Chapter 33 #3
“Two Nightwalkers who’ve been working against the queen from inside her household.” Fear settled into one of the chairs with the ease of a man who treated every room as if he’d chosen it. “Trustworthy. I vow it.”
Corbyn’s gaze moved to me. “And your brother?”
“He is enchanted by the queen, but he’s not dangerous.”
“Not yet.”
“Not yet,” I agreed, because I wasn’t going to lie to him about this. “And we can fix it. I will fix it.”
“You know what you’ve brought into this camp,” he said. “We’ve been warded and hidden from the queen for years. If now she finds us—”
“She won’t.” Fear sounded certain as always.
Corbyn kept his eyes on me. It was as if Fear did not exist to him now. “If she does, these people will pay the cost of your misjudgment.”
The canvas walls were thin. Outside, someone coughed. Further away, overlapping voices gave way to laughter.
He looked at Fear. “We’ll talk about the Nightwalkers later. Alone.”
“Of course,” Fear said pleasantly, but Corbyn didn’t look persuaded by the pleasantness.
The flap of the tent moved aside, and my mother, head bent to duck through the opening, came in. As she straightened, Corbyn, who had seemed indomitable a moment before, was suddenly slack-jawed and uncertain.
“My apologies.” My mother never sounded quite natural apologizing, and she didn’t sound that way now. “I was looking for my daughter and…son-in-law.”
She was taking my marriage in stride. More than I was, at least. I hadn’t told her about the bond; let her believe it was a ruse, as I once had. It seemed merciful when she, too, had to depend on Fear. I could despise him enough for both of us.
“Maris.” Corbyn began strong, with her name, and then seemed to lose the thread.
Fear and I exchanged a glance, allied at once in a desperate urge to be out of this room.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” my mother said, a bit absently, more focused on her mission and, as usual, only slightly on being polite. Then she turned back to Corbyn, blinking, as if she had suddenly truly seen him.
“Do you know me?” Corbyn asked.
“Should I?” Her tone was sharp. But she was always sharp when she was trying to cover a vulnerability. She probably remembered him, a little, but could not place him exactly.
“What did you need from us, Maris?” Fear sounded eager to be both helpful and elsewhere.
She ignored him. She seemed now as if she could only see Corbyn. “I asked you to help me—to teach me—” She put her hand to her temple as if she were getting a headache. “To teach Fear to fight.”
“Because the queen intended to leave him helpless,” Corbyn filled in. “You and I tried to protect him together.”
“It did not go very well.” She glanced at Fear, and there was something maternal in her gaze, something worried, as if he wasn’t the most frightening shifter in the kingdom. Not to her. “We failed him.”
“I don’t feel failed.” Fear told her with a grin. He turned that devastating smile on me, trying to include me.
Then I felt, as much as I saw, Corbyn’s gaze sweep up. He studied us, frowning, as if he had clocked something wrong between the two of us.
But he had his own problems. “I’m sorry, Maris. I didn’t want to lose you.”
“Wait.” She held up her hand. “Wait. You aren’t—I remember someone else, but it’s all mixed up.”
“To keep you safe, you had to forget who I was,” he said gently.
She looked up at him, wild-eyed. “Do you know what I remember? What must have been a lie if you…if you are…”
Fear’s hand was on my back again, and this time, he didn’t give me a choice. He swept me out of the tent with him.
But I could still hear their voices behind me.
“I can take away the enchantment. You can remember it all—”
“Why do you think I would want your fingers in my mind again? If you gifted me this to begin with?”
My mind spun.
He decided for her. He decided what she must bear and what she must lose.
I moved ahead of Fear. He had urged me out of the tent to protect me from hearing any more when everything between Corbyn and my mother hurt.
But he had also rushed me out to prevent me from hearing how a relationship like ours ended.
Corbyn had decided for my mother, just as Fear had decided and continued to decide for me.
“This is the life you chose for me,” I told Lightbringer in my mind. I wasn’t sure she was even listening. I felt furious at her, furious with my father, furious at being trapped. “How can you feel trapped and want this for me?”
There was no answer. She had sounded triumphant when Fear leapt to save me. She had seen his action not as Fear protecting his greatest plot, but as love.
“Corbyn loved my mother too.” That was obvious in the way he looked at her.
For him, it seemed as if twenty years had barely passed.
He had loved her then, and he loved her still.
“But love didn’t keep him from destroying part of her.
He decided for her and she paid. Is this what it was like with Shadowbane?
He forced you back into our world, didn’t he? To me.”
Fear gave me a look back that I couldn’t quite read. It might have been aggrieved, anxious, even sorry, maybe. Quietly, he said, “He was protecting her.”
I’d heard a truism once about how girls found men like their fathers.
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
Lightbringer said nothing.