Chapter 22 #2
Kinlear waved a hand. ‘You said that before and look where it’s landed you.’
‘You’re mad,’ Ezer growled. ‘Utterly mad.’
He crossed his arms and raised a brow at her. ‘You’ll be fine.’
‘Fine?’ She threw her hands up, searching for the right words.
‘If you won’t see reason about the flying, then see reason about this.
I am not a murderer,’ Ezer said. ‘You want me to soar across the Expanse and waltz into the Acolyte’s domain myself, stab him with a blade, and—’ Anger writhed in her. ‘Why are you laughing?’
‘Because it perplexes me, Raphonminder, how you can think so highly and yet so utterly lowly of yourself in one moment,’ Kinlear said.
He’d paused by the doors, the two of them several paces apart. The wind howled as one of the doors opened, and a gust of swirling snow spilled inside. A few younglings took notice of them – the snarling Raphonminder, the smiling prince – and promptly rushed past.
‘I certainly do not expect you to be capable of killing the Acolyte. That honor is to be bestowed upon someone else. Someone the Citadel can trust. To be quite frank … we hardly know you.’
‘And yet you have decided my fate,’ she said. ‘Like Lordach has done for the rest of us.’
His jaw twitched. ‘I don’t question the decisions of my father and his War Table. I certainly won’t question the gods.’
‘I suppose you wouldn’t, when you’ve spent your life protected. Knowing you’ll never have to go into war, never have to risk your own neck when the rest of us will do it for you,’ she spat. ‘We die. So that you can live.’
‘Careful,’ Kinlear warned. ‘You don’t know what you’re speaking of.’
‘Don’t I, though? Who’s the one that spent the past many weeks in the cage, while you were …’ She waved a hand, searching for an answer.
‘While I was what?’ Kinlear asked, raising a dark brow.
The door opened again and a few Scribes entered. They bowed to him, and he inclined his head, the picture of respect.
Another spike of rage went through her. ‘While you were galivanting about the castle in your silly little outfits, all prim and proper, and—’
‘We needn’t bring the outfits into this,’ Kinlear said, like she’d truly wounded him.
‘While you were reading books, lazing about in your plush quarters, drinking winterwine from your precious flask when it’s not even Absolution Day. While you were—’
‘I’m dying, Ezer.’
The words left his lips so fast she almost didn’t catch them.
She paused.
‘What?’
He inclined his head towards a small window seat in a shadowed alcove, where few would overhear their conversation.
She sighed and followed him to it. He sat gingerly, wincing, and turned to face her.
She did not sit.
‘I’m dying,’ he said again.
She shook her head. ‘I’m not certain what you’re getting at.’
‘The truth,’ he said. He raised a brow, like he knew she wasn’t getting it. ‘Dying. You know, the way people do when the gods decide they are no longer worthy of spending time in this world. The kind of dying that ends with a freshly dug grave.’
It was outlandish.
He didn’t wield, so there was no reason why he’d be on his deathbed already. He was young, and he was the prince, and they lived in a world of magic.
But then he coughed, and the sound was wet, like he had water in his lungs. He reached for that vial around his throat and uncorked it, his hands shaking as he took a sip.
‘I was born sick, barely hanging onto life, while Arawn was born strong,’ Kinlear said, as he recorked the vial.
He put his head back, letting the sickly-sweet liquid wash over him.
And when he opened his eyes again, they were heavy with sadness.
All the anger had fizzled out of her body, gone in a rogue wind.
‘The Masters, Alaris, all the best Ehvermage Healers we know in Touvre. They saved me at birth. But … they cannot fix me now.’ He looked at the cane in his lap and sighed.
‘There was no accident with the eagles that gave me my limp. Not as many would believe. No illness, that gave me my cough. My body, Ezer, is giving up on me.’
He removed his outer cloak, while she just stood there staring at him.
And when it fell from his shoulders, she nearly gasped at how thin he was. How his shoulders and lithe frame seemed to have shrunk.
In a matter of weeks.
‘What is it?’ Ezer asked. ‘The illness.’
He leveled his gaze on her. ‘It is my fate. Many things have been eradicated from Lordach, thanks to magic. But some diseases still linger. I’ve spent my life serving the gods, praying to them, and … for whatever reason, magic can’t heal me.’
‘But there must be some mistake,’ Ezer said. ‘Surely something can be done. You’re the prince.’
‘Death doesn’t see status,’ Kinlear said.
‘It doesn’t care whether you’ve a crown on your head or hardly a coin to your name.
