Chapter Forty-Four
For a woman ten years dead, my mother runs fast.
My first thought is that Adria has dyed her hair brown somehow. It’s not a common practice, but perhaps she thought disguising herself would make a difference on the battlefield. Maybe she had a wig made for the same purpose.
But then I see the silver at her temples. And the lines on her face.
And then she lowers her shadows over us.
“Mother?” asks Seth, his voice small and breaking.
“Inside,” she says, and my heart cracks in half, the pieces splintering and crashing to the palace steps around me, freezing me in place.
It’s her voice.
My mother’s voice. How many nights had I lain in bed, trying desperately to remember what she sounded like? How many times had I wished for just one more day with her, just one more conversation? To hear her say my name just one more time?
Sometime in the past eleven years since she left us, I had forgotten the sound of her voice, but my body remembers. My ears fill with wool, closing out everything that isn’t her.
“Come on, Sylvara. It isn’t safe. I’ll explain everything, I promise.”
She holds out her hand, and I take it. It’s bony and thin, far thinner than I remembered, almost frail. Her skin is leathery and calloused, and I should wonder why, where she has been, what happened to her to make her this way, to keep her from us for so long, but I don’t care.
My mother is alive.
I float up the steps after her, my legs somewhere else, my body moving in her shadow automatically, like it has always known how to follow her and has just been waiting to do so again.
I feel Seth’s heat as he floats along beside me, equally transfixed.
I reach down and grab his hand, and we are children again.
Him running, me toddling through the halls of Castle Pyka, playing games in our mother’s shadows.
I’m so entranced by her that I hardly notice the changes in the palace. Vaguely, out of the corner of my eye, I see that all of the gold has been stripped. Sconces removed, pots misplaced, paintings missing their frames. Adria’s orders, perhaps, or perhaps my mother’s.
The Grand Vizier. Her white robes are just like the robes Cyrus once wore. This is Adria’s new advisor, I realize with a sudden heart-dropping terror.
Felix knew. He met her. He had to have known who she was, and he lied. Oh gods, when I see him again, I’m going to punch him in his smug face. He knew my mother was alive, and he kept it from us.
This is the woman who told Adria to invade Brakkar.
Or is it? Could Felix have lied about that too? Is there a chance he got it wrong?
A rush of emotions comes over me as I remember her journals. All of the terrible things she had said, all of the things she did. This is my mother, the woman who loved me and held me and sang me lullabies, but this is that woman too.
And I betrayed her. Seth and I both did, though we didn’t even know it. We betrayed our family when we turned our backs on Adria.
What is she going to do to us?
She leads us into the library where Ronan held his war council.
The room is still clearly being used for the same purpose, only now the markers on the map have switched their positions.
I notice that although Adria is aware of the force Ronan has gathered in Pyka, she’s severely underestimating Elia’s legions in Minar.
“Why did you bring them here? Don’t let them see that,” snaps Adria, barely looking at us as she rushes to cover the map with a sheet.
“Did you know?” asks Seth, his voice strangely level. “Did you know she was alive?”
“Fuck you.” Adria looks up at him, her face shiny and red with sunburn, a muscle in her forearm twitching as she grips the table. “I spent weeks looking for you. I thought you were captured, held prisoner. Tortured for information. I waited for the demands to come. A negotiation.”
“And what were you prepared to give up for me?”
“Far more than you were worth.” Her hand tightens into a fist. “Shacked up with an Orsa. Who knew we had two lying whores in this family?”
Seth’s hand ignites first, and then Adria’s. I duck down, not wanting to get caught in their crossfire, but Mother extinguishes both of their flames.
Gods, her magic is strong. She’s been keeping one hell of a secret.
“Adria. Save it. I’d like to hear them out. They are, after all, my children too.” She gestures for Adria to join her at the head of the table, and Adria reluctantly agrees. “Please. Sit,” she says to us.
Seth and I stick together, taking the seats closest to the door.
“Where have you been?” I choke out into the silence that follows. If she has been alive all this time, why not reach out to us? Why did she wait until everything had gone so wrong?
Mother sighs, her hands fidgeting with an amber necklace she’s wearing around her neck. The necklace I wore to the masked ball. Adria must have found it among my things. “I have been many places, most of them unwillingly.” A knock comes at the door. “Give me a moment. Please don’t kill each other.”
