Chapter 12 Vengeance Must Be Had
Vengeance Must Be Had
“There she is.”
The Finally Rafaela didn’t also say was nevertheless loud in the judgmental arch of her brows and the severe tilt of her mouth.
Thick olandule smoke wreathed her private parlor, enclosing the settee where Alonso and I sat in a cloud-like haze that smelled of flowered meadows.
Her eyes, sharpened by the olandule, pierced me as she inhaled deeply through the mouthpiece of her pipe—a rare-and-priceless spike made from an unborn serpunta.
The little body of the snake-like changeling served as an unsurpassed filter for the potent olandule herb.
“It’s good to see our daughter sitting here with us once more.” Rafaela blew out a stream of smoke. “Weakness is—”
My memory was quick to fill in several possibilities: Weakness is not an option, weakness is for losers, weakness is the worst kind of defeat.
“—a worse fate than a final death.”
Alonso squeezed my knee with an empathetic wince before telling her, “Aw, Rafi, stop spinning her spit. She just lost her brother.”
Rafi’s eyes narrowed on him. “We just lost a son, when we believed we’d already lost a daughter. You don’t see me breaking, do you?” She exhaled smoke through both nostrils like a dragon. When she ran the tip of her tongue along a fang, the resemblance became acute.
“That’s ’cause you’re not capable of breaking.” I only realized I was going to speak once I heard the words outside of me.
I had escaped the sea. But I hadn’t escaped Teo’s death.
I felt as if there were still an entire ocean of water crushing my body.
Rafaela smiled—as much as she ever smiled, anyway. “That’s right, Soravelle. And I thought you’d learned your lesson. Breaking is dangerous, not just to yourself, but to those you love. To those who depend upon you for their safety.”
“How could I ever forget?” I heard myself as if from far, far away.
“One should never forget failing a sister.”
I got the impression she was talking about her sister and not mine, but the jab still stung.
“She didn’t fail Teo,” Alonso said.
Rafaela said nothing.
“Where is he?” I asked with renewed urgency.
“He’s … dead,” Alonso uttered slowly, as if suddenly concerned the trauma had left me slow of mind.
I grunted impatiently. “Where’s his body? How are you so sure he’s dead? Did they take his head? His heart? His blood?” I swallowed around a painfully tight throat. “Who killed him? And where can I find them now?”
Alonso squeezed my knee again. “Take it easy, slowly. You only just found out about Teo—”
“I didn’t.”
“What?”
“I already knew.”
Alonso and Rafaela shared a look.
“How did you already know?” Alonso asked, again slowly.
“Because he and I are twins.” When that didn’t seem to sufficiently convey the magnitude of our connection to each other, I added simply, “He’s my Teo.”
I leaned back onto the settee and tilted my head up.
Overhead, illuminated by a dozen lumoons, a fresco depicted a bloody battle.
Dark creatures with fangs, leathery wings, and clinging shadows attacked light creatures with white feathered wings and a warm glow.
Preserved by a spell, the fresco was as crisp now as it was the first time I saw it, forever telling a story as ancient as the dragons.
“I knew he was dead,” I finally said. “I just hoped I was wrong.” I jerked my head up. “And you’re absolutely certain he’s dead?”
Killing a s?nglure wasn’t easy. Teo had never been as powerful as I was. But he was still strong.
“Completely,” Rafaela said, holding my stare.
“Convince me, then. Tell me everything you know.”
“No. First you need to tell us what happened to you.”
I felt my fangs sharpen. “That’s not as important. Not as urgent.”
“Mateo is dead.”
Rafaela let her dooming pronouncement echo for several awful moments, as if Heartbreak crouched on her shoulder and encouraged the cruelty.
“There’s no hurry with him anymore. But you were stolen from us. Vengeance must be had.”
“My vendetta for myself comes after Teo’s.”
Rafaela smiled one of her half-smiles. “That’s my girl.”
“The vendetta for what was done to you is ours to claim,” Alonso said, the soft underside he exposed to me hardened, as if now protected beneath scales. “You were taken from us.”
