Chapter 46
Forty-Six
Ander grabbed me, his arm circling my waist. His mouth dipped toward my ear. “We have to get out of here.”
The hilt of the knife at his belt jabbed into my hip, and I was tempted to pull it loose and stab him. But the situation unfolding around us was hard to read, especially when I felt wild with my feelings.
“Fieran claimed you’re always clever,” he murmured before he released me.
But his words still made me slow, my fury simmering.
“He’s not going to die today. The arena won’t allow it,” Ander promised me. “Now move.”
I looked back over my shoulder.
Fieran didn’t stir.
Guilt speared through me so sharply it stole my breath.
The platforms lurched again. One cracked down the middle, the two halves beginning to sink. Water surged over my feet, icy enough to shock me.
“Cara.” Ander reached for me but stopped short when he saw the look I leveled his way. “Listen to me. The arena is coming down. You have to get out. Tay is waiting.”
Tay.
The name hit like a blade sliding between my ribs. I had done this—I had tipped the scales, I had broken Fieran open for the sake of saving my brother. The guilt surged so violently it tasted like blood in my mouth.
I had chosen, the only way I could, and Fieran had paid in blood.
“The healers will come for Fieran.” Ander cut himself off as the platform shifted beneath our feet.
I leapt from one platform to Fieran’s, barely managing to keep my balance as Ander landed beside me.
“We’re not leaving him behind to drown,” I told Ander. “You hate him. You have good reasons. I know him well enough to believe your hatred is entirely deserved. But still, Ander. Please.”
Ander looked down at me. There was blood smeared across his knuckles and his face. He looked weary, as if he carried far more than one fight’s exhaustion.
“I carried my brother. You saw me do it.” I stepped toward Fieran, bracing myself to stumble out of here with his body.
Ander let out a curse, then cut in front of me. He bent and grabbed Fieran’s wrist, muscling Fieran’s tall frame over his broad shoulders. Fieran’s other arm hung slack, dangling behind the small of Ander’s chiseled back.
There was another crack as another platform splintered apart.
“Lead the way out of here,” Ander muttered.
I surveyed the wreckage around us, the path through the dark water that remained. As the platforms continued to fall apart around us, Ander and I leapt from one to another.
Finally, my boots landed on ground that didn’t rock. I almost overbalanced because I had landed bent-kneed, hands out to stabilize myself, on all those other platforms. But now we stood at the tall gates to the hall.
I looked back at the far-distant stands.
Ander landed beside me. As healers bustled toward us, he unslung Fieran from his shoulders with so much force, it seemed as if he was going to just drop him on the ground.
But I checked him with a look, and Ander—with a muttered curse—laid him with reasonable care on the nearest slab.
Fieran groaned, somehow pushing himself up.
Ander moved to my side protectively, gripping his sword’s hilt.
“What do you think he’s going to do?” I demanded, putting my hand over his. “You beat him to the edge of death, Ander.”
“And he’s still the most dangerous thing in this kingdom,” Ander warned me.
Fieran glanced at him dismissively. His face was a mass of bruises, his lip cut and swollen red. Somehow he still looked rakish and alluring. “I’d never hurt her.”
“Let me stay with him, Ander,” I said. “He’s watched over me enough as I visited the healer.”
“He’s the reason you’ve visited the healer,” Ander reminded me.
“Cara?” Tay’s voice carried down the hall.
He stood at the far end of the corridor, small in the expanse of glittering Fae architecture, wrapped in a coat too fine and far too long for him. His hair was mussed, his eyes bright and terrified and alive.
“Tay.” The word broke out of me like a sob. My feet moved before I could think, before guilt or heartbreak could pull me back.
Ander stepped aside without a word, his face softening for the first time since the arena.
I rushed toward my brother. Tay met me halfway, colliding with me in a fierce, shaking embrace.
By the time I turned back, the healers were carrying Fieran away.
Fear raised his hand, still bloodied, in a flippant wave. I couldn’t read his face.
“He doesn’t want you to stay with him,” Ander told me, calm and rational and perhaps lying to me too. I didn’t trust him.
It felt as if part of my heart went with Fieran.
Ander and Fieran’s lieutenants completed the selection ceremony alongside the other leaders. Ander brought Tay and I to watch from a hall beneath the arena, my heart aching as Anayla selected the other members of Bismyth.
Afterward, Clan Amber received Tay and me as if I were a prize. They cheered as Tay and I walked in behind Ander.
The quarters they gave us were in the midst of their warm hallway, with stone walls hung with thick tapestries.
They gave Tay and me adjacent rooms, with a door opening between the two of them that we left standing open.
I never wanted to be out of shouting distance of my brother again; I felt certain I’d lose him somehow still.
I was one of them, no longer locked out. Or in.
And yet, I’d never felt more trapped.
I sat on the edge of the bed, still wearing the same clothes from the Trials. I should bathe, I should change, and yet something made me resist casting off the remnants of the day.
