They were the best part of me, I wanted to say. How dare you speak of them that way.
“You don’t belong here,” I said.
“I will always be here. Just as I will always be in you.”
She reached out again, and again, I jerked away, my hands on Tisaanah’s shoulders.
“Do not touch me.”
But she just looked at me, eyes wide, searching, angry. “Why do you talk to me that way? I made you strong. I gave you love, I—”
“Love?” I scoffed. My anger bubbled over, scorching. “You don’t know what love is.”
“To love is to want,” she shot back. “To love is to covet. To desire. Do you think I do not know what that is? And do you think I did not see it in you? All the things you coveted, Maxantarius. All the things you wanted. If it is love to crave a heartbeat of another, then I do know it. I love her. And I loved you.”
For the first time in nearly a decade, I felt something else as I listened to Reshaye, something other than hatred or fear.
I felt pity.
“It must be agonizing,” I hissed. “Existing this way, so close to humanity and yet understanding none of it. All you can do is mimic a shade of a shade of a shade of what you might have been, once, a long time ago. And all you can do is destroy, because everything else is beyond your reach.”
Tisaanah’s face lurched into an uncharacteristic sneer. Her hand reached out for me, even though I kept her at arm’s length, fingers brushing my jaw. I could feel magic there, pulsing beneath her touch.
“I gave you everything. Everything, Maxantarius, And yet you mourn them, and you reach for her, and your heart turns elsewhere, just as hers does. I feel the pain in it. I see how she aches at the thought of losing you tomorrow. Just as I see how you hurt for people who cannot even see your grief. It makes you both weak and still you cling to it above all else. Why?”
The question hung in the air, sharp both with anger and with an odd, childlike confusion. And in the seconds after, she searched my face, as if she was really looking for an answer.
Instead I slowly pulled her hand away.
“I told you not to touch me.”
Her jaw set, and she stepped back, though her eyes did not leave mine.
“She’s stronger than you are,” I said. “I wasn’t, but she is. But if you hurt her, Reshaye, I will put you in that white room you love so much. And I’ll make sure you stay there forever. Forever. Do you understand?”
Her hand lifted and pressed to her chest again, over her heart.
“Something has changed, you know,” she said, quietly. “Far underneath. Deeper than… than all of this. It feels like…” She frowned. “As if something is searching. Reaching. Trying to see me. But I do not think I wish to be seen.”
I had no patience for Reshaye’s incoherent ramblings. Especially not here.
“Do you understand, Reshaye?”
Mismatched eyes fell to me, first dull with hurt, then bright with anger, and then sparking with an eerie, inhuman glee. A smile spread across her lips.
“Do I understand?” she repeated. “Of course I do. We always did understand each other’s darkest shadows, Maxantarius.”
Chapter Nine
Tisaanah
Max left the next day.
Zeryth hadn’t wasted any time assembling his division. I was with him when he saw them for the first time, from the balcony at the upper levels of the Ryvenai outposts. A sea of green and blue and golden coats.
Here, it all became so dizzyingly real. Max and his army would travel to Antedale, to conquer one of the most heavily fortified districts in Ara, and after that, Lishan. In between, he’d be taking a few other smaller cities as well. And from here, I’d be doing the same — fighting, conquering.
I wasn’t as worried about my own battles as I was about his.
I did not need my magic to know what Max was thinking. His hands were clasped tightly together in front of him, shoulders square, jaw set, as he watched the army prepare. He was wearing a military general’s uniform. The sun was rising, outlining his strong profile in gold. Perhaps to an onlooker, he looked every bit the noble military leader, lost in concentration.
But I had been there to watch him button that uniform jacket up and then stare at the mirror for thirty long seconds, seething resentment written over his face. And I’d felt the way his hands squeezed mine before we arrived, in a silent plea or apology, or some combination of the two. I knew that I was seeing dread, not strategic determination, in the hard lines of his expression.
I was watching him live his worst nightmare.
And it was all because of me.
We had only a few minutes alone together before his departure. When he turned to me and I knew it was time for a goodbye, my heart swelled into my throat. A tangle of Aran and Thereni words choked me.
I’d always been able to conjure pretty words when I needed to. But it was moments like these, moments when words weren’t beautiful noise but raw, ragged truths, that they overwhelmed me.
I gave him a weak smile and said, “I promise that I will stay alive if you will.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Is that supposed to be an incentive?”
“Of course,” I replied, casually, stepping closer. “The best kind.”
“I’m glad that recent events have done nothing to dull your ego.”
The lump in my throat grew so large that I couldn’t speak. Max’s smirk had slowly faded.
I took his hands. We bowed our foreheads against each other.
