CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
We sat under a full moon around the campfire. It was warm, making the tang of pine and meadow grass floating in the air stronger. They had brought blankets and pillows outside so we could eat our supper around the crackling fire. We finished the last of the sage cakes, and I didn’t hesitate to lick the crumbs from my fingers. These vagabonds ate well.
I looked at Kaden opposite me, his hair a warm honey gold in the firelight. I had made a terrible mistake kissing him. I still wasn’t sure why I’d done it. I yearned for something. Maybe just to be held, to be comforted, to feel less alone. Maybe to pretend for a moment. Pretend what? That all was well? It wasn’t.
Maybe I just wondered. I needed to know.
The glow of the fire accentuated the hard edge of his jaw and the raised vein at his temple. He was frustrated. His gaze met mine, angry, searching. I looked away.
“It’s time for rest, my little angel,” one of the young mothers said to her son, a boy named Tevio. Many of the others had already gone bed. Tevio protested that he wasn’t tired, and Selena, just a dash older, joined in as if anticipating that she’d be the next one dragged away. I smiled. They reminded me of myself at that age. I was never ready to go to my bedchamber, maybe because I was sent there so often.
“If I tell you a story,” I said, “will you be ready for bed then?”
They both nodded enthusiastically, and I noticed Natiya nestled closer to them, waiting for a story too.
“Once upon a time,” I said, “long, long ago, in a land of giants, and gods, and dragons, there were a little prince and a little princess, who looked very much like the two of you.” I altered the story, the way my brothers had done for me, the way my aunts and mother had, and told them the story of Morrighan, a brave young girl specially chosen by the gods to drive her purple carvachi across the wilderness and lead the holy Remnant to a place of safety. I leaned more toward my brother’s version, telling of the dragons she tamed, the giants she tricked, the gods she visited, and the storms she talked down from the sky into her palm and then blew them away with a whisper. As I told the story, I noticed even the adults listened, but especially Eben. He had forgotten to act like the hardened ruffian he was and became a child as wide-eyed as the rest. Had no one ever told him a story before?
I added a few more adventures that even my brothers had never conjured to draw the story out, so that by the time Morrighan reached the land of rebirth, a team of ogres pulled her carvachi and she had sung the fallen stars of destruction back into the sky.
“And that’s where the stars promised to stay for evermore.”
Tevio smiled and yawned, and his mother gathered him up into her arms with no further protests. Selena followed her mother to bed too, whispering that she was a princess.
A heavy stillness settled in their wake. I watched those who remained stare into the fire as if the story lingered in their thoughts. Then a voice broke the silence.
Hold on.
I drew a sharp breath and looked over my shoulder into the black forest. I waited for more, but nothing came. I slowly turned back to the fire. I caught Kaden’s sharp stare. “Again?”
But this time it was something. I just didn’t understand what. I looked down at my feet, not wanting to let on that this time I wasn’t performing for anyone’s benefit.
“Nothing,” I answered.
“It always seems to be nothing,” Malich sneered.
“Not at the City of Dark Magic,” Finch said. “She saw them coming there.”
“Osa lo besadad avat e chadaro,” Griz agreed.
The older vagabond men sitting on either side of him nodded, making signs to the gods. “Grati te deos.”
Kaden grunted. “That story of yours, you really believe what you just told the children?”
I bristled. That story? He didn’t need to attack a story the children clearly enjoyed just because he was frustrated with me. “Yes, Kaden, I do believe in ogres and dragons. I’ve seen four of them firsthand, though they are far uglier and more stupid than those I described. I didn’t want to frighten the children.”
Malich huffed at the insult, but Kaden smiled as if he enjoyed seeing me rankled. Finch laughed at the girl Morrighan and then he and Malich took the whole story down a profane and vulgar path.
I stood to leave, disgusted, narrowing my eyes at Kaden. He knew what he had unleashed. “Do assassins always have so many loutish escorts?” I asked. “Are they all really necessary, or are they just along for the crude entertainment?”
“It’s a long way across the Cam Lanteux—”
“We aren’t escorts!” Eben complained, his chest puffed out as though he was greatly injured. “We had our own work to do.”
“What do you mean, your own work?” I asked.
Kaden sat forward. “Eben, shut up.”
