Chapter 38
Thirty-Eight
Cara
When I had washed up, I found Fear standing behind me with a cup of tea, steam curling up in the fading dusk.
I took it and glanced around before I raised it to him like a question. “There’s no one to see.”
He looked as if he were deciding what to say.
I couldn’t stand the thought he pitied me too much to hate me. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to fall apart.”
When I turned my back on him to go into the tent, he said quietly, “You never fall apart. That’s what worries me.”
I let the flap fall behind me, cloaking me in the dim light and the scent of wet canvas and the hint of woodsmoke from the brazier so that I was alone with my irritation. Fear never fell apart. Why would he pretend I could indulge in that luxury?
There was blood crusted on my sleeve. I cursed to myself and pulled my tunic off. Of course that was the moment he followed me into the tent. I turned on him in exasperation.
He parried my irritation with that maddening cool amusement. “If you’re not falling apart, I suppose you don’t need me to distract your mother? She’s outside.”
“I don’t need your help with my mother. She should hate you too.” She had warned me not to trust the dragon shifters before I left Stonehaven.
He offered me a new smile, one I had not seen before, both genuine and infuriating. “She does not.”
The distress of competing with Fear for my mother’s approval was childish and infuriating in equal measures. I yanked my belt back on with my knives and was still threading the buckle, the leather sliding down my hips, as I stalked back outside.
My mother stood there with Tay, and suddenly I wished I had asked Fear for his help with a distraction.
“I want you to use the knife on me too,” my mother said abruptly. “Cut out Corbyn’s enchantment.”
“We don’t have to do that.” I felt overwhelmed by the thought of picking up that knife one more time today, and the cutting would hurt my mother, and it was unnecessary. “Corbyn can lift the enchantment.”
She met my gaze, wide-eyed and full of open need. “I don’t want him in my mind.”
Of course I would do that for her, no matter how tired I was. “Can we do it in the morning?”
“It nettles me.”
Those words were so understated, delivered flatly. The evening light caught the gray in her hair, the lines around her eyes. She looked tired. She had looked tired for a long time.
Tay was leaning against the tent post with his arms folded, watching us with the expression he’d worn for years when Maris and I were circling each other.
He had the patient, slightly amused attention of someone who already knew the ending of the story.
It was so familiar that something in my chest loosened for the first time all day.
“What do you think?” I asked him.
“I think you’ve done harder things today.” He lifted an eyebrow. “And I think Mam has decided, which means you’ve already lost.”
Maris smiled, her eyes crinkling at the corners.
The constellation of the three of us was so ordinary that my breath caught in my chest. My wish that night with Fear in the forest came back to me as it often did: Tay, alive and well, and Lidi with her magic.
Almost there. If I could wrench Lightbringer into being, then I could have both. The thought was both an ache and a glimmer; hope and dread mingled together.
Fear stepped beside me. His voice was quiet, pitched for me alone. “She’s tired. You’re tired. Leave it for the morning.”
I had learned to read his performances by finding the audience: the queen, the clan, the camp. But my mother wouldn’t appreciate being thwarted. Tay wasn’t paying attention; he and my mother had already begun their own side conversation.
Was he simply trying to protect me?
The thought was so simple and so disorienting that I didn’t know what to do with it. “She’s waited long enough.”
His face tightened with frustration. I saw it up close as his lips dipped near my ear, making sure the words were only for me. “You don’t need to burn yourself alive to light the world, you know.”
I looked up at him, and my hand found his shoulder, my fingers sinking into the powerful muscle there to steady myself when the two of us were so close. “Why should you care if I suffer? I hurt you, remember?”
“You are simply so bad at taking care of yourself that I find myself moved by your incompetence.”
I let out a little laugh. It sounded shaky and exhausted. Maybe I couldn’t read him correctly; maybe there was someone to perform for. “I wish you would leave me to suffer.”
It was harder to suffer his alternating cold anger and warmth. At least if I knew he was always performing when he was warm, I could begin to raise a shield.
He raked his hand through his hair, disheveling himself just slightly. It just made him more handsome, even when he looked exasperated. “Well. I will not.”
I hesitated. There was no need to finish the threads of our frustration with each other. “This time, perhaps you’re right.”
He waited me out.
