Chapter 31
The sun rose.
And Ezer led Six from the cave, out into a forest of fresh-fallen white. It was bitter cold, the sky heavy with the threat of more snow.
‘Ezer.’
Arawn had no cloak, but he didn’t seem to notice as he rushed after her, the snow blurring his features. ‘Ezer, please. Let me talk to you, let me explain why I didn’t—’
She turned Six around, so fast that her beak nearly collided with Arawn’s face.
He stumbled back, eyes wide.
‘You knew,’ Ezer said, as she tapped on Six’s shoulder. The raphon bowed, dipping a wing for her to climb on. ‘From the moment you plucked me out of my tower. And you let me think he was dead.’ She looked past his shoulder. ‘Get on, Kinlear.’
The prince climbed on behind her, wrapping his arms around her middle.
All the while, Arawn stared up at them, his arms slack at his sides.
‘You let me mourn, Arawn, for a loss that wasn’t even real to begin with,’ Ezer hissed.
‘It is real,’ Arawn said.
‘He’s alive!’ Ezer screamed. ‘He’s alive and you knew the whole godsdamned time.’
Somewhere in the distance, birds rose from the treetops. She could hear their cries growing closer, as they came towards her call.
She felt like she was burning inside.
Like she was going to keep burning until it took everything down with her.
A raven landed in the trees overhead, cawing down at them.
Then another.
Gods, she had missed their mournful song.
‘Please, Ezer,’ Arawn’s voice broke.
‘Raphonminder,’ she corrected him. ‘You have no right to call me by name.’
Another raven cawed from above.
She could almost feel the sky filling with them.
She could almost feel the wind, whispering between their wings.
Six shifted beneath her, reminding her to breathe.
‘His body may be alive,’ Arawn explained. ‘But his mind died to us all, long ago. What you will find in that dungeon … he’s not the man you once knew.’
‘Funny,’ she said. ‘I could say the same about you.’
And before he could say another word, she clicked her teeth and let Six carry her and Kinlear away. The ravens followed, a blade of darkness that sliced apart the sky.
‘There you are,’ Izill said, as Ezer and Kinlear burst through the black door into the warm halls of the Aviary, after returning Six safely to her cage.
Nearly all of the prince’s weight was on Ezer’s shoulders, her arms around his waist as she tried to support him before his legs gave out.
‘You must have left early this—’ Izill’s face went ashen. ‘What happened?’
‘Training mishap.’ Ezer grimaced beneath Kinlear’s weight.
Izill shouted out an order, taking charge, and suddenly a flurry of servants and Scribes lifted Kinlear away from her, just as his legs buckled.
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Really.’
But his words were weak, and he wouldn’t stop trembling.
‘Take him to Alaris.’ Izill barked orders to the others. ‘Now.’
‘Wait!’ Ezer called out. She rushed after him, as he asked his helpers to pause.
Before she thought better of it, she leaned in and gently pressed her lips to his cheek.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered against him.
He was cold. He smelled like blood, and when she pulled away …
The sight of him held between two others, too frail to stand on his own two feet, made her chest ache.
‘For what?’ Kinlear asked.
‘For being someone who is not afraid to break me,’ she said.
He grinned, even through his pain. ‘You are not easily broken, Raphonminder. And as luck should have it … neither am I. I’ll send orders to let you pass into the prison. But what you will find there …’
‘I can handle it,’ she said.
He smiled weakly. ‘I know.’
She watched as he was led away.
Before she could visit Ervos, Izill had forced Ezer to bathe and accept a hot meal.
It’s not like he’s going anywhere, Izill said after Ezer told her the truth. She brought Ezer a bowl of soup from the kitchens, along with a small bundle of chocolates.
It was the first time Ezer had ever had a true friend.
Her presence settled the nerves in Ezer’s belly as she sat by the fire and awaited news of Kinlear.
And when news came by way of Kinlear’s servant that he was all right, along with a sealed letter meant to give her passage into the dungeons, Izill escorted Ezer all the way there.
‘What do I even say to him?’ Ezer asked. ‘Where do I start?’
‘At the beginning,’ Izill said. ‘You tell him everything in your heart – even the ugliest parts – because if you don’t, it might haunt you for the rest of your days.’
She promised to be there at the exit when Ezer was done.
Ezer’s steps echoed as she followed a rounded stairwell down, past guards and flickering magefire torches that cast an eerie blue glow on the stones. She walked until her legs felt leaden. With every step, her heart raced faster, until she came to the bottom of the stairwell.
‘Cell 59,’ a stone-faced guard said, after reading Kinlear’s letter. And Ezer was on her way, counting the numbers as she went.
