Chapter 13
I paced up and down a statue gallery in neutral territory, trying to settle my nerves. Tonight I was making good on my promise to take Kallen spying.
I stopped in front of the carved figure of Princess Clota, the first Earth lady, whose lush figure was wrapped in marble roses.
This was where Kallen had first told me Drustan had set his sights on me.
The Fire prince had followed me for a moment of innuendo—a moment to nudge me closer to becoming his ally in Earth House—and Kallen had been watching from the shadows.
I’d been so afraid of Kallen back then. Or afraid of the King’s Vengeance, since that was the armor he’d been wearing at the time.
A faerie with a bloody reputation who used threats and blackmail as currency.
He was still that faerie, I supposed. He hadn’t quite blackmailed me into this invitation, but it was close.
I felt a shift in the air, a cool current against my skin.
Mistei was full of peculiar breezes—some from ventilation shafts, some with no explanation whatsoever—but this wasn’t the first time I’d felt one when Kallen was nearby.
I turned and saw a shadow curling through the corridor, moving quickly.
It stopped a few feet away, and the darkness solidified before unraveling to reveal his tall frame.
“You move fast like that,” I said, fighting a fresh spike of nervousness. Kallen might not frighten me the way he once had, but his presence wasn’t exactly calming.
He nodded. “It’s difficult to maintain over long distances, but helpful for bursts of speed.”
“And for skulking around in poorly lit areas.”
“That, too.”
I took him in. He was wearing black, as always, but these clothes were more casual than his stiff formal tunics.
His boots were scuffed, the leather well worn.
An outfit for moving in, much like mine, though my trousers and loose shirt were dark red.
In addition to the sword strapped to his left hip, a long knife was sheathed at his right.
“Can all Void faeries move like that?” I asked. “Turn into a shadow?”
“Only the most powerful. I’m better at it than anyone else, though.” He said it matter-of-factly. Not a boast, just the truth.
“I wish Blood magic could do something like that. It doesn’t seem fair that only Illusion and Void can disguise themselves.”
His eyebrows lifted marginally. “You could make my heart explode if you wanted to, Kenna. You have plenty of skills of your own.”
“I suppose that’s true.” I flexed my hand, looking at it. I hadn’t dipped much into my new magic yet. What were its limits? Could I torture someone with a thought? Tear their arms and legs off without touching them? Destroy the part of their brain where reason resided?
All of those ideas were disquieting, but my gifts needn’t only involve destruction. I could heal wounds. Maybe calm someone whose heart was racing or who couldn’t draw a deep enough breath. And if I could give pain…I must be able to give pleasure, too.
I dropped my hand, feeling flustered at the thought. “So. Where should we spy?”
“I want to see who’s coming and going from Light House. I caught a Light faerie setting a trap near Void House today.”
“A trap?”
“A bushel of explosive powder hidden in an alcove.”
Alarm spiked. “That’s against the rules of the Accord.”
He shrugged. “Without a criminal, can it still be called a crime?”
“But you caught them.”
He reached up to rub his left shoulder, tipping his head to the side. “I don’t know if he was following Torin and Rowena’s orders or if he had a personal grudge.”
“Did you ask him if he was following their orders?”
His face didn’t change expression. “I did.”
“And?”
“He stabbed me with a hidden knife. Una ripped him in two for it.”
“You were stabbed ?” I reached for him instinctively, wanting to check for wounds, then stopped. “Where?”
He lowered his hand. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters.”
He looked genuinely confused. “I healed. The main issue is that Una acted too rashly. She eliminated him before I could get deeper into the questioning.”
I didn’t care what Kallen’s sister had done to the faerie who’d wounded him. I cared that he’d been hurt. “Where?” I repeated.
He hesitated, then tapped his chest a few inches above his heart, just below where he’d been digging his fingers into his shoulder.
I bit my lip. “Can I look with my magic?”
“If you need to practice. The injury is gone, though.” Regardless, he faced me more fully, dropping his arms to his sides.
He was trusting me to use my Blood power on him, even after telling me how easy it would be to explode his heart.
Nervous at that level of responsibility, I closed my eyes, reaching for the pool of magic inside me.
It didn’t feel like fire, but it still burned.
