42. Chapter 42
Chapter forty-two
As if Kaed wanted to reclaim the small moment of peace we’d had before now, he brought me back out to the orange grove.
“How did all of this just happen?” My question wasn’t for anyone to answer, but I felt Kaed’s presence tense beside me.
“My father will do whatever he feels will benefit the Crown.” His voice was strained.
“His family above anything else.” Kaed’s jaw sharpened as he held it rigid.
“He has always demanded I do anything I can to protect our family. He has pushed me to be better. To be stronger. To be more. Ever since my mother …” He swallowed and darted his eyes away.
“My failure is a failure of the Crown. And even if Tir lives for another thousand years, he will force the weight of the Crown on me every day until then.”
The gravity of that admission felt like lead in my blood. A few weeks ago, my biggest worry had been leaving my tiny village. Dismissing Bray’s proposal he’d flung at me had been the biggest upheaval of my life.
Until I met Kaed.
I made to leave, to sleep through this dream, but Kaed took my hand. Sparks danced up my skin where he touched me.
“Come with me. Please.”
It was the plea that undid me. And his hand on mine.
Arguing with those alone was hard enough.
But his eyes were not swimming in memories or hurt. They were hungry.
We’d left something unfinished from earlier. How had that been this afternoon? It felt like it could have been days ago that Kaed’s lips grazed mine.
He led us farther into the garden. The sky had changed from azure and sunflower yellow to a dusty blue as twilight set in, followed closely by heavy storm clouds.
Kaed pulled me by the hand as he vanished into a wall of ivy. Not vanished, but through a shrouded door that led out onto a quiet street beyond the house.
Once outside, Kaed sealed the door, and my eyes struggled to see where we’d just come from.
His lips twitched upwards. “It makes you believe there’s nothing to be seen.”
I looked harder at where the door had been and where it had vanished. As I focused on the bricks and mortar, I could just make out the frame of a door. It blended with the stone as if it were made from it rather than wood.
“Useful if someone doesn’t know what to look for. But know it’s there and you’ll see past the glamour.”
As we stood in the quiet street beyond the garden walls of the palace, Kaed gave me a moment to marvel at the magic.
I ran my fingers over the near-invisible door frame, and it rippled like water to reveal the worn wood of the door.
When I pulled my fingers back, the glamour of just a wall fell back into place.
I turned to see him waiting a few paces ahead of me. Studying me as I had studied the door. Did he think I was going to try to vanish before him again?
He offered a smile, and I thought it might be the most dangerous thing I’d ever seen him do, because I followed, without question, as he walked on.
Fae lights glowed in the streets, the glass houses and iron bars of the lamps tempering the spill of light. They trailed all the way up a winding hill cobbled with smooth stone. More cracks formed in the walls of buildings, the paving, the carvings as Kaed led me upwards.
“Where are we going?” I finally wondered.
“I want to show you something.” His voice was soft, a tender thread in it that I hadn’t heard before.
Kaed led me into a forest of ancient, sleeping mosses and willowy trees.
Only, this forest wasn’t born of the wilderness. It was growing from stone walls, through the remnants of floors. The tall and swaying branches of the trees reached for the skies, unimpeded.
The roof of the structure was completely gone, lost to the ravages of time. We were held by the remains of ivory walls and lancet windows, glassless and woven with ivy. Trees and saplings had overtaken the grounds and broken through the flagstones.
The entire place was like a house of worship to the earth, not gods. A few stray fae lights glimmered through the window frames and lit the place like something from my books. It was magical here, and I could feel its celestial grace even as it was crumbling in front of me.
“It’s beautiful,” I breathed. It didn’t feel adequate to describe the ruins that lay sleeping around me. It was so quiet here, so peaceful.
“It is.” Kaed came up behind me. He didn’t close the gap between our bodies, but I could feel him regardless. “I like it here.”
The barest touch of his lips earlier still haunted me.
“What is this place?” I didn’t turn to him as I beheld the stone garden.
Kaed’s fingers trailed the folds of fabric around my shoulders.
I couldn’t resist turning then.
But he’d pulled away to a sculpture of a fae goddess without answering. The figure was freckled with green algae from years of neglect, the carvings chipped along her delicate fingers, her nose, the tips of her ears.
