Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
“I know how you feel.” I’d spent most of my life being kept out of the way, most of my life being secluded and hidden from even our own people.
As much as I long to be under the canopy of the forest again, I feel strange about returning to Nithyria.
Especially now that I’ve made my own people my enemy.
“Well, I better get back to packing.” Taran shrugs his shoulder sheepishly and turns away to allow me to bathe.
“Wait, one more thing.” He nods, waiting. “Is there anything I can do for him? Anything I can do to help him? What did you do to help him before?”
“I don’t know if I ever really helped him. I just gave him space. Maybe I should have done more; I don’t know.” He watches Ronan, some old regret coming to the surface, but he keeps it to himself, and I don’t pry. “Be patient with him. He’ll come back to you.”
I wish I could be as sure as he is.
The others return a short while later carrying half a dozen animal skins and leather pouches.
“I take it the raid went well?” I ask.
“There was no raid,” says Larus, annoyed with my tone. “Not from us. There were no others in their camp. But we weren’t their first targets by any means.” He empties one of the leather pouches on the ground, and out comes coin, jewelry, and even a few teeth.
“They were cannibals, Sylvie,” says Quinn. She stays on Bitey’s back while Octavia distributes some of what he was carrying to Kira.
“We can’t know that for sure,” says Larus. “But there were more…remains than you might expect.”
“You mean meat. They had human legs on hooks. It was horrible.”
I shudder. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. There isn’t much to eat around here.
It does somewhat ease my conscience knowing what they planned to do to us, although Ronan doesn’t comment on it.
He doesn’t say much of anything as we cross the last of the Wastes, but everyone else breathes much easier once we spot the tiny flowers and grasses growing in the foothills of the Palador Mountains.
Our route takes us along a wide riverbed where only a small stream now flows.
It makes for easy travel and little climbing, forcing us onto the nearby trail only when we reach a waterfall.
The skins prove useful when we stop for camp, allowing us to use the blankets Taran brought as makeshift tents.
I share with Ronan, but I don’t push him to talk. Instead, I hold him to me, gently stroking his back. Just as I’m falling asleep, he stirs.
“Are you awake?” he whispers.
“Yes,” I say, my chest tightening. I’ve been waiting for Ronan to speak to me for the past two days, but now that he wants to, I’m afraid of what he’s going to say.
“What if we get on a boat in Pyka and just keep going?”
We haven’t talked about what we’ll do when we arrive yet.
The plan before we left was to try to organize what’s left of the Selaran forces from Pyka or to take a ship abroad and find support from one of Selara’s allies.
But that was before we saw the city fall, and no one has been willing to ask Ronan what he’s thinking given his mood lately.
“What do you mean ‘keep going’?”
“I mean we get on a boat and say fuck it to all of it. Let Adria have her chance. Maybe she’ll be better at it than I was.” His voice is strangely detached, like he’s been thinking of this for a long time.
“You want to leave Selara to Adria? Ronan, she just sent hundreds of her own people, maybe thousands, to their deaths to secure it. How can you think she’ll be better than you?”
“She saw her chance, and she took it. She’s decisive.
She takes action. I’ve spent the last six years trying to make everyone happy and making no one happy.
I let Nithyria pay the price for my father’s mistake.
I stopped the one thing that might be able to help them.
And then I ran like a coward instead of defending my city to the last. What kind of king is that? What kind of man?”
I tilt Ronan’s chin up to look at me. His eyes dart away, ashamed, but I stroke his jaw until he looks at me again.
“The kind Selara needs. The kind who considers the cost before letting people die for his petty need for revenge.” His eyes flash with fury.
I know there’s a part of him that despises Adria for what she’s done.
“I know how you feel. There’s a part of me that wants to run too.
A part that wants to free myself of the responsibility for the lives of an entire kingdom, that wants to take the trip we planned and leave them to their fate.
But that isn’t me. I didn’t know it until I met you, but I’m not the kind of person who can walk away when I can make a difference. ”
I’ve spent weeks thinking about my role in everything that has happened. Maybe I don’t bear responsibility for all of it, but my actions and inaction led us to where we are at least in part. And if there’s anything I can do to make it right, I must do it.
And I know Ronan feels the same way, even if he’s having a hard time remembering it right now.
