Chapter 48 #2
‘It is about Thessa,’ he says.
‘Thessa?’ I frown. ‘I’m aware that you’ve been spending time with her, presumably because she reminds you of your wife?’
He presses his lips together. ‘Yes, in part, but it is more than that. Rose, I cannot know for certain – I do not know if there even is a way to know for certain – but I believe there is a chance…’
Pacing and now babbling. Two things I’ve never seen from the king. Nerves, I realise. Which can mean only one thing: he fears whatever he tells me could damage the relationship between us.
‘Tell me,’ I entreat.
He swallows, pausing mid-pace. ‘I believe there is a chance that Thessa may be your cousin,’ he admits quietly.
I stare at him in confusion. ‘My cousin?’
‘Yes. I wanted to gather more evidence before I came to you with this, but I do not know how to get such a thing, beyond what I have learned of her family.’
‘Which is?’ I press.
‘There are several things that make me think she is related to you,’ Magnus begins. ‘Her role as sentinel, for one. And her mannerisms, many of which are familiar. Too familiar, I believe, to be a coincidence.’
It is depressingly little to go on. ‘That’s it?’
Once again, Magnus takes a slow breath in.
‘No, that is not all. The place that she hails from, the far east of the Hirathean Path, is where your grandmother also came from. Not only that, but she also believes her mother’s eldest sister, her aunt, died at a young age, in her twenties, lost and killed in a storm long before Thessa was born.
But I do not believe that is what happened at all, because that is the age your grandmother was when I met her.
She did not die at all. She lived. She lived here in Isthyr. ’
I hear the pain in his voice. The agony that speaking of her causes him, but we’ve come too far to stop now. I need to know more, no matter how much it pains him.
‘What happened after you sent them away? Why didn’t they return once it was safe?’ I ask him the question that has been plaguing me for weeks.
He opens his lips to reply, but before he does, the door creaks open behind us.
‘Rose.’ Caz hurries across to me. ‘Are you all right? I saw the Torailians. And Brida came to find me. Said you asked for me?’
Her dubious tone makes it clear she suspects the Issen was playing a trick on her.
‘Yes, yes, I asked her to, but now… I’m not sure if this is a good time?’ I look at Magnus questioningly.
‘Let her stay to hear this,’ he says. ‘So you will know I speak the truth.’
I glance at Caz, who nods, and a swell of appreciation warms me. For both of them. Magnus volunteering to have Caz here, and Caz once again at my side.
‘We should take a seat,’ Magnus says, gesturing to some chairs around the edge of the hall. Even when Caz and I take our places, he remains standing. Several times, he moves as if he’s about to start talking, only to stop and remain silent.
‘How did you meet my grandmother?’ I ask gently, hoping that a prompt might help him. Slowly, the king lowers himself to the seat, and this time, when he opens his mouth, he starts talking.
‘I was not yet king,’ Magnus begins. ‘It was two years before my mother, the queen, passed away, and I was guarding the border. This was before the days of the pyrrhic, you understand. Before the Morathkian knights arrived and offered us the use of their magic. In those days, it was a slow, lazy war with the Morathkians. A constant, niggling thorn in our side, but nothing like it is now. I was on the other side of the mountain range when I found them, near frozen to death.’
‘Them?’
‘Yes. Your grandmother. And a priestess.’
‘A priestess? A Sanning priestess?’
‘No.’ He shakes his head. ‘Morathkian. Her hair was dark, and she had a blue stone in her forehead that marked her as one of Etta’s.
She had magic. Gentle magic. She had been visiting temples up north and got turned around in a storm.
The same storm that saw your grandmother separated from her family.
The one that Thessa’s mother believed had killed her sister. ’
‘Which is one of the reasons you believe we’re cousins?’
Caz gasps, eyes wide, but holds her tongue.
Magnus nods, though he remains silent.
‘So you found them and brought them here?’ I ask, more to consolidate my understanding than because I need him to reply.
‘Yes.’
‘And this priestess, she lived with you too?’ Hope teeters in my voice. After all, priestesses age far slower than the average person, meaning there is a good chance she’s still alive, and if she’s in the city, then she may be able to tell me more about my grandmother.