“What do you think about when you come here?” My voice felt lost in the ancient ruins.
He paused before answering. “My mother.”
It wasn’t the answer I was expecting, but I didn’t know what to expect, really.
“She died. And this was her favourite place. So it became mine.” There was a rawness in his voice, and I wanted to close the gap between us. To stand beside him.
“I’m sorry.” It felt paltry to only be able to offer those words.
He’d said she had passed. I had assumed it was long ago. But the grief in his words didn’t match that.
“I can’t blame an entire nation for one queen’s actions.” He looked at me like that should be enough. His part in the war was still unclear to me but the guilt he clearly carried over it was painted across his face.
“How did she die?”
Kaed’s face went grave, and his eyes trembled with the threat of tears that looked like they had never been freed.
“This was a mistake,” he said, taking my hand and rushing us out the way we’d come.
“I’m sorry. Kaed. Please wait.” I pulled a little against his grip, and I knew it wasn’t my own strength that matched his but his will to stop. I couldn’t have stopped him if I’d tried.
Kaed went to put his hands on my arms but then thought better of it. His fists clenched and unclenched like he might be about to use his magic.
But I didn’t feel that. I felt something more like a pit open up—something darker inside him than his magic.
“If you’d like to tell me … I’d like to hear about her.” I tried, searching his eyes.
I wasn’t sure he was even listening. His gaze was distant as he stared through the canopy overhead to the stars.
Long moments passed.
There was something so fragile about the air around us. One breath before its time, and the tethers to this peaceful place would fray.
“She loved to grow things.” His voice was softer, like mist in moonlight.
“Nothing ever grew in Hayden, so when we would come here, to Viverna, she would spend all of her time in the allotments and gardens.” He paused as his eyes swam with memories melting before him.
“But this was her favourite place …” I could see why anyone would surrender to the beauty here.
Here, the walls bowed to the earth and flowers and growth.
Not the demands of the walls around them.
“She would come here for hours.” His eyes lingered on the statue.
“Before—When we were younger, she would bring my brother and me, and later, our sister.”
There was something tender under the unbreakable fae who stood before me, dark shadows in his blood.
“I was your age when I let it happen.” He swallowed, the apple of his neck bobbing as he fought the words.
My eyes searched his. “Tell me?”
His jaw was set in a hard line. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked.
I knew so little about him, and I knew I already cared.
I didn’t know what that meant to me. But the tangled knot of roots that was taking hold in me was so many different things.
He was still the male who had taken me. He was also the male I thought about at night, in my dreams. He was also the one I’d kissed another male to protect, as twisted as that seemed.
Everything that had been between us was shifting beneath my feet.
A dune of sand giving way under the forces of fate and time.
And I couldn’t explain how it happened. Kissing Eryk had felt wrong, but being beside Kaed felt carnal, almost hedonistic in my need to indulge the desire that poured through me.
And there was something else there too. The same feeling I’d had when I saw him bound and in the Cage.
I didn’t want him to suffer. I didn’t owe him that. But I couldn’t watch it happen to him. His pain felt like mine, carved into my bones. Deeper than anything the skin could sense.
There was pain I could feel crawling through him, down his back, like a spider with a hundred legs and poisoned barbs that dug their way in as they clawed. How I could feel his magic in me, I didn’t know. Perhaps it was the only fae part of me desperately trying to kindle a connection with another.
A rumble of thunder sounded overhead.
I blinked up at Kaed as he looked to the dimming stars.
“My father found my brother and me amongst the dozens of bodies … We were the only ones who survived the attack.” His words were nearly lost under the clouds shattering.
“Hart had never seen blood. He was barely ten. He didn’t speak for a year afterwards.
” Kaed paused as if to take a breath, but his chest was as still as the stone around us.
“I’d barely reached fae maturity, and my magic was still unpredictable.
” His lip shuddered, but he dipped his head, and when he pulled up, his mouth was an unbroken line.
“They never recovered their bodies, and I don’t think my father ever forgave me for that.
My sister, Tempest, wasn’t even five … My mother …
She—I let them die. Both of them. He was right not to forgive me. ”
There was no warmth in his voice, no life. All emotion was completely cut off from his words. It was like he had found death and worn their cloak.