Chapter 39 Valenna
Chapter thirty-nine
Valenna
Morning dawned damp and gray, with bird calls echoing over the sea. Outside the window, a vast, blue marsh glimmered, broken by patches of cordgrass.
Sennalaith was exactly as Valenna remembered it—soggy, quiet, smelling of salt.
A pod of aquatic dragons curled through the shallows, their spiny dorsal fins splitting the water and leaving V-shaped eddies in their wake.
Their keeper paddled behind them in a narrow boat.
He tapped the surface with his oar as he guided the pod to new fishing grounds.
A peaceful scene, but there had always been a veneer of peace at her father’s summer home.
Everything was the same. The oil paintings of birds and dragons hanging on the papered walls, the ornate rugs imported from Talwaith before it withered into the Scathmore Barrens, the maids humming folk tunes as they carried laundry down the stairs.
As she waited in the bright sitting room outside her father’s office, Valenna tried not to let her eyes drift to the chair in the corner and the basket at its feet.
Her mother was the last living soul to rest in that chair.
Her sewing kit and embroidery hoop sat where she left them on the morning of her death, the needles stabbed through the fabric, waiting for twenty years for their artist to return.
Why her father had never allowed the servants to pack the kit away eluded Valenna. It was as if he, too, was waiting for some impossible resurrection.
Valenna glanced in a mirror mounted on the wall and frowned. She was muddy, her hair tangled. She didn’t look like an avenging agent of justice; she looked like a bewildered young woman who missed her husband very much.
The door swung open, and Valenna’s father stood in the doorway.
Like everything else, he had not changed in five years. The touch of gray at his temples had not yet frosted his golden hair. He was still strongly built. His face bore deep lines, but not from mirth. They were smirking lines. Scheming lines.
He wore white pants tucked into shiny leather boots, a powder-blue jacket with golden epaulettes on the shoulders, and a cobalt cloak on one shoulder, fastened by a gold braided rope looped under his left arm.
When Cadmus saw Valenna, he spread his hands and smiled. “Valeria, my darling! It is wonderful to have you home again.”
After five years away, Valenna wasn’t prepared for how visceral her reaction to her father would be. Her chest burned like she’d drunk acid, and she recoiled from him as he stepped toward her.
He followed her as she shrank away, and he planted his hands on her shoulders and kissed her forehead.
His smell triggered a parade of memories—crying over a broken doll and being locked in a dark room until she stopped; lying in bed hungry because she had shed a tear over a beloved cat that died; flying into battle in a billow of caustic wind, her brambles strangling faceless soldiers.
She had had no hate in her heart for them, or any conception of why they deserved to die.
Was it possible for a man to smell cruel? Her father did.
She forced a smile and ducked out from beneath his hands. “Have you done what I asked?”
“I was so pleased when I received your message. I have long searched for that sanctuary, but I always thought it was on some secluded island. I never guessed it was on the border like that—how clever. And I’m eager to see the hydra. What a fine gift.”
He rubbed his hands together as he spoke, and the familiar motion brought the angry magic roiling inside Valenna.
“You agreed you wouldn’t attack Cobblepine,” she said. “You said you would only take the hydra.”
“Of course. And I meant to keep my word, I really did, but I was so eager. Twenty years is a long time to search!”
White-hot terror shot through Valenna. “You promised you would leave them in peace! It was a condition of our deal!”
“I know, I know.” He creased his brow and looked regretful. “I’m such an impatient person. I’m so sorry. It wasn’t much—one detachment, a few phoenixes, and a dreadnought or two. And we didn’t take everyone. Just the youths.”
If her father attacked the sanctuary last night, then Evander might have been caught in the raid. What if he was inside the inn when the phoenixes arrived? What if he was captured?
“And who did you say the child’s father was?” Cadmus asked with thinly veiled malice in his voice.
“I said he was an Allageshan farmer named …” She searched in her mind for a name. “Leroy.”
“Oh, he died, did he not?”
She conjured a sorrowful expression. “He did.”
Cadmus rubbed his smooth chin. “Well, that’s taken care of, I suppose. If you want to marry, I can arrange it. You will need to produce a legitimate heir eventually, once we’ve defeated Marwenna, of course.”
“I’m not interested in marriage.”
His eyes flashed, but he quashed his anger. “We shall see.”
