Chapter 30
‘Rose,’ Magnus calls as we move to leave the throne room. ‘May we have a moment?’ His eyes slide over to Kyor. ‘You are welcome to stay too. I know there are no secrets between the pair of you.’
His words twist like a knife in my gut. It would be great if that were the case, but that isn’t exactly the truth. Regardless, Kyor unsurprisingly chooses to stay at my side.
As the last to leave, Loch catches my eye as he quietly shuts the door, his gaze holding a silent promise that he won’t listen in.
Magnus opens his palms face up and says, ‘I’m sorry that I have kept this from you.
Your mother, your grandmother’s heritage, your Raven Sight…
I can understand why you must believe it to be another deception on my part, but the Veil is enough to contend with, and I simply did not wish to burden you further.
’ He pauses. ‘I also wondered if perhaps that was what the Veil would show you – that the truth of your heritage was the lesson you might have to learn – and I did not want to affect that. But from your surprised reaction, I see that is not the case.’
It’s the first time Magnus has outright been willing to talk about the experience within the third stage of the Veil, so I give him honesty in return.
‘No. That’s not what it wishes me to know.
To learn,’ I tell him. ‘But I understand why you would think that, now I know the truth. I also understand why you didn’t tell me before, and I accept it.
’ But having struggled with the Veil thus far, even with all my existing thoughts running through my mind, I can’t help but wonder what effect this new addition will have.
His shoulders sag slightly, though whether in relief or tiredness, I can’t tell. Possibly both. ‘My apology still stands. I should have taken it upon myself earlier.’
‘Thank you,’ I say softly. ‘For your apology, I mean.’
A genuine but pained smile alights on his lips, reminding me of the smile my mother gave during the vision in the Veil when she said farewell to Florian.
There was so much love, but fear in there too.
Fear for him? It seems unlikely. More likely, the fear was for the night to come.
She knew, as all great healers do, that labour is not always smooth.
And given the outcome of the event, it was fear well placed.
‘I cannot promise that I will be the perfect grandfather and certainly not the perfect king,’ Magnus continues, ‘but I promise you, Rose, just as I promise every person under my rule, that I will always be there for you, I will always apologise when I am wrong, and I will always try my best to learn from my mistakes.’
Kyor’s grip tightens around my hand.
As I glance up, I realise the gesture was not for me. In fact, he’s not even looking at me. His attention is locked on Magnus, and his face is pale. He knows now what a real king looks like.
As we leave the throne room, Fen and Elska trailing us, his grip remains firm in mine.
‘Is there anything good the Morathkians have done?’ Kyor’s voice is a whisper. A question to himself. ‘We took the gifting and claimed it as our own so others could not benefit. Murdered the Sannings. Lied about the Issen. What good have we done?’
I hear the guilt flooding through him. ‘Kyor.’ I rest my hand on his arm. ‘This is not on you. We’re talking of actions undertaken thousands of years ago. You can’t hold the guilt for that.’
‘Perhaps. Maybe it’s just the lives lost now I have to shoulder.’
As the weight in his words bores into me, I turn to him, ready to take him in my arms, only I spot something – a door ajar in front of us.
Ruben and Benny stand just inside, and there’s something about their tense postures that makes me stop. Benny is reaching an entreating hand towards Ruben, while my friend’s arms remain folded tightly across his chest.
I pull on Kyor’s arm so that we come to a stop. He slides me a questioning glance but joins me in eavesdropping.
‘Please, Ru, don’t do this.’
Benny runs his thumb along Ruben’s jawline, causing Ruben to involuntarily close his eyes, yet almost as quickly, he snaps them open again, his body rigid.
‘Ben, you know how I feel about you. But you need to stop. Please. I can’t do this otherwise.’
‘That doesn’t affect us. It doesn’t change how I feel about us.’
‘Of course it affects us,’ Ruben snaps back, his jaw tense. ‘Don’t be dense, Benny. It doesn’t suit you.’
‘Don’t let this come between us. You can’t honestly tell me that you don’t feel the same way?’ Benny shifts closer, causing a shudder to roll down the entirety of Ruben’s body as once again his eyes threaten to give him away. But again, his jaw locks.
