Chapter Forty One #3
‘Settle down, little wolf. I doubt you’ll believe me, but I’m not keen to see you at the Governors’ mercy again.
I still regret that I was powerless to help you the first time.
’ Her expression was disturbed. Fake, lying cunt.
‘Leave as you wish. I will not stand in your way.’ A sly, mocking smile curved her lips.
‘Until we meet again, Kyra Dae. My dear Oslan.’
Kyra didn’t need telling twice. She grabbed Oslan’s arm and headed for the exit, feeling Lilion’s gaze glued to the back of her head the entire time.
She didn’t stop until they were well away from the Arc and the main streets. By some miracle, they’d avoided the Union completely. Perhaps Roheia was guiding their way.
Despite that, she couldn’t shake the feeling it had been too easy. All of it.
Two steps behind her, Oslan was a silent, sullen shadow as they traipsed to the same spot Kyra had bade Rosary farewell all those months ago.
You’ll be alright, Ky.
Was she alright? In all honesty, she felt the opposite.
Swallowing the lump in her throat, Kyra looped her satchel over her head and set it down on the riverbank.
It was infinitely lighter now without the weight of the Eye.
Yet Kyra couldn’t shake the awful feeling that she should never have relinquished it to Lilion.
That it should never have left the temple’s crypts.
She swallowed that thought down too.
‘We can stop here for a moment,’ Kyra told her brother. The Union weren’t swarming the Upper States like they were in the city, and this little spot by the rushing water, covered by a canopy of trees on either side, was as good as any for what she had to do next.
To say goodbye again.
Kyra turned to Oslan, tears already brimming in her eyes. But his attention was fixed on something else. Something that, even under darkness, could still be seen at the top of the hill, just as unkempt and run down as it had been on the day he had left.
The manor. Their former home.
‘Are they in there?’ Oslan said, his voice barely audible.
‘I don’t know,’ Kyra said truthfully through the lump in her throat. How long had Oslan dreamed of seeing his family again? ‘Os, do you… do you understand what just happened? You’re free. You can go wherever you want now. You don’t belong to her anymore. You’re free.’
His brow furrowed, eyes flickering as they had done in the arena when he’d stared down at the Eye.
They closed shut, and when he opened them again, there was sorrow in them so profound, Kyra thought she might drown in them.
He stared at the house a while longer, and before Kyra could say anything else, he completely broke down.
Sobs shuddered through his body. Tears streamed down his face. His large shaking hands covered his face.
Kyra had never seen her brother despair like this. Not even when their parents died.
‘Oslan,’ she said, voice cracking. She put a gentle hand on his arm. ‘Os-’
‘I just wanted to be free,’ he sobbed. ‘That night… Gods…’
Kyra stared at him, fearful. Had the years of abusing roots completely fucked his mind? Or had Lilion’s slaver’s mark burrowed deeper than flesh, rendering him insane? ‘Oslan, it’s okay. It’s alright-’
‘No…’ he wailed. ‘No, Kyra… it’s not. You don’t know… you don’t know…’
‘Then tell me, Os,’ she begged him earnestly. ‘Tell me.’
Oslan’s hands shook as he took them away from his face. And in those swimming brown eyes, Kyra saw the brother she had once known. The boy she’d grown up with.
He wrapped his arms around himself, the ridges of his spine sticking out against his fine tunic. Then he whispered, ‘It’s my fault.’
‘What is?’
‘It’s my fault they died.’
The air vanished from Kyra’s lungs. ‘No, Os. You had nothing to do with-’
‘I was there,’ Oslan went on. His body had frozen, as though he’d lost himself in a memory.
‘I’d been begging them for months to take me into the city.
Mother always thought it was a good idea…
she wanted us to have a life outside of the manor walls.
I wanted to meet pretty girls, I wanted to eat street food, to taste ale for the first time.
Win would never allow it but I persisted.
I begged mother to take me, over and over.
Then one day, she relented. She didn’t tell Win.
Just for a couple of hours, she said, no more.
Father came too. And that… that was when it all went to shit.
Kyra just stared at him, unable to think, unable to speak.
‘We were chased down an alleyway, somewhere near the slums. I don’t remember the exact place.
Father told me to run, to hide, as a group of mercenaries bore down on them.
I did as he told me, squeezing myself into a sewer drain.
I don’t think the mercenaries knew I was there…
they never looked for me. I stayed there, like a fucking coward, frozen whilst they…
whilst they killed them.’ Kyra stifled a sob.
‘It seemed to last a lifetime… they fought back so hard. They left their bodies there. I crawled out from the sewer when I was sure they were gone and… and just sat with them. I don’t think I cried.
I don’t remember much of what happened next at all.
I don’t remember getting back to the manor.
I don’t remember telling Win what happened.
I do remember their faces, covered in blood.
And I remember stinking of sick. I’d thrown up on myself at some point. ’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Kyra croaked. ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Os?’
Oslan’s cheeks were streaked with silver.
‘I wanted to. But Win told me not to tell you or Dovella that I had been there. I think she worried you would blame me for it. But then she revealed their deaths to you and the girls and I couldn’t bear the guilt.
I tried so hard to just continue on in the manor, knowing that it was my fault they were dead.
I tried, Ky… I tried. But in the end, it became too much.
‘I… I wanted to end it all.’ He took a rasping breath.
