Chapter 44 #3
“And you killed your uncle.” Her tone was matter of fact, no trace of judgement in it, or disgust at what I had done.
“And I killed my uncle. But not only my uncle.” I picked up a small pebble and cast it into the distance, watching it soar until it faded from view.
“I had my entire inner court executed and replaced with those of my own choosing. All those who had taunted me through my youth, sneering at me because my mother was nothing more than a commoner from the woods, unworthy of the king. All the hissed barbs in my direction, calling me the son of a common whore and insinuating that I was like my mother because I had courted the backing of the high king, lowering myself to please him and gain his favour… All the whispered lies about how she had conspired with the seelie to let them into the castle that day and had always wanted them all dead. Everyone who dishonoured her memory, who tainted it with their vile vitriol, were put to the blade and I made sure they knew why their lives were forfeit.”
Saphira grew silent and still beside me, her hand still resting on mine, but I could sense the shift of her emotions, hear the quickening pace of her heart and scent her anger rising again.
And then she whispered, “I’m sorry about what I said.”
I knew what she was speaking of.
I let my breath flow from my lungs as that tightness formed in my breast, that writhing and twisting ball of darkness that felt as if it might pull me into it one day, devouring me.
“You did not know,” I said instead of letting it take me.
She slowly shook her head. “It doesn’t excuse what I said. I was angry and hurt, and I didn’t know that—”
She had not known that others before her had called me a whore, had scarred me deeply with that word despite my efforts to deny the sharp blade of it.
“Does…” She drew down a breath and lifted her gaze to meet mine. “Does the high king know what others called you?”
I nodded and swallowed. “He is aware of it.”
“So when he called me a… a whore.” She frowned as she uttered that word, as if she hated it even more now than she had last night.
“It was a blade aimed at my chest.” I risked running my thumb along hers, and she did not withdraw.
She held my hand more tightly. “He’s a bastard.”
I was inclined to agree with her.
But I was a bastard too.
If I was the son of a whore, then perhaps I was only doing what was in my nature by marrying someone I did not love and warming their bed for the rest of my life.
That thought, so whisper soft in my mind, cleaved my heart open like the sharpest of knives, cracking it open so roughly and so totally that I could not deny the truth that leaked from it, flowing through all of me.
A truth I had not seen until this moment, with Saphira at my side, uncertain of what might happen and unsteady for the first time in a long time.
I was broken.
More shattered by the death of my parents than I had ever realised.
And this male I had moulded myself into was fracturing under the growing weight of everything I had done, and I was no longer sure it had been worth it.
That cutting away that boy I had been before that dreadful night had been worth it.
Not if it meant losing everything dear to me.
“Tell me about your parents,” she whispered, drawing me back to her, her voice like a blade that cut through the shadows and pain, through time itself to part the darkness and reveal a glimpse of them to me.
“It does not have a happy beginning.” I smiled tightly.
She stroked my arm. “So many great love stories don’t.”
I glanced at her.
Ours certainly had not.
And I was not sure it would have a happy ending either.
“My father plucked my mother from a squalid village in Wraith Wood during Wraith’s Hunt, when the snow was thick on the ground but the prey had been thin.
She caught his eye and the elder of the village offered her to him to appease him because the hunt had failed to produce prey for him to kill.
” I cast another stone into the distance. “He was to hunt her instead—”
“I’m sorry.” She cut me off, her hand tightening in mine as she frowned at me. “Did you just say someone gave your mother to your father for him to hunt?”
I nodded.
She blew out her breath. “And I thought we had a rough start.”
I would have smiled if I had not felt things between us were destined to end before they ever really began.
“Rather than running her down with his horse and gutting her with his sword, he accepted her as a gift and brought her back to Belkarthen.”
“He sounds delightful,” she muttered.
“My words, not his.” I picked up another stone and cast it towards the cottage. “He was… he was more like you. Warm. Kind. He saw a female being treated as chattel by a cruel man and wanted to free her.”
