Chapter 47
Emmerick
I’d fucking kissed her. Now, the memory of it and the reckless desire to do it again consumed me.
I’d never learn my lesson—constantly falling for women with no intention of emotionally attaching themselves to me.
The next few days went by in a lovesick blur. I should have told her about Dritan, but doing so in the safety of Lamoreaux, where the trees would guard us from outside influence, felt safer.
Instead, I told Lark to keep checking in on the boy, to not let him out of her sight when she was not with us. She happily obliged.
If what Aquas had implied was true, I feared for him. Relic or not—both the Sources and Caym sought him.
We’d traveled to Laome, where the Nadiars remained a steadfast ally to Luz, and me by default. The eastern royals were grateful to hear of my renewed loyalty in keeping peace among the courts.
Since I’d last seen them, the East Corridor rulers had grown too ancient to ruffle feathers in the realm and too stubborn to step aside and let any of their eight children take the throne.
Lark came along with me when I used an Egress to visit Mama twice. Color returned to my mother’s face, and she sat up and chatted with us over a bowl of broth. Elsedora thought I didn’t noticed her avoidance to travel with us.
Wyeth, Luz’s head healer, told me she had no reason to believe Mama wouldn’t make a full recovery. She had explained it would be best for the bone to heal on its own and it would take time. But Mama had gotten through the worst of it.
Elsedora also avoided being alone with me. Selfishly, it left me enough time to figure out what to tell her about Dritan. Honesty would be the best approach.
When at last, the three of us made our way back to Lamoreux, we were exhausted and ready to eat. With the fireplaces in the estate roaring, the air was muggy and warm. We stripped from our cloaks immediately.
Lark kept her boots on while El and I kicked ours off at the front entry, and the house whisked them away.
“I’ll go to Helos and help Mama prepare for tomorrow’s festivities... You two relax. Reconnect,” the Princess said with far too much insinuation, which Elsedora playfully scowled at as she shooed her niece toward the hall.
“Mama planned your recrowning celebration, so expect a crowd,” Lark teased and met my gaze. We both had truth to face the next evening. I would not let it be the first time Elsedora learned of it all.
Lark left us, and I followed El into the parlor. She took off her dagger belt and set it on the low table beside the sofa.
Would she let me stay? I reveled in the idea of hiding out at Lamoreaux once more. Her presence made the sprawling estate feel more like home than the cottage I’d grown up in, or my room in Luz.
At least in all the buzz, Sybilla seemed to have forgotten that my birthday landed this week.
With my mother still bedridden and my father always having relied on her to remember important dates, I was free from celebrating my fiftieth year.
No more wisdom graced me than when I was a bumbling thirty-year-old Constable in love with his queen, anyway.
I expected El to flit off or make an excuse to further avoid talking about our lapse in judgment. Though, it hadn’t felt like a miscalculation to kiss her at all. Despite logic, I grew eager to find out whether she wanted to continue what we’d started.
She didn’t ask me to leave or bid me farewell. That was a start.
The buckle of my harness and sword clattered down beside her weapons. After she flopped onto the sofa with an exhale, I settled beside her. Kicking one heel under myself and setting my arm around the back of the sofa behind her, I watched as she quietly stared at my weapon.
“What’s that one’s name?” she asked, nodding at the sword.
I’d taken a new blade from the Helos armory, since my old sword had been one of Isolde’s relics. I played a silly game where I named all my weapons after loved ones. Talking to them used to make me feel less homesick while traveling.
“I don’t do that anymore,” I lied.
I’d named it Elsedora.
She frowned. “That’s a pity.”
Did she wish that I’d say her name?
More likely, that kiss had meant nothing to her at all.
“You once told me that ‘love is a sacrifice of freedom, one you are happy to make,’” I said.
This back-and-forth between us exhausted me—if she felt nothing more than friendship, then why had she kissed me with such eagerness? It had been too impassioned, too perfect, to ignore.
She huffed a laugh before pivoting her body in my direction and meeting my gaze. “I say a lot of foolish things.”
“There is nothing foolish about believing in love. And frankly, those didn’t sound like the words of a woman who wasn’t in love then.”
She glanced away and long silence stretched between us.
When her lips parted, I trained my stare on them, wishing they would tell me she’d loved him.
Because if she’d never loved Ryn after centuries, if her heart was that impenetrable, then what chance did I have after twenty years? But if there was even a thread of hope, then I’d hang on to it.