The moment she steps outside, Adria and Seth begin to yell.
“When did she arrive? How could you keep this from us? How long have you known?”
“Keep it from you? You nearly cost me everything. Do you know how many of our people died because of you?”
“Because of me? Your attack was reckless. Foolish. I never thought you’d be so stupid—”
“Stupid? I was trying to save your stupid life!”
The door slams as Mother reenters. “What did I just say?”
They silence themselves immediately.
“That’s better. Now, as I was saying, I am sorry it took so long for me to return to you. I assure you I did everything I could to get back sooner, but I had no choice—”
“We heard you died,” says Seth, his hand shaking as he reaches for a glass. Mother rises and fills it from a pitcher and then fills one for me as well. “King Aurelian found you after you threatened Ronan. They said you died in your sleep.”
“I nearly died that night. I was in an inn near the Irai Oasis. Ronan’s camp was stationed along the river, and my people had joined his forces.
Aurelian’s assassins found my servants first. He never had much skill with quiet killing.
One of them, my dear Hestia, screamed, and I stole away out the window before they arrived.
I watched for a time from a nearby palm grove.
They carried away Hestia’s body, and I realized they believed it to be my own.
We were of a similar complexion and build.
I couldn’t risk being recognized in Ronan’s camp, so I made my way south on foot. ”
It’s strange hearing Ronan’s name in this context. And even stranger when I realize he was only eighteen when this happened. “Why south?” I ask. The Machair Plains hadn’t been scoured yet then. If she had been able to go around Ronan’s camp, she could have been back in our territory in a few days.
“Because Father and I were in Minar,” says Adria, shaking her head at my ignorance. “She was trying to get back to us.”
“I thought it would be simple. But Adria’s legions were engaged to the northeast against Aurelian’s, and your father was out at sea with that Adama woman fighting his navy.
I tried for the harbor, but I was caught trying to steal a dinghy.
A Brakkari slaver, a fellow shadow-born out to profit off of Selara’s misery. ”
That makes no sense. “Brakkar doesn’t have slaves.”
“Oh, sweet Sylvara. You’re as innocent as ever.
” She reaches across the table and strokes my hand, and the gesture is so calming, and my heart is so broken for her, I nearly forget every doubt I have.
“Everywhere has slaves. It may not be legal, but wherever someone has power over others, there will always be slavery. I was bought and sold in the black markets of Solia. It took seven years for me to escape the mines. Then two years for me to secure enough money for passage back here. And another year almost for me to find someone who could get me to where I needed to be.”
Let me guess. “Felix March?”
She nods. “He trades in Solia, and he has a mouth as big as his ego. He managed to let slip that he’d met you in a tavern where I was running an operation.
He was smart enough not to use your names, but I realized who he was talking about and what you were planning.
It took a bit of…negotiation to get him to trust me.
I told him to find a way to get word to you that I was coming, but clearly, he chose not to do so.
I’m sure he was trying to find a way to profit off of the information. ”
Forget punching. I’m going to gut that slimy bastard if we ever get out of here. “So you came back here to help Adria,” I say, cautiously twisting the ring Ronan gave me.
“I came back here to return to all of you. I thought you would be together; that’s how Felix had made it sound.
Gods, I was proud of you when I heard what you had done.
It was an extraordinary plan. By the time we set out, Faros had fallen.
I thought I would be greeting you all at the palace.
My family, reunited at last, Vahlo save your father’s soul.
” Her eyes—my eyes in her face—turn to ice as she looks at me.
“Tell me, Sylvara. Is that Calia’s ring on your finger? ”
I tuck my hand beneath the table like a child with a stolen toy. “Mother, I—”
She pushes her chair back, the wood scraping the stone of the floor so loudly it makes me jump. She grips its arms, but she does not rise. “Do not lie to me, Sylvara.” Her tone is exactly the same as Seth when he says it. “I knew Calia for years. Is that her ring on your left hand?”
Adria turns to look at me for the first time since we returned. “You married him?”
I ignore her, looking only at my mother. I have to make her understand. It’s my only chance. “Mother, please. We found your journals. I know you saw the connection between us. Ronan isn’t like his father. He’s different. If you had been here, if we could have tried to make things right—”