Dust clung to my boots. Blood—I didn’t even know whose—was dried on my sleeve.
“Cara.” Tay stood in the doorway, giving me a worried look.
“I’m sorry.” I blurted out the words as I leapt to my feet, my grief and shame spilling over. “I tried so hard to get you safe, and here you are in this awful place with me. It doesn’t matter that you’re healed; you’re—”
“Hey, hey.” He wrapped his arms around me, hugging me. “It matters to me that I’m healed, all right? I’m not dead weight being hauled around as you fight the monsters. I can fight the monsters too. I can watch your back.”
I sagged into a hug that felt like family.
“You don’t have any reason to apologize to me. But you know that, don’t you?” He pulled back so he could give me that too-knowing smile—that I grew up with you and all your assorted nonsense smile.
A knock sounded at the door.
Ander stepped in, cloak unfastened, sword at his hip. He didn’t smile, but there was something kind in his voice. “You and every other new recruit will be expected at the shifters’ ball tonight. I’ll leave Candassa and Riven behind to make sure Tay is safe.”
I nodded. He seemed thoughtful, but I couldn’t forget the unsettling look on his face as he drove Fieran to the very edge of death.
Still, could I pretend that Fieran wouldn’t have done the same?
“There’s a spread of food in our common room,” he told us both.
“That’s my subtle cue to leave you two to shifter business,” Tay announced. “And I am happy to do just that as long as there are more of those smoked turkey legs.”
He headed for the door but stopped at Ander’s side. “Thank you.”
Then he was gone, but he had taken some of the fire out of what I had to say to Ander. He did deserve our gratitude in so many ways.
Still, part of me hated Ander.
“Do you know what I admire about you?” Ander asked me.
“I cannot imagine,” I answered.
“You’re willing to burn everything down to keep your family safe.”
“Willing to cheat?”
He huffed a dry laugh. “Anyone would have to be to survive Fieran.”
He twisted the ring off his finger and held it out. Reluctantly, I held out my palm. The ring seemed to burn against my skin.
I was never going to put it on again.
Ander was watching me carefully, as if he’d found in me an enchanted blade that might strike out in any direction.
I needed some of that famed cleverness of mine to make him trust me, but I wasn’t sure at the moment I’d ever trust him.
I was haunted by the look on his face before he slammed his boot into Fieran’s chest.
“I’m not keeping you prisoner,” he said. “But I won’t pretend I trust you, either. You betrayed Fieran for your family; I don’t expect I have any more of your loyalty.”
“Fair.”
He nodded once. “We’ll earn each other’s trust the hard way.”
Before he could leave, I blurted out, “Begin to earn my trust. Tell me what happened between you and Fieran.”
He crossed his arms over his massive chest. There was something he was going to say—probably putting me in my place, since he was my clean leader now—given the stern set of his mouth.
And then he let it go.
He exhaled and leaned against the doorframe. “He and I grew up together. After my parents were killed.”
Grief for him welled in my chest. “How were they killed?”
“I believe the queen ordered it. Then she rescued me to raise me as a son. It’s a favorite game of hers.” He said it simply, like it was something he’d told no one and expected no one to believe.
The queen was a monster. And yet…
“And you obey her.”
“I keep the family I have left alive,” he said sharply.
“And Fieran?”
“He’d been neglected in the palace with no training.
Unarmed. Unprepared. She wouldn’t release him to the academy where the other young shifters train.
” Ander’s voice sharpened. “She wanted him to be helpless. Wanted him to enter the Trials weak. Wanted him dead before he could ever become a threat.”
When Fieran first brought me here, I’d been furious he was throwing me into this dark water. But he’d had his own brush with drowning. “When did Fieran learn to fight?”
“I taught him,” Ander confessed reluctantly, sounding as if he were admitting to something shameful. “My father had been the queen’s most trusted general. I’d had the best training since I was old enough to form a fist.”
“You didn’t hate him then.”
“You know Fieran can be as easy to love as he is to hate.” He leveled that accusation at me like a punch. But he softened it by admitting, “I felt responsible for him. I saw myself as the older brother he needed. I was the one who could save his life.”
“And now you regret it.”
“Constantly.” He fingered his jaw absently, as if lost in the memory of blows taken.
“If you could go back in time and prevent yourself from teaching him…”
He straightened from the wall. “Cara, you don’t know what came after.”
He started for the doorway, then turned back. “Be careful tonight. Clan Amber is curious about their new sister and her loyalties. You don’t have to prove yourself—”
“Oh, I know I do. You can control your people, but you can’t change them. Even I know that, though I’m just a foolish mortal.”
“I don’t see a foolish mortal when I look at you.” He paused. “I can’t wait to see what fierce dragon chooses you.”
I smiled faintly, unable to help it. His eyes sharpened at once, troubled by my guardedness.
“You don’t trust me,” he said.
“You wouldn’t have chosen me if the queen didn’t require it.”
His lips curled disbelievingly. “Now you really are being a foolish mortal.”