Hot, liquid, deep. The magic surged to greet me, slithering through my veins and making my fingertips tingle.
Kallen formed in my mind’s eye. The beat of his heart pulsed against my new senses, and as I deepened the focus, I discovered the countless tributaries of his veins, the sturdy structure of his bones, and the coiled strength of his muscles.
Focusing on the left side of his chest, I hesitantly sent a tendril of magic towards him, shaping a wish to know if he was in pain.
My power found smooth skin, a thick slab of pectoral muscle, ribs, lung, heart, spine. All unblemished.
I wasn’t touching him, but somehow I felt the shiver that went through him. I lingered in the sensation, marveling at being able to know someone else’s body like this, from the inside out. I could feel the tension in his shoulders, the knot that had formed there that he’d been trying to work out.
Then I frowned as the edges of my magic brushed up against something else. Scar tissue, coiled around his ribs. Faeries didn’t scar unless they’d been injured before becoming immortal, or unless certain herbs had been rubbed into fresh wounds to prevent them from healing correctly.
Who had hurt Kallen, and when had it happened? Could I heal that old scar? I had just started thinking about it, pushing my magic against the ridge of raised skin, when Kallen abruptly jerked away. My eyes flew open to see him looking at me with a tense expression.
The look was gone too soon for me to figure out what the feeling beneath it had been. “As you can see,” he said crisply. “Uninjured. Let’s not waste any more time.”
“Very well,” I said, though my pulse was tapping too quickly. Feeling the insides of him—the bone and sinew and that echo of an old injury—had been strangely intimate. I wanted to know more about how he was put together.
My lips hovered over the question of what had caused that scar. But he was blank again, deliberately cold, and I already knew he wouldn’t answer.
“Lead the way,” he said.
Light House was the closest to the surface in Mistei, nearest the sun, and it was a long hike through the claustrophobic passageways and up narrow staircases.
We were in one of those staircases now, moving single file by necessity. The walls pressed in on either side, the stone damp beneath my fingers, and I was far too aware of Kallen following close behind.
“I can’t believe these passages existed all along,” he said, voice soft. We weren’t near any spy holes or doors at the moment, but we were moving quietly anyway. “How far have you explored?”
Talking about this made me uneasy; it was a massive betrayal of Earth House. But I wasn’t part of Earth House anymore, and Oriana had betrayed Lara, so what loyalty did I owe her? These tunnels were mine, too, which meant I could do whatever I wanted with them.
I wouldn’t have chosen to involve Kallen, though. He wasn’t the type to sit idle when he had access to a tool of this magnitude. He thankfully couldn’t open or even see the doors without the key, but that just meant more opportunities for him to badger me into taking him spying.
“Far,” I settled on. “But nowhere near all of it.”
“Down to the Nasties?”
I shook my head. “I couldn’t find a route that deep, but I’m sure it exists.”
“To the places where the trials were held?”
I hesitated. “Yes.”
“You killed Garrick.”
I stopped and felt the whisper of air at my back as he nearly walked into me. I spun to face him. He was a step below me, and it brought our faces to the same level. Far too close, but I wasn’t going to be the one to retreat. “How did you know?”
His eyes flicked to my neck, where Caedo was coiled. “He was drained of blood. Once I saw you kill Osric, I knew it had to have been you. I just couldn’t figure out how you had gotten into the forest without being detected.”
“Do you remember the trial?” I asked. “I don’t anymore. Only brief flashes.”
Wilfrid, the Void candidate, lying dead in a pool of blood.
Lara swinging a branch into Markas’s head and Garrick trying to kill Lara.
And driving my dagger into Garrick’s gut before twisting the blade, taking joy in his suffering…
yes, I remembered that, too. I just couldn’t remember why we had been in the forest to begin with or what test had been set for us.
“Not the specifics. I was there when they brought Garrick’s body back, though.” Kallen regarded me with a neutral expression. “It looked like you made it hurt.”
I felt a deep spike of discomfort at someone else knowing the crime I’d committed. “He tried to kill Lara.”
“You don’t have to excuse it.”
“Do I not?” At his steady look, I sighed. “I suppose I don’t. Not in Mistei.”
“Not to me, at any rate.”