Griz growled, echoing Kaden’s sentiment, but Malich waved his hand through the air. “Eben’s right,” he said. “Let him speak. At least we finished the work we set out to do, which is more than you can say.”
Eben hurried to describe what they’d done in Morrighan before Kaden could stop him again. He described roads they had blocked with landslides, flumes and cisterns they had fouled, and the many bridges they had brought down.
I stepped forward. “You brought down what?”
“Bridges,” Finch repeated, then smiled. “It keeps the enemy occupied.”
“We’re not too ugly or stupid for some tasks, Princess,” Malich jeered.
My hands trembled, and I felt my throat closing. Blood surged so violently at my temples I was dizzy.
“What’s wrong with her?” Eben asked.
I walked around the fire ring until I was standing over them. “Did you take down the bridge at Chetsworth?”
“That was the easy one,” Finch said.
I could barely speak above a whisper. “Except for the carriage that came along?”
Malich laughed. “I took care of it. That was easy too,” he said.
I heard the screams of an animal, felt flesh beneath my nails, the warmth of blood on my hands, and strands of hair between my fingers as I came down on him again and again, gouging at his eyes, kicking at his legs, kneeing his ribs, my fists pounding his face. Arms grabbed my waist and yanked me off him, but I continued to scream and kick and dig my nails into any flesh within reach.
Griz clamped down on my arms, pinning them to my sides. Kaden held Malich back. Lines of blood covered his face, and more ran from his nose.
“Let me go! I’m going to kill the bitch!” he yelled.
“You worthless, vile bastards!” I screamed. I wasn’t sure what words flew from my mouth, one threat piling on another, battling with the threats Malich hurled back at me, Kaden screaming for everyone to shut up, until I finally choked and had to stop. I swallowed, tasting the warm blood pooling inside my cheek where I had bit it. My chest shuddered, and I lowered my voice, my next words deadly even.
“You murdered my brother’s wife. She was only nineteen. She was going to have a baby, and you miserable cowards put an arrow through her throat.” I glared, my head throbbing, watching them put the picture together in their own minds. I felt as much revulsion for myself as I did for them. I had been dining and telling stories with Greta’s murderers.
Whoever had gone to bed in their carvachis or tents had come back out. They gathered silently in their nightclothes, trying to understand the furor. Finch had bloody lines across his jaw too, and Kaden had them on his neck. Eben stood back, his eyes wide, as if he were looking at a demon gone mad.
“Ved mika ara te carvachi!” Griz bellowed.
Finch and one of the vagabond men grabbed Malich, who still strained to get at me, and Kaden came and took me brusquely by the arm, dragging me to the carvachi. He opened the door and all but threw me in, slamming the door behind him.
“What’s the matter with you?” he yelled.
I stared at him in disbelief. “Do you expect me to congratulate them for murdering her?”
His chest heaved, but he forced a slow deep breath. His hands were fists at his sides. He lowered his voice. “It wasn’t their intention, Lia.”
“Do you think it matters what they intended? She’s dead.”
“War is ugly, Lia.”
“War? What war, Kaden? The imaginary one you’re waging? The one Greta didn’t sign up for? She wasn’t a soldier. She was an innocent.”
“Lots of innocents die in war. Most are Vendans. Countless numbers have died trying to settle in the Cam Lanteux.”
How dare he compare Greta to lawbreakers. “There’s a treaty hundreds of years old forbidding it!”
His jaw hardened. “Why don’t you tell that to Eben? He was only five when he watched both his parents die trying to defend their home from soldiers setting fire to it. His mother died with an ax to her chest, and his father was torched along with their house.”
Rage still pounded in my head. “It wasn’t Morrighese soldiers who did it!”
Kaden stepped closer, a sneer smearing his face. “Really? He was too young to know what kind of soldiers they were, but he does remember a lot of red—the banner colors of Morrighan.”
“It must be very convenient to blame Morrighan’s soldiers when there are no witnesses and only a child’s remembrance of red. Look to your own bloody savages and the blood they spill for the guilty.”
“Innocents die, Lia. On all sides,” he yelled. “Pull your royal head out of your ass and get used to it!”
I looked at him, unable to speak.
