Chapter 28
LITTLE ORCHID
THE PLAN WAS SIMPLE. IMOGEN had been over it enough times with Mender Alcuin and Cinah Creed since that initial meeting in her old neighborhood pub to assuage the worst of her paranoia.
Cinah and Alcuin shared a contact within the king’s capital guard.
One they both claimed was an ally to their cause and would help ensure safe passage out of the city when the time came.
She hadn’t dared breathe a word of her intentions to Karrick.
She didn’t want to get his hopes up until every last detail had been polished to near perfection.
She had a hard enough time managing her own expectations.
So much could go wrong. The one factor that gave her a measure of reassurance was knowing that Karrick’s safety was relatively assured regardless of the outcome.
Even if they were found out, the Asterosian monarchs would not dare kill the Primordial Male.
Then again, some fates were worse than death.
Imogen navigated the now-familiar subterranean hallways of the Stronghold with practiced ease.
Never mind the slow, inexorable dread that seeped into her marrow with each step.
She was due to meet the newest Fate for what Vulgren had deemed “an instructional session to manage servicing expectations.” Her time for avoiding the young female was at an end.
Lieutenant Gore trailed her closely and took up a post adjacent to the entrance of the small room they approached. The door was locked. Imogen pulled her ring of keys from beneath the folds of her elder robes with a soft clinking. She had slowly and carefully been adding to her collection.
“I shouldn’t be long,” she told him. Not if she had any say. She had more important things to do.
He nodded.
Imogen stepped into the dimly lit room and shut the door behind her. She turned, the sight rooting her in place.
A young woman, the same one with honey-blonde hair and freckles that she’d seen her first time returning to the Stronghold, stood in the center of the sparse room with hands folded loosely in front of her. She was completely naked.
“Hello, Elder,” she said.
“What are you doing?” Imogen demanded.
The young Fate glanced down at herself and all the creamy pale skin on display. “Mender Vulgren said you would want to inspect me for yourself. To ensure my physical form is properly inclined to receive my chosen male’s attentions.”
Imogen’s stomach soured. “Put your clothes on.”
The woman hesitated.
“Please,” Imogen said.
The Fate turned to the lone table and mechanically began to redress. Once she was fully covered, Imogen invited her to sit.
“What is your name?” she asked.
The woman’s soft cornflower eyes widened slightly at the question. “Mender Vulgren said we left our past identities behind when we entered—”
Imogen waved a hand in the air as though dispelling a foul odor. “Yes, I know what he told you. I’m asking anyway.”
The Fate blinked, pink lips parting. “Railah, Elder. My name is Railah.”
“How old are you, Railah?”
“Twenty-five years this summer.”
Gods, she was barely older than Felíne. She looked a decade younger.
Without thinking, Imogen reached forward, grasped Railah’s hand, and squeezed in what she hoped was a reassuring gesture. Railah glanced down with a confused wrinkle between her pale brows.
“Do you have any family?”
“Yes,” Railah answered. “My mother and older brother.”
Imogen closed her eyes, thoughts going briefly to her own mother. “I’m so sorry.”
“Whatever for?”
Imogen opened her mouth. She hadn’t expected the question. “That you were taken from your family.”
“I wasn’t taken, Elder. I volunteered.”
“What?” Imogen blurted, visibly stunned. “Why would you do that?”
“I want to serve the Goddess and my kingdom. The priests in our temple said I was blessed with a supple body and a resilient spirit. I have prayed so long for the Goddess to show me how I can be useful to her. Then I met Mender Vulgren. He told me of the Fated Mothers and their divine purpose. I knew immediately that this was the answer to my prayers.”
Railah stated it so plainly, as though giving up her freedom and endangering her life was a logical decision.
Imogen had difficulty processing what she was hearing.
Volunteers to the Fated Mothers had become virtually unheard of.
She had volunteered only because she’d been desperate and hadn’t fully understood the gravity of what would be expected of her.
Vulgren hadn’t exaggerated Railah’s eagerness.
The young woman felt she was answering a spiritual calling.