It chose me. It chases after me. And soon—’ He sighed and ran a hand through his dark curls, pushing them away from his eyes.
‘It is why this mission is pivotal. Not just to the kingdom, to the women and children and men that call Lordach home. But to me. I want to see him die. I want to see the war end before I go.’
Before I go.
Three words that seemed too resolute. Like he’d decided upon his fate.
It was utterly horrifying to imagine.
‘How much …’ She couldn’t believe she was asking this to someone so young, someone who didn’t even wield.
To someone that, beyond his strange disappearances and the cough and the limp …
seemed vibrant. Full of life. And someone, she realized now, that she had come to care for in their short span of time together.
Even if he annoyed the hell of out her, she’d come to appreciate their banter.
She’d come to enjoy the mystery that was Kinlear Laroux. ‘How much time do you have left?’
It felt cold to ask. It felt callous. But she had to know. She had lost so many people already, and now she was about to lose another. The one that had given her Six.
‘I don’t know,’ Kinlear said, and placed his heavy cloak back over his shoulders, fastening it beneath his throat.
It hid his shrinking frame well. ‘It goes through phases. Days when a healer must attend to me and help reignite my strength. Days when I think the end is near, but then the worst of it passes, and I’m back to my old self again.
There are ways to combat the exhaustion, the cough, the weakness my muscles experience.
Thank the gods for runes, but in the end …
it continues to eat away at me. Like a poison. And nothing can stop it.’
She had no words.
She sat beside him, suddenly seeing him differently.
The wind rattled against the windowpane, and she trembled.
‘Do others know?’
‘The ones that matter do,’ Kinlear said. ‘The others speculate. They whisper.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m sure you understand what that is like.’
She nodded and stared down at her hands.
‘I have to make it to the other side. I have to see it through to the end, Ezer. So that I will know, when death comes calling … that I did something of worth. That I wasn’t just the bonus prince, the shadow to Arawn.
I don’t want to be just another portrait hung in the castle in Touvre, for my mother to mourn as she walks past. My father will die soon, and when he does, they’ll remember him forever for all he’s done to protect Lordach.
I want the same thing for me. I want vibrant stories told, and songs written.
I want them to marvel about Kinlear the Brave.
Kinlear the Bold, the prince who saved us all. ’
And suddenly she understood.
Her blood felt cold.
‘We’re doing this together, Ezer,’ Kinlear said, his voice almost worshipful.
‘You’re the Rider. I’m the Assassin. All I need, all you have to do, is get me there.
Take me to the other side, so we can ride Six through the shadows.
So that I can use this …’ he lifted his cloak to show the pale dagger on his hip, the one that had driven into her own chest, time and again in her dreams, ‘… and kill him. I can end this, once and for all.’
She had no words left.
She could see the truth in his eyes. He’d been dreaming of this, preparing for this, for quite some time.
And he hadn’t told her the truth.
‘Take the rest of today off,’ Kinlear said and winced as he stood up, leaning on his cane more heavily than before. ‘Go to the bathhouse.’
She glanced up. ‘What?’
A strange thing to say after such news.
‘Take some time there. Sit in the silence with your future. Your calling from the gods. Wrestle with it, war with it, for it is not without consequences. But in the end … the best outcome is for you to cede to it, Ezer. Let it win. Do it afraid.’
She was so taken aback by the words, she almost gasped. ‘What … did you say?’
He shrugged. ‘An ancient phrase, taught to us when we are just younglings. Everyone born in the Citadel knows it. It means to accept that you cannot defeat fear. So you take it with you and do the thing you fear anyway.’
‘I … know what it means,’ Ezer said.
She’d never heard anyone but Ervos speak that phrase.
And for some reason, it made her gut twist. Because … where had he learned it?
‘I’ve accepted my fate,’ Kinlear said. ‘It’s time you accept yours. At least … we’ll be together.’
He bowed low, and when he came back up to standing, he looked like a prince again.
Healthy.
Happy.
Not at all doomed to die.
He turned and walked away, pausing to speak to some younglings who were busy cleaning saddles. She watched him, wondering why a part of her still feared him, and why a part of her actually liked his company, so long as he wasn’t telling her what to do with Six.
Her dreams certainly hadn’t warned her that he would be the one dying.
And suddenly, his words echoed into her mind.
All you have to do is get me there.
She realized with a pang in her gut … he’d told her to take him to the Sawteeth. That was the mission. But he’d never once mentioned her bringing him back.