‘That was my only intention when I left home. I wanted those mercenaries to find me. I wanted them to finish the job they’d started.
But Lilion found me first. She took me in and before I knew it, I was bound to her.
I didn’t care enough about my life to give a shit that I was a slave.
Days stretched into months, months stretched into years.
I numbed the pain with roots, so much so that I nearly lost my mind. But I didn’t care. It helped me forget.
‘I’d known you were at the Arc for some time, but I was too fucking dazed to do anything about it.
And… I was too ashamed to face you. How could I look you in the eye, knowing what I’d done?
Knowing that I’d completely ripped our family apart?
And when Lilion made me fight you… I wanted you to kill me.
It was all I deserved. It was my fault mother and father died…
I couldn’t be the cause of your death too.
But the roots… I barely remembered my own name.
I… I kept losing myself. I didn’t even recognise you…
and then suddenly I did… and then you were a stranger again.
’ His voice caught, strangled by grief. ‘I’m so sorry, Kyra.
I’m so sorry. Please… please forgive me. ’
She knew he didn’t just want forgiveness for the fight.
Oslan sat on the bank of the river as silent, relentless tears streamed down his face. For a moment, there was a small part of Kyra, a part she loathed, that did blame him.
But as she stared at him a little longer, her own cheeks as wet as his, that blame gently dissipated. He’d been a boy. A teenage boy who just wanted a tiny taste of freedom.
And Goddess knew he’d paid for it every single day since.
Kyra sank down next to him and took his hand. ‘There’s nothing to forgive, Os. Nothing.’
For a while, they watched the river flow, neither letting go of the other’s hand. Everything was utterly fucked, inside out and upside down, and yet they had this. They had one another, after all these years.
Kyra felt sure that wherever they were, their parents were smiling to see their two eldest children together again.
‘What will you do now?’ Kyra asked sometime later. ‘Where will you go?’
His gaze was faraway, glazed almost, as he said, ‘I’ve been thinking about going to Taru. I’m not sure why… but a fresh start in a new place seems like a good idea.’
A slow smile spread on Kyra’s lips. Then, quite suddenly, she was laughing, tears springing in her eyes.
Oslan was alarmed. ‘What?’
‘Taru is the perfect place. A friend of mine is there. Her name is Rosary Talbot. You’ll like her. Everybody does. She was family to me when I had none.’
The cruel irony was that she had had family at the Arc. Oslan had been there the entire time, hidden beneath in the brothels. Lilion had deliberately kept them apart.
For seven years.
Kyra hungered for Lilion’s blood, wanting nothing more than to splatter it all over the walls of the Arc.
One day, she promised herself. One day she would make the Lady of Shadows pay.
‘Taru it is, then,’ Oslan said.
‘When you see Rosary,’ Kyra began, but her throat constricted, heart aching to think of Oslan and Rosary together without her.
They would have each other, and that was more than Kyra could ever hope for but…
Goddess, she missed her friend. She swallowed the lump in her throat.
‘Tell her I’m alright. Tell her that… tell her that I miss her.
And tell her I found the Water Warden but I’m yet to get him to turn water into wine. It’s all very disappointing.’
Oslan did not truly smile, and if truth be told Kyra wasn’t entirely sure he remembered how to, but the corners of his lips quirked up. His soft brown eyes, identical to Win’s, found hers. ‘Where will you go?’
‘I have to go back to Phaenon. I left a bit of a mess behind,’ Kyra said, guilt plaguing her soul as she remembered how she’d left Zuriel. The unnatural angle of her limbs. ‘I don’t know if you knew, but-’
‘You’re the Earth Warden,’ Oslan finished for her. ‘I heard a lot of things in that brothel. Humans love to talk.’ He paused. ‘Is that why Lilion let you leave the Arc?’
‘No, she didn’t know I was leaving. After our fight, I was heading to Taru with Rosary.
That’s when it… when it happened.’ She didn’t know how much Oslan knew, but she wasn’t sure she could tell him the story without vomiting.
She could still feel the power that had surged, could still see her hands drenched in Cristian’s blood, could still see the fissure that split the earth apart.
‘I killed them,’ she rasped. ‘For what they did to them… I killed them all.’
Something like relief crossed Oslan’s features. ‘Good.’
It was a strange thing, to be sat next to her brother again.
The brother she’d thought was dead, the brother she’d grieved and mourned.
It was stranger still that all that had existed between them as children, as siblings, had disappeared into an unreachable ether.
They would never again be those carefree siblings who had once relentlessly teased one another, who had once delighted in the simplicity of star-gazing late at night when they ought to have been sleeping, or stolen cake from the kitchens at the crack of dawn to have an illicit, sugary breakfast in bed.
They didn’t know one another as adults. But perhaps, with time, they could get to know one another again. Perhaps, they could heal together.
Kyra tucked that tiny sliver of hope away. Then she stood, holding out a hand to pull Oslan to his feet. His eyes earnestly scanned her face, and with pain tainting his voice, he said, ‘You look like mother.’ Kyra willed the tears to stay behind her eyes. He promised her, ‘I’ll find Rosary.’
‘Look after each other,’ she replied thickly.
With the knuckle on his forefinger, Oslan nicked underneath her chin, a gesture he’d done countless times when they were children.
Then Kyra watched her brother walk away, finally a free male. And in that moment, there was not one ounce of guilt in her heart for what she had done to make it so.