He swallowed, shaking his head, then swiped his hand through his hair. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.” His eyes focused on the floor, then on me again, his anger now subdued by his infuriating practiced calm. “But you’ve made things more difficult. It will be harder to keep you safe from Malich now.”
I drew in a false breath of shock. “A thousand pardons! I wouldn’t want to make anything harder for you, because everything is so stinking easy for me! This is a holiday, right?”
My last words wobbled, and my vision blurred.
He sighed and stepped toward me. “Let me see your hands.”
I looked down at them. They were covered in blood and still shaking. My fingertips throbbed where three nails had been torn past the quick, and two fingers on my left hand were already swollen and blue—they felt broken. I had attacked Malich and the others as if my fingers were made of tempered steel. They were the only weapons I had.
I looked back at Kaden. He had known all along that they had killed Greta.
“How much blood do you have on your hands, Kaden? How many people have you killed?” I couldn’t believe I hadn’t asked the question before. He was an assassin. His job was killing, but he hid it far too well.
He didn’t answer, but I saw his jaw tighten.
“How many?” I asked again.
“Too many.”
“So many you’ve lost count.”
Creases deepened at the corners of his eyes.
He reached for my hand, but I pulled it away. “Get out, Kaden. I may be your prisoner, but I’m not your whore.”
My words left a deeper wound than the ones on his neck. Anger flashed through his eyes and shattered his calm. He spun and left, slamming the door behind him.
All I wanted was to collapse into a ball on the floor, but just seconds later, I heard a soft tap on the door, and it eased open. It was Dihara. She entered carrying a small pail of scented water with leaves floating on top. “For your hands. Fingers fester quickly.”
I bit my lip and nodded. She sat me down in the lone chair in the carvachi and pulled a short stool up for herself. She dipped my hands in the water and wiped them gently with a soft cloth.
“I’m sorry if I frightened the children,” I said.
“You’ve lost someone close to you.”
“Two people,” I whispered, because I wasn’t sure I’d ever get the Walther I knew back again. Out here I couldn’t do anything for him. For anyone. How little the worth of my own fleeting happiness seemed now. Even the barbarians would have had the good sense to back down from the combined force of two armies. The prospect had frightened them enough to want to dispose of me. Was that how Kaden had planned to eliminate me, an arrow through my throat like Greta’s? Was that what he had regretted so deeply that night we danced? The prospect of killing me? His words, we can’t dwell on the maybes, came back to me, bitter and biting.
Dihara pulled away a piece of hanging nail, and I winced. She placed my hands back in the pail, washing away the blood. “The broken fingers will need bandaging too,” she said. “But they’ll heal quickly. Soon enough for you to do whatever you need to do.”
I watched the herbs floating in the water. “I don’t know what that is anymore.”
“You will.”
She took my hands from the pail and carefully wiped them dry, then applied a thick sticky balm to the raw skin of the ripped nails. It immediately eased the pain with numbing coolness. She wrapped the three fingertips in strips of cloth.
“Take a deep breath,” she said and pulled on the two blue fingers, making me cry out. “You’ll want them to heal straight.” She wound them together with more cloth until they were stiff and unbendable. I looked at them, trying to imagine saddling a horse or holding reins now.
“How long will it take?” I asked.
“Nature is dependable in such things. Usually a few weeks. But sometimes the magic will come, greater than nature itself.”
Kaden had warned me to be wary of her, and now I wondered if any of what she told me was true—or had I simply been grasping at false hope when I had nothing else to hold?
“Yes, there’s always magic,” I said, cynicism heavy on my tongue.
She placed my bandaged hands back in my lap. “All ways belong to the world. What is magic but what we don’t yet understand? Like the sign of the vine and lion you carry?”
“You know about that?”
“Natiya told me.”
I sighed and shook my head. “That wasn’t magic. Only the work of careless artisans, dyes that were too strong, and my endless bad fortune.”
Her old face wrinkled with a grin. “Maybe.” She picked up her pail of medicinal water and stood. “But remember, child, we may all have our own story and destiny, and sometimes our seemingly bad fortune, but we’re all part of a greater story too. One that transcends the soil, the wind, time … even our own tears.” She reached down and wiped under my eye with her thumb. “Greater stories will have their way.”