14. Curse my petty little heart
CURSE MY PETTY LITTLE HEART
Maksym
Irefused to give much credence to the bone-deep relief I felt when the weight of Enora’s head settled against my shoulder or how her exhausted sigh made my chest ache a little. There were already too many damned things I needed to unpack about this woman’s forceful insertion into my life.
Enora’s resiliency going into the initium was not something I doubted—she’d thoroughly proved how headstrong she was in the exceedingly short time I’d known her.
I had even instructed Gallan to be dangerously lax in his assessment of how fit she was to continue, because that was my only genuine fear—she would never cede, but he might find himself forced to decide for her.
The looming potential of having to navigate the bargain I’d sealed if she was disqualified left me pacing in the atrium, surrounded by people I didn’t have patience for.
The cards, drinks, and general merriment that came with waiting for the contestants to complete their initiation grated on me in a way it never had.
How Jasper slipped right into it all, like nothing was at stake, was beyond me.
He took a seat at one of the hauled in tables, took a hand of cards, and didn’t glance my direction again until his swift departure at sunrise.
Clearly, he was vexed with me over the terms of my bargain with Enora—as if we’d had any other tangible option.
He’d rambled all goddess-damned day about how I should’ve been more forthcoming about how she and I had bound ourselves to each other, about how bargains like these really worked.
To me, they were pointless semantics to someone staring down her death otherwise.
But Jasper could hold a grudge worse than anyone I’d ever known.
“You’re going so fast.” Enora’s raspy mumble tore me right from my thoughts, and I glanced down at her.
Her eyes remained shut, but she creased her brow and curled her fingers tightly into my shirt. I possibly had been taking the winding steps out of the caves two at a time with no consideration for her comfort, being jostled around in my arms.
“Sorry about that. Just want to get you upstairs.”
“S’okay.” Enora licked her lips and seemed to wage some internal battle as her brow knit farther and her jaw tensed, but all she did was sigh. I wasn’t going to press her.
Against my instincts, I took the rest of the steps at a slower pace.
Enora had settled again once I leaned my weight into the door leading back into the lower halls and headed away from the atrium.
The last thing either of us needed was to be confronted by a few dozen drunk or delirious Elixia members.
Thankfully, the Keep had plenty of means of discreet travel.
A few brief moments, and we were heading up another enclosed staircase that staff made the most use of, exiting onto the central hall of the second floor. Well, away from the rumble of laughter and noise rolling up from the atrium.
Just as I’d asked of her earlier, Malva was waiting for us a short distance from Enora’s bedroom.
There were few staff I’d trust the princess with in such a vulnerable state, but there were also not many who’d shown up the day after I beheaded my father and demanded they be given a job.
Even fewer still I would’ve granted a role to.
Malva’s mother had served as one of a gaggle of Umbrite women my own mother had trusted implicitly to keep her house running, and she should’ve been among their numbers one day.
Even though Malva had been a fixture in the Keep for years now, I could never fight off the pang of guilt I felt whenever I saw her.
The crippling injuries she’d sustained in the desperate lines of work she took on with all the other women who were exiled from the palace after my mother’s execution were just impossible for me to rationalize.
“She actually did it?” Malva asked, her raspy voice unmistakably awestruck as she scoured Enora’s half-conscious frame with her single, green-black eye, her hands clasped in front of her.
Her other eye was nothing but an empty socket now, covered with a mess of scarred flesh, courtesy of a disgruntled brothel patron some decades ago.
“Mina, give her some credit,” I chuckled. “She did well.”
Malva’s mouth gaped, and she hobbled after me. “That’s not what I meant. She’s just…” Malva frowned. “Never mind.”
I cocked my head at her, but Malva waved me off, reaching up to untie Enora’s sandals even as we were still walking. Ever the one to not waste time. Malva managed to remove one, tucking it under her arm, and had just undone the knot on the other when Enora let out a low whine.
The princess shifted in my arms, turning her face farther into my chest as she gripped my jacket a little tighter, and I slowed my pace dramatically.
Her room was so damned close, but she let out another noise of discomfort I wasn’t sure how to handle.
Malva was clearly undeterred as she finished unwrapping Enora’s other sandal and hobbled briskly to open the door.