“Fine, I take it back.” She picked up a stone of her own and threw it, lunging dangerously forwards with the swing of her arm, towards the sheer drop to the rocks far below.
I snared her with my shadows, wrapping them around her waist without taking my eyes off the pebble that fell far short of my own throw, dropping to clatter and bounce between the boulders on the foothills of the mountain.
“I wouldn’t have fallen.” She idly twined one of my shadows around her finger.
I echoed that day outside the tower too as I said, “You do not know that.”
She almost smiled.
“What happened to your mother?” She continued to toy with my shadow, maddening me as I felt the softness of her fingers against my skin through it.
“The court presumed she would become his mistress—his whore to warm his bed as he pleased—and while their relationship seemed to start out that way, my father truly loved her. He courted her and in time she came to love him. She loved him deeply, and she shared that love with myself and my brother and my sister, together with her strong mind and heart. I have never seen another couple as happy as they were.”
“They look happy in their portrait.” She released my shadow and rubbed at her knees, and did not look at me as she added, “You looked happy then too.”
She was talking about the portrait of me and my siblings, one my sister had insisted on hanging in the castle.
“Vaeleryn seems to like you,” she whispered.
“As a friend. I promise you, Saphira, that my interactions with Vaeleryn have never gone beyond talking, or dancing. I have never touched her. Never kissed her. I have only played the role I needed to play, doing the bare minimum expected of me to keep the high king happy.”
Her expression shifted back towards hurt. “So you were courting her while we were—”
“No!” I snapped, and grimaced as my shadows lashed at the rocks around me in response to my outburst and that sudden surge of fear that seized hold of me as I sensed her drawing away from me.
I softened my tone. “No. I am not courting her. This agreement… it is between the high king and me. Vaeleryn does not even know of it, and it only comes into effect once my vengeance is done. Right now… I am free.”
“But your visit to Ereborne.” She refused to look at me, even when I twisted towards her and took hold of her cheek, trying to make her.
I sighed and stroked my fingers down her cheek, and let my hand fall to her knees.
“Elduin requires regular progress reports on my vengeance and enjoys bringing me to Ereborne for ridiculous reasons so he can push me upon his daughter, even as he creates laws that prevent me from marching an army into the Summer Court. Sometimes I am not sure that he really wants this wedding to go ahead, and that this is not all some game to keep me under his control. But yes, I speak with Vaeleryn and I keep her company at times, because she likes to see me and hear of my court and the places I have been. Places she does not get to see because she is kept in the castle.”
She pushed my hand off her knee, breaking contact between us as she bit out, “I guess we know your type then—caged and virgin.”
I was digging myself into a very deep hole.
“You have every right to be angry with me.”
She hugged her knees tighter, brooding in silence as she did her best to ignore me, refusing to look at me when just moments ago she had been softening and perhaps beginning to forgive me.
Then she muttered, “How many people know about this? Is everyone… do they all know? Have they been watching me make an idiot of myself?”
I shook my head. “Only Vyr knows, and she does not believe you are a fool… she believes I am one for putting myself in this position, as she always has.”
She did not seem relieved to hear that only Jenavyr had been aware of the agreement between myself and the high king, and that the others had not been watching her fall for me while knowing I was betrothed. Not betrothed. Not yet. There was still hope for me. For us.
It was hard to see it though.
Her mood remained unchanged, as gloomy as my own. “Were you ever going to tell me?”
I sighed and raked a hand over my hair. “I have tried so many times to find the words, and have started to tell you more than once… but I failed each time. I even tried at the ball, when that fiend Kalyn came to drag me before Elduin. I did not want to keep this from you.”
“This is what you wanted to tell me later, isn’t it?” she whispered.
I nodded.
I closed my eyes and exhaled, knotted inside, feeling I was going to lose her unless I confessed everything and made her see what she did to me.
How she had changed everything.
I cupped her cheek again, gently turning her head towards me, not letting her have her way this time because I needed her to see I was speaking the truth.