. “No, no they can’t be—”
“They are. Now was what you saw good or bad?”
Swallowing I squeak, “Both.”
“That’s not possible,” she chuckles, then her face falls when she sees the fear on my face. “Lyra, it’s not possible. There are Light Seers who see the good to come, and Dark Seers who see the bad. There is no both.”
“Then I don’t know what to tell you. How is it you know about Seers anyway, and yet I’ve never heard of them?”
“This is all…classified information.” She looks down at her hand that drew the blood oath. “But in the king’s council, there is a Dark Seer.”
I eye her up and down. “If it’s classified how would you know that?”
“Tell me what you saw first. This has to be a give and take.”
Reluctantly, I recount all I saw. Though, I skip the flash of clinging to a man as he ravishes me against a tree. Then, I cross my arms over my chest expectantly.
A hesitant silence stretches between us before she says, “I used to be in Cyrus’ Close Circle.”
“You what—”
I don’t get to finish my thought. The bell rings out and both of our eyes widen as we whip to the door. We both break into a sprint.
As she climbs out the window, she tosses out, “Quick! Get in bed!”
I shut the door and secure the latch before diving under my sheets and stilling myself. The bell rings closer, louder.
As I squeeze my eyes shut, the ringing stops.
One heartbeat. Two.
The sudden silence is almost more terrifying than the ringing. I spend a long time trying to calm my thoughts in the quiet thereafter. Until finally I can fight my exhaustion no more.