“I’m going to do it anyway. Not because I think you’re wrong.” I looked back at him and tried to see him clearly, tried to see what was truly there. “Because she needs me.”
“She could also need you in the morning, when you’ve had a full night’s sleep and a good breakfast and time to recover.” He looked at me for a long moment. When I was slow to find a retort, he stepped back.
He had made his case, and now he honored the answer.
“Thank you,” I told him.
He said nothing, but he moved toward the tent.
I turned to my mother. “All right. Let’s do it tonight.”
“It will hurt,” Tay warned her, all warmth and worry. “It’s a mistake.”
“It’s not a mistake.” My mother sounded as weary as I felt. “Magic cannot be trusted. None of us should carry an enchantment.”
Tay shook his head. “Mortals don’t have our own magic. To have an enchantment gives us the power we lack.”
“We don’t have our own magic because of her.
” My anger spilled out; it was always seething under the surface.
Always, the memory of the Fae stripping away my magic, my first wound, my childhood nightmare that had chased me into adulthood.
“We are supposed to have magic. We only lack because they steal from us.”
“This is not the conversation we need to have now.” My mother overruled us as she had for a thousand childhood arguments. “Corbyn’s enchantment was to alter my memories. I certainly have the right to my own memories. Do I not?”
She gave us both a pointed look.
“Of course you do,” Tay said reasonably. “That’s totally different than what the queen has done. She healed me. Corbyn hurt you.”
My mother’s attention snapped to him. Her lips parted, then sadness drifted over her face, and the words faded.
Dread settled into my stomach like cold. Had there been another enchantment? Had I missed part of it and left it still settled into his flesh? Had I made an unforgivable mistake? My gaze flew to Fear, who stood holding the tent flap.
I had been so careful.
Fear was watching me carefully, as if I was the one who worried him. There was no answer to my questions in that gaze.
“Do you know exactly what you’re cutting away?” Tay had moved from working on my mother to me, and he sounded entirely rational. “You don’t have magic of your own. You’re only guessing at how to use the knife. Do you know it only takes what it should?”
It was a reasonable question. But Tay had always been the one who said if anyone could do something, he’d bet on me.
I wasn’t sure if I knew my brother anymore.
“Yes.” Because I had to say something and because it was close enough to truth. “I know.”
He shook his head. Unconvinced, but gentle.
Voices nearby startled me, laughter threaded among them.
Riven and Tesa stood at the next campfire, and Corbyn and a few of his rebels stood with him.
Fear was watching, too, and I had the feeling he appreciated Corbyn’s effort to ease contact between the camp and Nightwalkers.
Corbyn clapped Riven’s shoulder and began to move away.
“Corbyn!” Tay called cheerfully, and my mother’s lips pressed together tightly, going pale.
She did not want Corbyn anywhere near her. Not for this. She certainly didn’t want him to know that she was rejecting his offer of painless lifting of the enchantment.
She’d prefer the knife to trusting him. That would cut for him.
I glanced at Tay, who had certainly never been stupid. Because he was earnest and good, people sometimes saw him that way. But it takes a cleverness of its own kind to be good in our world. He was always able to read my mother and me. So why had he summoned Corbyn? It was so unlike him.
The cold dread in my stomach crept through the rest of my body.
Corbyn responded cheerfully, coming over with good humor and greetings for all of us. His gaze only lingered a little longer on me and then on Maris. He could not resist staring at her as if she were still his whole world. Meanwhile, she didn’t look at him at all.
“Everything all right?” Corbyn asked, and I had no doubt that he was keenly aware that everything was not all right.
“Fine,” my mother said doggedly. “I was asking Cara to use the unmaking knife on me.”
The rejection barely ghosted over Corbyn’s face. “That makes sense. She’s your daughter. You would trust her the most.”
If he had been present during my growing-up years, he would know things were not always that simple.
“It’s not because I don’t trust you,” Maris said, making it dazzlingly obvious that she did not trust him.
“No, I understand,” Corbyn returned.
I would rather have drowned in one of my awkward conversations with Fear rather than stand in this one.
Tay cast a startled look at Fear every time he moved, making it obvious that Fear’s restraint had not been forgiven.
I was desperate to talk to Fear about whether I had failed my brother, but I was not going to attempt that conversation in front of this audience.