“But what if I can’t fix it? What if I’m truly not what Selara needs?” His voice is small. He curls onto my chest, and all I want to do is take this burden from him. I want to spare him from it, to fight for him, to save him from a lifetime of sacrifice.
But I can’t. This is his burden to bear, and it’s mine now too.
“If you truly want to give up, you can. If you truly think they’re better off without you, you can go.
But I’m not going. I’m staying here, and I’m finishing what I started.
If I leave, it’s only to come back with an army.
I will not let Adria win. I will not watch Selara die.
I can’t. And I know you can’t either. I told you I believed in you.
I told you I would fight for you. You said you wanted me at your side as your equal.
” I tuck a lock of his golden brown hair behind his ear, and he trembles at my touch.
“Here I am, Ronan. I’m here with you, at your side. Now and always.”
He looks at me for a long moment, considering what I’ve said. Then he frowns, his brows furrowing as he sinks back into himself. “I just…I don’t know.”
I sigh. He does know, but he isn’t ready to face it yet.
And that’s alright. I know Taran is right. He’s going to come around, and I’ll fight for him until he does.
We finally reach the forest on the next day.
I know these woods. I remember them well from my childhood, the looming trees with moss-covered trunks, the soft blanket of ferns and mulch on the forest floor.
The creaking of branches and the shivering of the leaves in the wind, their colors fading now from green to yellow and orange.
We’re getting ready to set camp for one final night before we reach Pyka when I hear something in the distance.
“War drums?” asks Quinn. Bitey stalks low, carrying her to investigate.
“No,” says Taran, listening. “Music. It’s one of the tribes, probably out on a hunt.”
Ronan looks up from where he’s building the fire, his interest piqued. He loves music. Maybe it would do him some good to have a night to relax.
“Would they welcome us?” I ask.
Taran hesitates. “Not Seth or Larus. But the rest of us, probably. They might recognize you as a Verran, Sylvie.”
“Unlikely,” says Seth. “She favors our mother. House Sergia.”
“That’s not a distinction they’ll care much about.”
I reach for Ronan’s lute and hand it to him. He looks at it skeptically. “You can speak for me, Taran. Explain who I am and why we’re here. I’ve never fought with your people, not personally.”
Taran looks at me, and I beg him with my eyes to say yes. “That’s true. Alright, we’ll go. But follow my lead.”
“Larus, I think we’ve been uninvited from the party,” says Seth.
Larus grunts. I know he’s having a hard time dealing with the fact that we’re coming to the Orsa at all, and I understand how he feels.
He spent years fighting with them alongside my father, and from what they told me, it was horrible.
There were terrible losses, losses that I know haunt him to this day.
Truthfully, there’s a part of me that’s afraid too.
It’s hard to shake the lessons you grew up with even once you realize that they’re false.
But I know from my time with Taran that the Orsa aren’t inherently bad.
I don’t know what these Orsa will be like, but I trust that Taran would tell me if we were going to be in any danger.
Ronan is holding the lute, his fingers ghosting over the strings.
I feel his grief even more strongly than before, and I wonder if I’ve made a mistake in suggesting this.
The lute belonged to someone who died for him in the war.
And then we lost her daughter Stella, too, to Adria in the throne room.
I give him a moment while I get my flute.
My heart flutters nervously when I pick it up, and I’m not sure which thing scares me more: that I’ve somehow made things worse for Ronan, that I’m about to perform in front of people who don’t know, or that those very same people might try to kill me if they realize who I am.
But then Ronan strums a chord. The lute is out of tune, but I see a tiny glimmer of himself come through when he plays. A little quirk at the corner of his mouth, a little flash of excitement in his feelings.
He tunes the lute one string at a time, strumming quietly until the chord sounds clean, each note in harmony.
Then he rises and nods to me, and I follow him into the woods.
The Orsan tribe has gathered around a bonfire in a small clearing. There are twenty or so of them, all sitting on logs felled in a circle around the fire.
Taran whistles to announce our approach.
The music—a cheery tune played with drums, a low flute, and a lyre—ends abruptly. Then a young woman shouts something in Orsan.
Taran replies. There’s a moment of tense silence, and then the woman shouts something back.
“We’re welcome to share their fire,” says Taran. “But they don’t have food for us.”