When she sent a message to Cadmus begging for his caladrius bird in exchange for the hydra, she’d told him that she ran away because she fell pregnant by a man who later abandoned her and the child.
She said the child was very ill and needed the bird’s gift to survive.
It was a cliché story, but she knew her father’s disdain for her would render it believable.
Valenna turned away from him as nettles stung her ankles. The pain was pleasurable.
She was home, and Cadmus stood before her without his caladrius bird. It was beautiful how his thirst for revenge dropped him into the path of her own vengeance. She had saved Evander and secured her father’s demise at the same time.
She smiled to herself—a crooked, scheming smile, and, as she did, she glimpsed her reflection in the mirror. And she saw her father in her face.
It frightened her, and she started out of the mirror’s accusatory view.
“It is interesting, my dear,” her father said, his boots jingling as he swept across the room and sat in a graceful heap on a silver velvet sofa under the window, “that you are back just now, on the eve of my invasion. A wonderful coincidence.”
Nausea pitched in Valenna’s stomach. “I should like to go to my room and rest,” she said.
Cadmus smiled benevolently. “Of course, of course. We will talk soon. Guard!”
A guard entered.
“Accompany the princess to her room, please!”
The guard led her down corridors and up staircases, but Valenna’s feet knew the way to her old attic bedroom.
It was exactly as she’d left it—stark and humorless, with wood paneling, a bed draped with a simple gray blanket, and a lonely map of Sennalaith adorning the walls.
As she crossed the room, her feet crunched on dead plants.
Once the guard was gone, she moved to the wardrobe and, taking a deep breath, she pulled open the doors.
The smell nearly toppled her—cedar and leaf rot. Dry brown vines covered the walls. She slammed the doors shut and took three more tremulous breaths before she opened them again.
It was a large wardrobe, and quite deep. Inside hung her old clothes: sky-blue Sennaliathic uniform jackets, and a few purple dragon scale trousers and shirts for battle. Her father liked her to stand out—his little demon child.
Taking a lantern from the vanity, she stepped into the closet and knelt before the back wall, feeling for the notch.
She found it and slid a panel aside, then crawled on her hands and knees into the narrow space beyond.
It was no more than a nook, barely tall enough to sit up in.
The floor was carpeted with one of her mother’s favorite ornate rugs.
Valenna had stolen it from the library when she was twelve.
Her father never noticed, and the servants didn’t tell.
The walls were fitted with shelves she’d built herself at the cost of dozens of splinters and blisters.
The shelves were lined with books, also taken from the library, and scattered with seashells she’d snatched and hidden in her pockets while training by the shore.
Juvenile sketches of dresses she’d dreamed of between battles peeled off the paneling.
It was like a museum of her sad childhood. All her hope and grief and will to survive spread out in front of her like a picnic of pain.
A dry tendril of strangling ivy attempted to climb the walls, but it was weak, withering.
Finally back in Sennalaith, Valenna found, with a pang of disappointment, that her desire to burn her father and his entire kingdom to the ground had worn thin.
She’d escaped this place once, and she’d worn beautiful dresses, read wonderful books, and married a kind man whom she loved with an overwhelming passion.
Next to all that, her vengeful wrath seemed small, common, like a mangy cat.
Drawing up her knees, Valenna covered her face with her hands and wished she could cry.
She had done a wicked, desperate thing in betraying Cobblepine and, though she couldn’t regret it, she knew that Evander would never forgive her.
Before Cobblepine, her anger had thrived on her innocence and her father’s guilt.
He was a bad person, and she was a good person.
But now, she was a bad person too. Her father had traded the lives of thousands upon thousands of soldiers to avenge his beloved wife.
She had traded the people of Cobblepine to save her beloved husband.
They were the same.
Suddenly, there was no air in the closet, and she felt like another second crouched in the dark would suffocate her. She scrambled out into the bedroom, rushed to the window, and threw open the curtains—then jumped back with a startled scream.
Raska perched outside. She blinked twice at Valenna, then swung her body around.
“Wait!” Valenna threw open the window and leaned out. Raska, hanging from the brick sill by her taloned feet, paused, her wings outstretched.
“Is he alive?”
Raska croaked through the slits atop her beak.
“Did you take him to Ashkendor? Please, Raska, I need to know!”
Raska flapped her huge wings, dropped from the windowsill, and flew away.