“I still dream of him... He seems so real and yet so clearly a figment of my imagination. He’ll act as my friend and then say things that eat away at me.”
She picked at the fraying seam of her leather breeches.
“Our minds have a way of being our worst enemies.” I swallowed hard.
I needed to admit what I’d seen before waking—unravel everything I’d hidden. She deserved his message, too.
“Do you ever think of her... Firose?” Elsedora asked. I knew she loathed the woman who had done so much irreparable damage to the realm. Firose had also betrayed Else’s brother, Fenris.
She’d sparked a war that led to El’s parents’ deaths.
She’d been the mother of my child.
I couldn’t hate her. It hadn’t been love, either.
Sybilla may have unveiled the truth about how much of Firose’s treachery was Caym’s doing, but my Source Match’s actions left scars on the people I loved—on me.
I’d felt part of my Source power recoil as the marble in that amphitheater fell on the Fire-wielding enchantress who wove such complicated ties to the realms.
“I think of her often,” I admitted. “I’d done so many evil things under Caym’s control. She was the only one who understood. I suppose we were kindred in our guilt.”
El still toyed with the fray in the seam of her breeches—it had now grown into a gaping hole on her inner knee.
“Do you think she could have been someone you’d be happy ‘sacrificing your freedom’ for?’” Elsedora asked. Ice had edged into her voice.
She wore jealousy adorably. I treasured the slight flush of her freckled cheeks as she refused to meet my gaze. What a stupid, boyish thing to celebrate—her caring what I thought of another woman.
“It wasn’t like that between us... Well. Once.”
Her attention finally snagged. Would she be disgusted with my actions?
“I need to tell you something now. I don’t want you to hear it all for the first time tomorrow.”
Her shoulders braced. Without thinking, I slid my arm down, and rubbed her neck, trying to ease the tension my words were sure to heighten.
“That sounds ominous, puppy,” she teased, though a hint of worry laced her tone.
“When I was waking, I saw Ryn,” I admitted, and her eyes widened, growing glassy. “One moment I watched you from the orchard, like any other evening, and then the next he was there. I was ripped away from the world and taken somewhere else.”
“Watched me?” Her head tilted.
I’d slipped up.
No time like the present to dig my grave deeper.
“It sounds odd. But in the years that followed Caym being unbound from me, I found peace here. Watching you come and go from Lamoreaux anchored me. They weren’t dreams.”
She smirked. “Did you look in the windows while I—”
“Can you stop trying to turn me to putty for a moment?” I stifled a laugh, wanting so badly to sit with her in this moment of levity without anything changing.
Even on the verge of tears, she would try to melt me down to wanting.
“That isn’t an answer.” She leaned into my touch.
“No, I did not peep in your windows like a lusty teenager.”
“What a shame,” she teased but nodded for me to continue as she sucked in her cheeks.
“He told me his duty was to deliver us a message—that the last relic was not an object. It’s a person.
That is what Aquas meant about the Sources creating the third relic.
Ryn said the Reverist abilities Isolde sacrificed to Caym hinge on the black moon, but none will come should that person, a boy, live on. ”
Her brows rose. “The boy is Dritan,” she concluded again. “Lark’s friend who was there when you were unbound.”
“Yes. But how did you know that?”
“As a babe, the Sources left him in a field of flames, and he thinks he was born in the in-between place where the Sources live. If I’m honest, I didn’t put any confidence in it at first. But he believed it so thoroughly I didn’t want to sully the story he’d been told.”
Watching the way she chewed on her lip with excitement at this revelation warmed me, and I leaned in, longing to kiss her again before I tore up my last hope of ever having her. She tipped forward into my space; with only inches between us, I nearly faltered.
Hating what I was about to do, I nodded and swallowed hard. “It’s true. And I believe he is my and Firose’s son.”
She moved to rise, and I held her down by her shoulder.
“Let me up!” she exclaimed. Betrayal painted her features, and a breeze swept through the room, despite no windows being open.
“Please, please listen,” I soothed.
“How long have you known?” she questioned.
“Since waking,” I admitted.
Tears slipped down her cheeks at that.
I wiped them away with the thumb of my free hand.
“Fuck, I hate crying,” she snapped as she shook out her shoulders and straightened her posture. “You have a son? Dritan—he’s yours? And hers? And you didn’t tell me…”
Her nose scrunched in dismay; I didn’t fault her.