Yet Magnus shakes his head.
‘No. No, she left after less than a moon. Without Lyda.’
‘Lyda? That’s my grandmother’s name?’ An unexpected heat blooms behind my sternum. He has never said it before, and hearing her name now somehow feels precious, important. Another branch of a family tree I’ve never known.
‘Yes.’ His face glows a little. ‘My Lyda. I did not believe in love at first sight before I saw her, but even half frozen to death and unable to carry her own weight, I knew there was something special in her. The way she tried to thank me as I carried her down the slopes, the constant apologies, as if she had deliberately inconvenienced me… She was so humble, so kind. Even then I knew her soul was the most perfect I had ever encountered. And as she grew stronger, I grew more certain. Her laugh… I swear it would have been more effective than an entire battalion in stopping men in their tracks. That smile, more luminous than anything magic could ever create. She taught me so much. About the Sannings’ history.
The Sannings’ past. She spoke of the gift of Raven Sight that had been stripped from them by Sanrott. ’
Their gift of Raven Sight, wrenched from them, and now there is not a soul that has it, bar me. There is no one alive who can teach me how to use or control it.
‘And yet you have the sight,’ he replies, as if reading my thoughts. ‘The first person in millennia to do so.’
I can feel the way Caz’s gaze is boring into me. All her unspoken questions are undoubtedly bubbling under her skin, but she restrains herself from interrupting.
‘So you fell in love,’ I say. ‘What happened then?’
‘Then we married,’ he says.
He says it like it’s the most obvious answer. Love leads to marriage. But I can’t imagine it was that simple. Not for an heir to the throne.
‘How did your family feel about you marrying a common, magicless Sanning woman?’
He chuckles softly. ‘It was not what my mother had envisaged for me, it is true, but she could not deny the love between us. And she knew that the greatest rulers were those with love to guide them. Sadly, she died before she saw the arrival of our child. Your mother.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It is the way of age,’ he replies. ‘And my grief was supplanted by the love that I knew was to come. The life that was growing in Lyda’s belly.’
The heat beneath my ribcage tightens. Not once did I feel I grew up lacking in love. Not before we were stripped, anyway. But now I see how much more there was for us, waiting on this side of the mountains. Had my mother known it?
No, I can’t believe that. There’s no way she would have let us struggle the way we did after the queen’s death had she known this was an option for our family. Gladden root, I suspect, took her memories from her, the truth of her deadly heritage hidden, even from her.
It’s easier to think so, to imagine she was not complicit in hiding this from me and leaving us in the slums to rot when we could have lived with our bellies full, even if it was on a constant diet of riverweed.
‘So what happened then? How did my mother end up in Wrohelm?’
‘Truly,’ he says, ‘I do not know. We lived as close to a blissful life as a young king and queen whose kingdom was at war can ever do. This was before the years of Korvane’s visit.
That is why I was so keen to foster peace with the Morathkians.
Because I wanted a future for my daughter where war was a thing of the past. And I believed we were the start of that.
Of a new future. A new hope. That is not to say we did not have differences when Korvane arrived.
Lyda did not trust him, hated him truly, but that was understandable considering the way the king’s ancestors had hunted the Sannings after Sanrott stripped them.
I think that is perhaps where the fractures began.
But I did not see it then. No, perhaps that is not right. I did not want to see them.’
It clearly pains him to relive those moments, and my throat is thick with sympathy for the king. And so I remain silent, waiting until he’s ready to continue.
‘I found a letter,’ Magnus continues eventually, his eyes trained on his lap.
‘A letter from Lyda.’ He lets out a low breath, clearly still haunted by the words.
‘I never knew until that moment that words could destroy you. Thanks to Uzra, we were forewarned of Korvane’s planned attack, and my Lyda wrote me a hasty note before she fled with Ingrid.
She told me that she was grateful for our life together, for our child, but that our time was at an end.
She wrote that they would be safe elsewhere.
’ He looks at me, tears glazing his eyes.
‘I would show it to you, but I am afraid I was not so rational in my thoughts. I let the hurt get the better of me, and I burned it. An act I deeply regret.’
He pauses for a moment before he continues.