‘You know I do. But you also know what it’s doing to me being torn like this. If, if—’ He stops, and his gaze shifts to the door as if he is worried about being overheard. When he sees Kyor and me standing there, he blanches.
‘Rose,’ he says, panic catching in his voice. ‘I didn’t realise you were there. How long have you been listening?’
‘Not long.’ Certainly not long enough to know what the fuck they’re talking about. I frown. ‘Everything all right?’ I ask, looking between the pair.
‘Yes. Fine,’ Benny says too quickly. ‘We’re fine. Right, Ru?’
He reaches out and takes Ruben’s hand, and though he lets him take it, Ruben’s eyes remain on me.
‘Come on,’ Kyor murmurs, taking my hand. He leans in and whispers in my ear, ‘Whatever this is, let’s leave them to it.’
As he turns, my feet remain planted for a moment. The tension between them – it’s more than relationship woes, isn’t it? Yet I have no right to demand answers. So, with a dryness filling my throat, I allow Kyor to pull me away.
Some battles are easier fought with teeth and claw, Fen mutters. And on that note, Elska and I are going to hunt beyond the pyrrhic, if all is well? We are hungry.
Yes, of course. Go.
The wolves trot off. Food may have been the stated excuse, but I felt the undercurrent: Fen is giving Kyor and me privacy to talk.
A quiet, heavy silence fills the space between my prince and me, following us with every step.
‘So … how are you doing?’ Kyor asks as we walk along the corridors. ‘That was a lot.’
‘For you, too,’ I acknowledge, but Kyor keeps his gaze straight ahead, so I answer him truthfully. ‘Confused. Lost.’
‘About Thessa and the Sannings or about the Veil?’
‘Both,’ I admit. ‘And more. Kay lost the baby.’
‘Gods, Rose. I’m so sorry.’ Kyor reaches out to take me in his arms, but for once I struggle to find comfort in his grasp and step swiftly back.
‘I hate that I’m not there for her. Once, nothing would have stopped me from being with her at the worst moment of her life.
I don’t know who or what I am anymore. Being a Morathkian, even a slum rat, has been ingrained in me my whole life.
Now I’m discovering I’m a freaking smorgasbord of heritages. ’
‘Whatever your birthright,’ he soothes, ‘you’re still one hundred percent Thorn.’
I turn to offer him a smile as a splintering crack rips through the air.
For half a heartbeat, nothing makes sense. The sound is too loud, too wrong, echoing like a thunderclap off the walls around us.
Then I follow the sound and look up.
Above me, the ice chandelier has fractured, a jagged vein racing through its frozen spine, and if it doesn’t stop, the entire thing is going to shear free from the ceiling.
‘Rose!’ Kyor cries in warning.
Yet it’s not me causing the fissures. My magic, for once, is dormant. Whatever this destruction is, it’s not of my making.
The thought has barely formed in my mind when that last anchor holding the chandelier splits.
It is no snowflake; it doesn’t flutter downwards – it plummets.
Crashing straight down towards me.
I’m still staring upwards in frozen disbelief when Kyor slams into me, hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs, shoving me sideways. My boots skid across the slick floor as the world tilts, my shoulders slamming against the hard floor as Kyor pushes me down beneath him.
The ice chandelier explodes as it hits the ground, shattering into thousands of pieces exactly where I was just standing.
Razor-sharp shards of ice scatter across the floor like a storm of knives, fragments skidding and bouncing.
Kyor’s body tenses as they slice through the air and possibly him too, but he doesn’t move from where he’s curled over me, shielding me completely, his arms locked tightly around me.
I can feel the force of his breath against my neck, sharp and uneven, feel the tremors of adrenaline running through him.
Silence follows the crash, and for a moment, neither of us speaks.
Then, quieter than anything, almost lost beneath the settling crackle of ice, he murmurs, his voice rough with something dangerously close to fear, ‘Are you hurt, Thorn?’
I have to think, to catalogue my body. ‘I… No. I’m okay. Are you?’