Taking her chin between my fingers, I took a deep breath. “Yes,” I replied. “Ryn said he’d seen Firose—there, among the Sources. She’d been with child.”
El shook her head, looking away from me and toward the fire.
“There’s more, and you cannot fly off the handle and do anything impulsive. You need to let her forge her own path,” I whispered, not wanting this conversation to carry out of the room despite us being alone, as though the trees might whisper it.
“You’re scaring me,” she breathed out.
Her words sent goose bumps down my arms—she faced so many things, spiders aside, without fear. I took a deep breath.
This would go over so poorly.
“Tomorrow night I will announce that I have an heir. But Lark will also announce that she and Dritan have wed.”
Elsedora tried to rise again, and this time, I planted both palms on her shoulders and sat her back down.
Luckily her daggers were out of reach, because at this rate, I’d have one through my heart if she could reach them.
“For fuck’s sake, let me up, Emmerick,” she spat. She didn’t anger easily, but I’d just dealt her multiple blows of shock.
“I will when you promise not to go kill them. They found each other with no one’s help. Everything that has unraveled, everything we’ve lost, it all brought those two together. It cannot be a bad omen. Can it?”
Her expression could cut glass.
I continued to rub her shoulders, not above getting on my knees and pleading for her to stay calm—to not think differently of me. For two decades, I couldn’t protect my son, or get to know him, or speak with him. But El had. She’d protected him.
“You’re asking me to lie to my friends, my family. About their daughter.”
“By omission... for a day,” I justified while staring into those gorgeous hazel eyes.
There were a million ways to chance losing Elsedora’s trust, but putting her niece in danger wasn’t one I’d ever take.
Despite my romantic falling out with Sybilla, I’d never stoop to wishing her daughter anything but well. Lark seemed as strong-willed as her mother—nothing would have stopped the Princess from marrying.
Elsedora groaned. “Fine. But we must follow through on Aquas’ demand. We bring Dritan to him.”
“What if it’s a trap? We’re playing with deities who are unpredictable.” I shook my head. “I didn’t get the luxury of raising my son, and I won’t sacrifice him like a lamb.”
Something steely flashed in El’s eyes, but she didn’t vocalize her concern. “After it is announced tomorrow, we’ll discuss what comes of it all. Together. If he agrees to go, then by your logic we must let him forge his own path, too.”
Though she’d used my own words against me, she appeared calmer, so I finally released my grasp on her shoulders. She focused on the burning embers in the fireplace again, expression horribly unreadable.
“He’s worked for me for years. I knew they snuck off together here and there, but I trusted her.
She’s had stars in her eyes for him since they were kids.
I figured eventually it would wane or they’d go their separate ways.
I can’t say that I’m surprised, but her parents?
They might very well kill me for never putting a stop to it. ”
I huffed a quiet laugh and smiled. “I doubt that.” It warmed me to think El had gotten to see Dritan grow up. “What is he like?”
She smirked. “Kind, clumsy, and excessively apologetic. He works hard, too. He’s taken an apprenticeship with a blacksmith in Helos and still does all of Lamoreaux’s groundskeeping.”
My eyes burned; he sounded like my father. He may not be Leo Faulker’s kin, but family ran thicker than blood. My parents would adore him simply for existing.
“Did Ryn say anything else?”
I didn’t know if relaying his last message would break her.
But it felt wrong to withhold it.
“He told me to tell you that he always knew,” I said.
She hunched forward as though punched in the gut. I caught her as she collapsed into me and cradled the back of her head.
A muffled sob vibrated against my shoulder as I wrapped both arms around her.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered into her hair, not knowing for what. All I knew for certain was that I would try to hold her forever, if she’d let me. She deserved better than the world had dealt her.
“I am calling in the favor you always promised. I don’t want to be alone. Please stay at Lamoreux tonight,” she whispered.
It was not forgiveness, but she wasn’t pushing me away either. My whole body uncoiled with relief.
“There’s nowhere I’d rather be, wildflower. I just have to go check on Mama. I’ll be right back,” I promised her. “Do you want to come?”
“Not yet,” she sniffled out. “I’m embarrassed for not visiting her sooner.”
“She’ll forgive you,” I said.
I held her there for a few minutes more.
For all the wrongs Caym had influenced me to commit, I’d repent for them by being whatever Elsedora needed me to be.