“Everything alright?” I asked quietly.
Enora let out a huff to put all others to shame. “Don’t wanna see him again,” she mumbled, though I wasn’t confident I’d heard her correctly.
I didn’t exactly have anything to say to her either, so I yielded to Malva’s impatient waving over, hurrying the rest of the way to Enora’s room. At least we had a measure of privacy with the door shut behind us.
“Maksym,” the princess warbled, and I tensed. Enora was looking up at me, her hazel eyes awash with tears and her chin trembling. “Don’t wanna see him again.”
Goddess below, maybe I was just exhausted, but I couldn’t fathom what she meant. My mouth opened and closed twice in my confusion before I asked, “Who don’t you—”
“Don’t worry, miss. You won’t see anything else; your mind’s clear of it all now.” Malva was there suddenly, smoothing back Enora’s damp strands and fixing me with a brief, annoyed glance that solidified how lost in my damned head I was.
I’d pulled Enora out of the initium; of course, there was someone or something she didn’t want to see again. Her mind probably treated her to an entire evening of particularly unsettling images, as it did for most participants.
Thankfully, that reassurance seemed to do all the work needed.
“Now, can you stand for me?” Even with the hardened rasp in Malva’s voice, the result of another patron incident, she could rein it in to something downright gentle when she needed to. “I’ve salted broth here for you; help get your strength back.”
Enora let out a bone-deep sigh, already squirming to get out of my hold. “I think so.”
I doubted that statement, but I didn’t have any choice in helping the wholly unsteady woman onto her feet as she nearly tumbled right out of my arms. Her knees didn’t seem to want to support any weight, and she swayed right into me with a quiet curse, but Malva was already stuffing a broth-filled mug into her hand and guiding it up to her mouth.
“Help her with that, will you?” Malva flashed me a pleading smile. “I’ll run a bit of water.”
“As opposed to all of that not helping I’m doing, of course.” I took her place, supporting the mug while Enora gulped back its contents and leaned most of her weight against me.
Malva had the audacity to curtsy quickly before she hurried off into the bathroom. How I’d found myself surrounded by so many people who used my position as a point of humor more than anything else was beyond me.
“You’re going to need to breathe at some point,” I commented quietly to Enora, whose fingers tightened around the mug as I tried to tip it away. Stubborn as a damned mule.
Finally, a moment later, she pushed the mug at me as she sucked in a sudden lungful of air, followed by a few shorter bursts and a rather contented sigh.
An amusing mule, at that.
I set the mug down precariously on the closest surface—the arm of a chair by the fire—and steered Enora into a series of uneasy steps toward the bathroom. “Malva will help you wash up and change, alright? Then, I think we’ll get you straight into bed.”
She gave that a considerate hum. “I don’t feel like washing my hair. It’s so much work.”
My lips quirked, a match to Malva’s entertained face as she leaned against the doorway. “Then that can wait until tomorrow,” Malva said. “Come now. Let’s get you a little less grubby at least.”
Enora mumbled something I certainly didn’t catch, and I didn’t think Malva did either, but she gave no protest as I shuffled her over, and they disappeared into the bathroom. The door shut, one of them giggled from behind it, and I took that as good enough.
Honest to the goddess below, I hadn’t intended to snoop.
Despite Enora technically being my prisoner, for lack of any better term, I wanted her to feel like she had some measure of privacy, that her quarters were somewhere she didn’t have to worry about having her things rifled through or scrutinized.
But, I also hadn’t expected to be presented with a journal laid out on top of the dressing table as soon as I turned from the door, or to be struck by such a sudden memory of how often my mother had once sat there, writing notes of her own while the drawing desk went unoccupied.
The urge to drown that memory had to be what drove me to pick up the small book—an agenda, I realized quickly—and skim over the open page.
The most recent entries weren’t filled with much, other than the dates being crossed out or initium being spelled incorrectly but still marked down in Enora’s neat but hurried handwriting.
My ever-confusing curiosity had me flipping forward first, finding holidays and an astounding number of birthdays marked down in the months to come.
The princess was a good friend, and a far more organized creature than I.