‘I’m fine, but what the fuck just happened?’ he says as he slowly sits up and looks around. Thin cuts litter the back of his top, but by the looks of things, they didn’t go deep enough to reach his skin.
‘Was that you?’ he asks with no trace of censure in his voice as he helps me to my feet. ‘Did you lose control?’
I grimace at the fact that he would think so, but frankly it’s not an unfair assessment.
I shake my head. ‘No. It wasn’t.’
Kyor’s forehead creases as he studies me. ‘You don’t look surprised. What am I missing here?’
I’m surprised by the weariness of the sigh I exhale. There’s no point in stopping now. ‘I think maybe you’re right that someone’s trying to kill me. Or at least scare me.’
‘Dammit, Thorn! What haven’t you told me? What has Stefan done?’
‘We don’t know that it’s Stefan.’
‘The fuck we don’t. It’s either him or Ranveeg. What else, Rose?’
I inhale slowly, already anticipating the fury of his reaction.
‘That slip in front of everyone as I walked to the Veil that first time? I swear some ice appeared out of nowhere. And that time in the battle yard when you thought you winded me? It was like what I did to Jonas that time. Like someone had stolen my breath.’
‘And you’re only just telling me this now, why?’ he growls. He’s practically trembling with rage, though it’s not aimed at me.
‘You had enough going on. More than enough. I didn’t want you worrying about anything else. Besides, I didn’t want you to go ahead and murder Stefan with no evidence and potentially set off a catastrophic chain of events.’
His scowl is still locked in place, but from the way his chest is rising and falling, I know he’s trying to steady himself.
‘I need you to be honest with me, Rose. If you can’t manage that, then what are we doing?’
The direct accusation causes a flare of anger to burn within me.
‘Really?’ I fire back. ‘You’re going to chastise me about honesty? Have you forgotten about your vow? About your addiction? About your lies? And all the other things you’ve kept from me?’
With a shake of his head, his anger falls away. ‘I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m just… Please don’t hide it from me the next time you’re attacked. This is the third time?’
‘I think so … but honestly, it doesn’t feel very serious. More like a threat. Especially the one where my breath was stolen. If they’d wanted to, I would have died. But they stopped. I feel like someone is trying to scare me, get me to run off, you know?’
‘Maybe, but it’s escalating. If that chandelier had landed on your skull, the weight of it … it would have killed you, Thorn. So yes, it’s serious,’ he says grimly. ‘You are not to be alone from now on. You understand that? And definitely not in training.’
‘It’s not Stefan,’ I say flatly. ‘He could have killed me a hundred different ways in training and made it look like an accident.’
‘Maybe he’s biding his time, trying to see if he can pull you into his expansionist bullshit.’
A pang of guilt flickers in my chest. That’s another secret I’ve kept from Kyor – Stefan’s suggestion that he and I rule together – but there’s zero chance Kyor would let him get away with a remark like that, and for all I know, the Issen is simply trying to goad the prince into a fight so he has a reason to kick him out of Isthyr.
It’s definitely not beyond the realm of possibility.
‘I don’t buy it,’ I say eventually. ‘Honestly, these attacks feel juvenile. Like someone lashing out. It’s not Stefan’s style.’ He’s more of a smooth operator.
‘Juvenile or not, you’d still be dead if that chandelier had hit you.’ The fear’s still there, lingering behind those icy irises, but he’s trying to temper it. For me. He looks at me, then at the shards of ice all around us, a blizzard in a corridor. ‘Can you make it disappear?’
I chew on my lip. Can I?
I reach out with my Issen magic, the cold creeping into my veins until the power is humming under my skin. And then I imagine the ice shifting to snow, and then to water, and then to vapour.
I blink in shock when the remains of the chandelier disappear utterly.
Kyor gives me a small smile. ‘Nice.’
‘Thank you,’ I say softly. ‘You know, for pushing me out of the way.’
He looks at me in all seriousness. ‘I’d take a bolt of lightning for you, Thorn.’
‘Well don’t. I happen to like you alive.’