The notion didn’t just perplex Imogen; it horrified her.
“But what about your family?”
Railah shrugged. “My brother left when I was young. I stopped begging my mother to attend temple ceremonies with me long ago. She planned to leave the city and force me to give up practicing my faith.” She leaned forward and dropped her voice to a hush.
“I do not think she is Faithful Cursed, Elder. I think she’s a traitor. ”
Bile seeped into Imogen’s esophagus, threatening to bubble up her throat. She forced it back down.
Railah straightened. “Is it true what the others say? That you succeeded in becoming pregnant? That the Goddess blessed your womb with a fruitful seed?”
The hungry, hopeful light in Railah’s blue eyes made Imogen ill. Words stuck in her chest. She didn’t even mean to, but she nodded absently.
The light flared brighter. “Blessed Goddess,” Railah breathed. “I am honored, Elder. Truly. Mender Vulgren said that my womb is ripening. I will enter a fertile cycle very soon, and then it will be my turn to try for a chosen seed. Will you teach me? Will you show me how you did it?”
Imogen was going to be sick. She felt the blood drain from her face, sensed her complexion turn ashen.
“I will do whatever you ask, Elder,” she insisted.
Imogen had the sudden, horrifying thought that if she instructed Railah to mutilate herself to improve her chances of becoming pregnant, she’d do it unquestioningly.
“Mender Vulgren said you would be there.”
“I…” Imogen replied numbly, the jarring reminder of what Vulgren expected of her stealing all coherent thought.
Railah smiled. It was a full, genuine, sunny smile.
Her eyes sparkled. “He said, when my time comes to service my chosen male, you will be present to help me. To oversee a proper coupling.” Railah grasped Imogen’s clammy hand with warm fingers.
“Thank you, Elder. The Goddess has sent you to be my guiding angel.”
Imogen barely escaped her meeting with Railah without voiding the contents of her stomach.
To say the girl’s fanatical obsession with what she perceived to be her divine purpose was disconcerting might have been the understatement of the age.
She didn’t know what had driven Railah into the open arms of the Faithful Cursed, but the young Fate was now fully ensconced within their grasp, buried in their doctrine.
Imogen had answered Railah’s questions in a disconnected stupor.
She couldn’t even remember half of what she’d said beyond the initial pieces of conversation.
Her brain had operated independently of her awareness, likely out of self-preservation.
These old wounds of hers were still too tender and raw.
It was one thing to comfort a female subjected to abuse, but to face one so willing? So eager? She blanched.
“Are you unwell, Elder?”
Imogen glanced up into Prestyn Gore’s concerned gaze. She forced an unsteady smile. “I’ll be fine, Lieutenant.”
He didn’t look convinced. “Was she…”
“Unexpected,” Imogen finished. “She was unexpected, is all.”
Imogen descended another flight of steps and soon found herself standing before the bars to Karrick’s room. The guards unlocked the cage and let her in.
Karrick was seated at the table with a blunted piece of charcoal, scrawling on a sheaf of worn parchment. He glanced up as the door bolted shut behind her. His black eyes roved over her in quick assessment. He was before her in a blink.
“What happened?” he demanded.
Imogen suddenly regretted coming here. She’d intended to discuss the plans she, Mender Alcuin, and Cinah had been poring over for the past several days.
Had planned to solidify the time and place of their escape.
But now that she was here, standing before him, the conversation with Railah came flooding back, and it was all she could think about.
“They want me to watch,” she heard herself say. Horror leached the color from her face and painted her voice. “There’s a new Fate. He’s going to give you another woman and make me watch as you…as she…”
“Hey,” Karrick said. “Hey, easy.”
It was too much. She wasn’t supposed to be coming apart like this.
She was supposed to be collected. The caretaker.
The capable one. The elder. Yet Imogen felt stitched together with tattered thread, and the pieces were being wrenched apart, straining the very fabric that wove her into one whole.
She never allowed herself even a moment of vulnerability.
She kept her fear and pain locked within an inviolable vault.
She didn’t have the luxury of safety. And now, now of all times, the emotion she’d spent years carefully, dutifully bottling, was threatening to crack her shell.