When I flipped back through the pages from weeks that had come and gone many times over, I found much of the same. Little reminders to herself of celebrations, of people she was seeing, of plans she had made. Details of her work, on posts and assignments.
It all thinned substantially in the weeks that led to her departure from Odessa, and I could only assume that had something to do with her brother. The princess certainly didn’t seem like the apathetic type.
But perhaps what caught me the most by surprise was not the plethora of activities that Enora had once filled her busy life with, admirability aside.
It was how often she spent time with someone named Theo.
Their name came up again and again, plenty often with other names, but even more frequently alone.
That the princess likely had a paramour shouldn’t have come as any surprise, but it did little to help the sympathy I felt for the poor woman.
I couldn’t help but stare at the bargain mark on my palm and sigh.
“Maksym?” came Malva’s rasp, and I went utterly stiff, turning to find her head poking out from the bathroom door.
I lowered the journal back down as casually as I could. “Hm?”
“I left some clothes there, on the bed. Do you mind?” There came another one of those pleading smiles.
I fetched the neat stack of soft layers and passed them through the cracked-open door.
Malva pulled it back shut so quickly, I almost lost the tips of my damned fingers in the process.
A few more feminine laughs carried out from behind the door, and a set of curses belonging to both women, until they emerged just a few moments later.
Enora was already looking so much better than when I’d carried her out from the caves, though her exhaustion was wholly palpable.
She took both mine and Malva’s help over to her bed without an ounce of resistance, settling onto the surface with a groan of relief.
The princess may have very well been a doll for how she yielded to Malva’s fussing, letting her stuff pillows behind her back and a small rolled blanket beneath her knees before being draped with the sheets and duvet.
“There. Now, she’ll be proper comfortable for a nice, long sleep.” Malva gave all the layers another smoothing down, clearly pleased with her work. “You need anything else right now, miss?”
Enora shook her head, her eyes fighting the pull of sleep, but that didn’t stop a small smile from gracing her exhausted face. “I’m okay. But…Maksym?”
There went my plan of slipping away unnoticed. I took Malva’s place at her bedside as Enora fought her hand out from under the blankets that had just been so carefully tucked around her. She extended her fingers towards me, brushing the back of my hand, and I yielded to her non-verbal ask.
“Thank you,” she whispered, squeezing my fingers as I curled them around hers.
Curse my petty heart for the small flutter it gave. “You’re very welcome, Miss Wynn.” What drove me to bend and press my lips to her forehead, I couldn’t fathom. “Get some rest.”
Her eyes were already closed when I straightened, but that smile hadn’t left her face. She did let go of my hand, however, and I took full advantage of it to escape before I could dwell on the sight of her any longer. Mercifully, I didn’t receive any goading from Malva on our way out.
“I’ll check on her soon.” She pulled the door shut gently behind us. “Eilir will be back in the morning? She’ll need plenty of rest before they’re blabbering her poor ear off.”
My chuckle came from a deep-seated place of knowing Malva had never had patience for our emissary sprite. “Thank you for that. And yes, they will be. Goddess help you if they find you in her room too. They’ll think you’re out to replace them.”
“Oh, goddess help me, truly.”
Malva rolled her eye with a sarcastic click of her tongue, but I caught her measure of hesitation after. While there had been a rather substantial gap of decades in our strange friendship while I’d dealt with my exile, her tells were plain as day.
“What is it?”
She winced, taking a long look back at Enora’s door before taking a few steps and motioning me over. “I wouldn’t want to be presumptuous or speak out of turn…”
I scoffed. “As if that’s ever stopped you before. Tell me.”
Even though I had an inkling of where this was going, I’d still prefer to hear it from her, to know someone other than Eilir and I understood even a fraction of what was at hand.
Malva hesitated for a long moment before her face softened.
“I was young when Her Majesty died, you know? But she was so kind to me and my ma, and…” She sighed. “I remember the things she said. The things she saw.” Malva cast another look back at Enora’s door. “Do you think it’s her?”
Honestly, I couldn’t remember the last time someone mentioned my mother and I felt something other than the urge to end the conversation immediately. Especially not a flicker of warmth coming to life in my chest.
“I think it is.”
A smile bloomed on Malva’s face. “Thank Mina. I never thought I’d see the day.”