He was too close to be having this conversation. Those serious blue eyes saw far too much. “You don’t care that I was cheating?”
“Lara was cheating. You were forced into it.”
“I don’t think that absolves me.”
He shrugged. “I don’t think there’s anything to absolve. We all manipulate the system however we can. We just have to be prepared for the consequences.”
I felt suddenly chilled, and I brought my hands to my arms to rub up and down.
The fabric was fine, sliding smoothly over my skin.
I wished it was something rough enough to catch at my fingers and rub me raw.
“I didn’t suffer those consequences, though.
Oriana didn’t, either, and she’s the reason it happened.
” No, Lara had taken the consequences for all of us.
He was quiet, watching me rub my arms. His fingers flexed at his sides before he clenched them into fists. “It would be nice to believe in justice, the way Light House does.”
Kallen never seemed particularly well rested, but there were moments he looked downright weary. “You don’t believe in justice?” I asked.
“Not in the sense that good people will be rewarded and bad people will be punished.” His mouth turned down slightly. “Sometimes it’s hard to believe in goodness, too.”
I laughed softly, the sound scraping up my throat. “Sometimes I don’t believe in it, either.”
“And yet you’re the main argument for its existence.”
The words took me aback. I let out another laugh, startled this time. “For goodness? I’ve killed people, Kallen. I enjoyed killing Garrick and Osric.”
He looked deadly serious. “They deserved it.”
“And that makes me good?” I shook my head, squeezed my arms tighter.
“I think a good person wouldn’t want to kill to begin with.
I think they’d always strive to be kind.
” Like Anya had always been. A smile on her face, a helping hand when she could afford it.
Infinite forgiveness, infinite generosity.
And look what had happened to her. Maybe Kallen was right, and justice was an illusion.
“It’s not black and white,” he said. “What is the point of having ideals if you never dirty your hands to make them happen? If a kind person isn’t willing to stop a tyrant, what use are they?”
We were debating philosophy when we should be spying on Light House. But Kallen’s opinions were intriguing, and I didn’t want to stop the debate, and he was looking at me like he didn’t want to stop, either.
“Justifying evil in the name of good?” I asked. “That seems like a slippery slope.”
“Do you think killing Garrick was an act of evil?” He sounded genuinely curious.
No, I didn’t, and that should probably concern me. “I think I shouldn’t be the one to decide that.”
“I’d argue you are the only one who gets to decide that. Good or evil, right or wrong. The answer is almost always somewhere in the middle, and the important thing is that we don’t lie to ourselves about that.”
My skin felt electric. The argument was waking me up, invigorating me and making me think.
I’d been reacting out of fear to so much these last six months, but right now it was just the two of us in a darkened stairwell, away from any listening ears or prying eyes.
That privacy made me feel safe enough to ask the next question.
“Do you ever feel guilty about what you’ve done? ”
“Always.” His eyes held the dark of a winter’s night.
“Always,” I echoed, feeling a surge of relief.
It wasn’t just me grappling with the weight of all this violence.
It wasn’t just me who felt conflicted and broken sometimes.
Kallen, untouchable and feared as he was, felt it, too.
“You say that, but you still don’t believe in goodness?
You clearly want to do the right thing.”
“I am not good, Kenna,” he said, voice sharpening. “That word has nothing to do with me.” His eyes moved to my lips, then to my neck and the weapon that was now practically a part of me. “But I do understand wanting.”
Shivers chased over my skin. I wanted to say that the desire to do the right thing and the ability to feel guilt were both fundamental parts of goodness.
I wanted to tell him he was wrong to think the word had nothing to do with him.
But the argument got lost somewhere between my brain and my tongue.
Why was he looking at me like that?
I blinked a few times, feeling like I was surfacing from a dream. Why were we having this debate to begin with? This was supposed to be a mission. Something like blackmail but not quite, like we were allies but not quite.
Kallen wasn’t my friend. I didn’t know what he was, but it wasn’t that.
I let go of the desire to keep engaging in this strange argument and turned to start climbing again. “What I want right now is to get this done with so we can both go home and rest.”
For a moment there was no noise from behind me. Then I heard the brush of his foot against the stairs, and we resumed the climb in silence.