“Oh shit,” she whispered, voice hitching. Imogen covered her mouth with a trembling hand.
Karrick opened his arms, and she stepped into them, burying her face in his threadbare shirt.
“It’s too much, Karrick,” she croaked. “I had just lost you, and then they took her from me, and I can’t do this. I can’t watch you…and another…” Her voice devolved, cracking, and an ugly half-sob worked its way free.
Karrick rubbed her back with broad, firm strokes. “Who did they take? Your mother?”
Imogen lifted her head and stared at him with wide, terrified eyes. “No,” she gasped. “Gods, you didn’t know. I know you didn’t know, and I couldn’t tell you.” Her face twisted, aghast. “I wanted to tell you, I swear I did, Karrick, but I couldn’t do it. Gods damn it, I couldn’t do it.”
Karrick studied her face, trying to make sense of her convoluted confession.
“She was so beautiful, Karrick,” Imogen whispered. “She was so perfect.”
His hand stilled on her back. “Who?”
Tears flooded Imogen’s eyes, spilling over like a burst dam. “There was a baby, Karrick.” She could barely get the words out. They lodged, viscous and painful, in her throat. “We…had a baby.”
A terrible moment of silence stretched.
Stark disbelief, unbridled rage, and an eviscerating anguish warred over Karrick’s features. His chest swelled with a strangled moan, and he clutched Imogen to him hard enough to force the air from her lungs.
They stood there, bound together in mutual agony, for an eternity. Imogen sobbed great, desperate, wretched sobs that soaked Karrick’s shirt with tears and snot. He shook from the effort of tempering his own emotion, but he never let her go. Not once did he let her go.
Sometime later, they disentangled themselves. Imogen splashed water from his shallow basin onto her face and held a cool towel to her swollen eyes. She’d needed that. Gods, how she’d needed to let that out.
When she faced him again, Karrick was shrugging out of his snot-smeared shirt. He tossed it into a corner and donned a fresh one.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be,” he said. “I’ve had far worse things stain my clothes.”
They sat on the edge of his cot. Imogen picked at a loose thread in her vestments. Karrick ran a hand over his shorn head.
“I wanted to tell you,” Imogen began.
Karrick silenced her. His single hand dwarfed both of hers. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t even think of apologizing. I’m sorry, Gen. I’m so fucking sorry you had to go through that alone.” His hand tightened. “I should have been there for you. For both of you.”
Imogen leaned into him. He accepted her weight.
“Will you—” He hesitated. Imogen felt him work a swallow down the thick column of his throat. “Will you tell me what she was like?”
Something painful and long-buried spread behind Imogen’s ribs.
“I don’t really know. They took her before I could hold her.
But she was already gone. She didn’t even cry.
” A memory Imogen had spent countless nights forcing away resurfaced as easily as if it had happened only hours before.
She glimpsed a tiny limp body covered in blood and whitish film.
Only a brief flash of features, and then Vulgren’s assistant wrapped a towel over the pallid, brown form.
“She had a head full of fine, dark hair. Her fingers were long and slender like mine, but she looked like you.”
Karrick’s face was bleak. “Where…” He tried again. “Where is she now?”
“I don’t know,” Imogen managed, fresh tears welling.
“There’s a small park on the western side of town, away from the busier parts of the city.
It has a hill with a twisted little orchid tree.
I placed stones at the base of the tree for her.
It blooms in the spring with huge purple and white flowers, and when they fall, the entire hillside is dusted in color.
” She wiped her face with a sleeve. “That’s what I call her. My little Orchid.”
Karrick didn’t, or couldn’t, reply. He put an arm around her shoulders, hugged her into his side, and kissed her hair hard. They sat like that without speaking long enough for Imogen to lose track of time.
“I am going to kill him,” Karrick whispered, eventually. “Before my time is done, I will rid Ilistaar of the stain that is Vulgren. With the gods to bear witness, I will paint these wretched halls with his blood. I swear to you. I swear it to her.”
They were the most beautiful words anyone had ever spoken to her.