The smell was just like Rendegard.
She must have been far beneath the Citadel, deep in the belly of the rock on which the fortress stood, because the air felt stale. Cold, and lifeless.
She walked into the narrow hallway, past countless cells.
The men and women were mere scraps of things, covered in ragged blankets, curled up amidst their own feces.
A horrific place to be.
And not where she had ever, in a million lifetimes, expected to find her Uncle Ervos.
She approached cell 59 slowly, carefully, her heart in her throat. And when she came to the front and peered inside, she wasn’t even certain Ervos was there until the lump of blankets on the cot shifted.
And a ghost sat upright.
At first, she thought the guards had directed her wrongly. Because the man inside could not be Ervos, kind and larger than life Ervos, a man whose laughter held such joy it could have shaken the stars from the sky.
The man before her was skin and bones. His tattered cloak hung from his shoulders like a sloughed skin. Tears blurred her vision. He was covered in cuts and bruises, gashes large enough they had to have been made by the tail end of a whip.
His cheeks were too shallow, the bones protruding from beneath his skin. His head was shaved, his shock of red hair gone.
She felt like she’d collapsed into another of her dreams.
He had lied to her, all her life.
As long as she’d been searching for the truth of her past. But now that it was right here before her …
She was suddenly afraid.
She backed up a step, but something pushed at her back. The wind.
‘Go,’ it whispered.
So, before she could stop herself, she stepped up to the bars.
‘Hello, Uncle,’ Ezer said.
He stiffened at the sound of her voice. Slowly, he looked at her, blinking into the torchlight as if she, too, were a ghost.
‘Ah, my Little Bird,’ he said. ‘I was wondering when you would arrive.’
‘What have you done?’ Ezer breathed. ‘Is it true?’
‘All this time apart, and this is how you greet me?’ he asked.
She crossed her arms. ‘I know everything, Uncle. I know about the blood on your hands.’
‘The … ah. The monster pups,’ he said. ‘I did what had to be done for the Five.’
‘Not just the pups,’ Ezer said, and rage ran through her as she curled her fingers around the cold bars, thinking of how lost and lonely Six had been all this time. Because of him. She took a deep breath. ‘I know about Styerra.’
At that, he sucked in a breath.
And that was all the confirmation she needed, that what she’d seen in her labyrinth was true.
‘All this time, you knew who my mother was,’ Ezer said. When she was a crying child, awake at night, scared of the wolves and wanting a mother she’d never truly known … ‘You fed me a lifetime of lies.’
His eyes had been downcast, but now they slid to hers.
And he smiled. The bastard smiled.
‘Styerra. You look just like her. A gift to see her face in yours every day of my life.’
He said the name like a prayer. And something about it made her skin crawl. ‘You lied to me. Why?’
‘Of course I did,’ Ervos spat. His hands shook as he reached up to scratch at his head, where cuts and bruises littered his skin like confetti. Some of them broke open, and blood smeared down the sides of his bald head. How long had he been down here, rotting in the dark? ‘She made me promise.’
‘Promise what?’
‘To protect you.’
‘Protect me?’ Ezer asked. She curled her fingers tighter around the bars, wishing she could wrap them around his throat.
She’d never felt such unbridled rage, and it made her shake worse than the cold.
‘You hid the truth from me! My entire life, Ervos, I wanted to know who I was, who I came from, why I had these strangeties you begged me to hide. And you knew. That’s not protecting me. That’s breaking me!’
‘I was afraid,’ he whispered.
There were tears running down his cheeks now, making tracks on his skin through the dirt and blood.
‘Afraid of what?’
‘Of you,’ he whispered.
She released a breath.
She shook her head slowly, like that had been the final dagger.
She did not think she would ever be able to forgive him.
‘I tried to stop it all before it began,’ Ervos said.
‘They sent for several of us, years ago, Ravenminders all across the south. I knew … oh, Gods, I knew they would come for you, too, after so many of us failed in their mission.’ He sucked in a shaky breath.
‘He’s a monster, the second prince. The whole War Table, too, for allowing this.
They claim faith in the Five but allow an abomination to live.
I did what I could, before they stopped me.
’ He shook his head. ‘Six months in this hell, and I thought the matter was settled. Imagine my horror, Little Bird, when I heard the guards’ whispers that a beast had survived.
And then, months later … I knew that the one to tame the last beast was you. ’
She stared at him in disbelief.
He’d truly killed the raphon pups, in cold blood. Ervos, a man who had always loved the birds, had nearly murdered Six.
It didn’t make sense.
It felt like a betrayal against her own soul.