But I was taken from myself.
“We’ll allow you to claim Teo’s vendetta,” Alonso added.
I pressed my lips together but didn’t agree. “Tell me. I have to know.”
Rafaela took one last pull off her spike and waved it in the air.
A goblin appeared to materialize from the very wall to receive it.
The little serpunta, animated into immortality by a spell, was already coughing out the undesirable fibers of the olandule when the goblin lowered the spike onto a silver tray and vanished back into the wall.
The serpunta’s hacking silenced immediately.
“I insist,” Rafaela said. “We must know everything first. We are your parents. More than that, a great deal has changed since you were last home. You’ll need a history lesson before you’ll comprehend the full scope of Mateo’s murder.”
There it was again, history lesson.
“Tell us what happened to you, then we’ll tell you what happened here. We’ll save the identity of Mateo’s killer for last.”
“Why?” I asked tightly.
“Because now that I recognize my daughter in you again, I know what you’ll do the very instant you learn who he is.”
He. A man, then. The assassin in me started cataloging. Or perhaps a male creature of some sort.
“You won’t listen to us anymore, not even to me. You’ll race out of here to punish him. I won’t let you leave here unprepared for what you’ll be facing.”
I stared at her with a hardening jaw, but when it came to fights with Rafaela, I knew to pick my battles. I won a sad few. Resigned, I sighed.
“If you won’t tell me who, then tell me when. How long have I been gone?”
My mind eagerly filled in such hopeful options as a week, a few months at most, less than half a year, even when the signs suggesting longer—far longer—were too numerous to discount.
Alonso cleared his throat, slid forward on the settee with a rustle against the blood-red-and-gold brocade. “My dearest Sora, you’ve been gone for 121,963 days.”
I blinked.
“It’s been more than three hundred and thirty-three years.” He ran a hand along his nape. “After a few desperate decades without news, we finally accepted that you were dead.”
“Not Teo.”
Alonso shook his head sadly, the movement highlighting a few silver strands at his temples. “No, not Teo.”
“He knew I wasn’t dead.”
“That is true. As the years passed, he was the only one left to insist you were still alive somewhere.”
“He looked for me?”
“To the exclusion of anything else.”
“He was obsessed,” Rafaela said. “Made him practically useless.”
“Teo wasn’t useless,” I said through clenched teeth.
When Rafaela got a faraway look, Alonso said, “No, he wasn’t. Of course he wasn’t.”
“Well, either way, he’s dead now,” Rafaela said, stare lost in the settling smoke. Slowly, she faced me. “You look awful, worse than when I found you on those grimy, filth-ridden streets.”
Worse because I didn’t have my power. Most everything might be overlooked so long as power was the reason.
“Tell us your story. Don’t leave anything out.” Rafaela kicked off her shoes—wickedly spiked heels—and extended her legs on the settee across from ours.
Since it seemed the easiest path to securing all the information I needed, I rubbed at my puffy eyes and began recounting how I’d woken underwater, escaped, succumbed to bloodlust, and was then arrested.
While Alonso’s face was an animated mask of continual sympathy, Rafaela only reacted once, to news my power had been “dampened.” Her only follow-up question was to ask how long it would be until my power was restored, her only comment to reavow that she and my father would avenge me.
When I finished, Alonso’s eyes were red, Rafaela’s distant.
“Now, who killed my brother?”
Rafaela tsked. “You must be patient. You never learned to be patient. The only skill you lacked as my envoy.”
Envoy instead of her assassin, when she’d been the one to insist I become what I was.
I faced Alonso. Immediately he began shaking his head in refusal.
He was the head of this kingdom—or used to be, anyway—but she was the neck that turned the head any which way she wanted.
“I can’t,” he protested.
I reached for his hands, held them in mine with my broken nails and bloody nailbeds. “I must know.”
When Alonso only shook his head, I said, “It’s Teo…”
His head stilled. He swallowed.
As if Rafaela weren’t right there with us, he whispered.
“Alobaz Hawxley. That’s who killed our Teo.”