“If you can do it,” Max murmured, “I suppose I can do it.” Then his eyes met mine, so close I could see every vein, every cloudy shift of color. “And you have to. Alright?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. I took his face in my hands and kissed him, long, deeply. My mouth felt cold against the air when we parted, and my fingers were achingly empty when his hand slipped from mine.
I stood with Zeryth up on the balcony of the military headquarters to watch him leave. I couldn’t tear my gaze away, not even when he was a spec of green and gold in the distance. He was barely visible when he turned around one final time and lifted his hand in a wave. My eyes stung as I returned it.
I felt Zeryth’s stare, but didn’t look.
“He’ll come back,” he said.
He’d better, I thought. He has to.
“Why him?” I asked. “Why do you want someone who hates you so much to lead your armies?”
“Because he’s good.”
“I’m sure you have many good generals.”
“Maybe I chose him because he hates me, and because I can make him.”
My gaze flicked to Zeryth. There was a twisted smile at the corner of his mouth, and he leaned casually against the wall, elbow propped on stone. On the surface, he seemed as nonchalant as a cat bathing in the sun.
But I looked closer.
There was something off about it all. The lazy stance of his was practiced and deliberate, the smile a little too forced, the tone of his voice sticky-sweet with manufactured drawl.
No. It wasn’t as simple as that. Not quite.
Zeryth’s head cocked. “What are you looking at me like that for?”
“Do you remember the first time we met? I must have been fourteen summers, yes?”
He chuckled. “Probably.”
“I was so excited to meet someone who looked like me. Even with some differences.” I gestured to the patches of gold skin on my face, raising my brows wryly. “I asked you to tell me of Ara, you took your knife and carved the shape of the continents into an apple. Threll and Besrith, even the Fey lands. You showed me where Ara was.”
His smile had gone distant. “I don’t recall.”
“I’m sure you don’t. But I kept it until it rotted.”
I still remember exactly how it looked, the white meat of the apple shriveled, the mottled skin of the “continents” fly-eaten. I tried everything I could to preserve it — impossible, in the oppressive heat
of the Threllian summer. By the time I finally gave up and discarded it, it looked like a ravaged version of the world, blackened and decaying like the flesh I now rotted beneath my fingertips. Zeryth was long gone by then, of course, set off across the sea. And after I threw that apple into the trash, I returned to my little, windowless room with nothing but a dream of whatever lay beyond it.
“I was so young,” I said. “I thought that it was kindness, what you did for me. But you have always been so willing, Zeryth, to dangle a world just out of reach.”
Then I pulled my cloak closer around me, slid my chilly fingers into my pockets, and went down the stairs.
I understood, in an abstract way, that Max’s family had been powerful. But walking the halls of the Farlione estate put that into a whole new perspective. It was so different, seeing it in person rather than in the imprints of Reshaye’s memories. Those fuzzy images didn’t capture the scale of it, or the unfamiliar beauty. Max rarely spoke of his family. Now I realized exactly what the Farliones must have been, before their fall. This estate was befitting of a family only two steps from royalty.
The hallway was lined with paintings. I paused at a portrait of a woman with long dark hair and brown eyes that gazed into the distance. The half smile on her lips was the same one Max wore when lost in thought. His mother, surely. Beside her, there was a man with grey at the temples of his black hair and deep smile lines, and the angles of his face resembled Max’s so strongly that I knew I had to be looking at his father.
I heard light footsteps approach from behind me.
“We need to start working today,” Nura said. “Start strategizing. And training, of course. Taking Kazara won’t be easy with our forces split. We’ll have to rely on you heavily. And the sooner we take back the Capital, the sooner this nightmare is over.”
It was the first time I’d heard Nura say much of anything, let alone express such strong distaste, since she hurled blades across the dining room the day before. There was something else in her voice, too — a glimpse of a deeper discomfort. Even beneath Nura’s stoic ice, I had seen the expression on her face shift, ever-slightly, when we walked into this house.
I turned around. “Why did you miss when you threw those knives?”
Her lips thinned. “Did you think you were the only idiot to spill your blood over a contract?”
Ah.
Now that it was out in the open, it seemed practically obvious. How had I not seen it before?
“You can’t act against him.”
“I certainly can’t kill him.”
Her wording was different than mine. Noted.
“Zeryth and I… never got along,” she said. “And to be a Second is to be a failed competitor of the Arch Commandant, and the one to take power if they die. It made sense to build a loyalty protection into the oath. As much as I despise it.”
She looked as if the words physically pained her. I was sure she did hate it. I was also sure that it was the only reason Zeryth had made it this far alive.
“You and I are united in that,” she added. “It’s in both of our best interests to get this over with as quickly as possible.”
I didn’t answer. I took a few meandering steps down the hall, looking up at the paintings. Several dark-haired, dark-eyed teenagers stared down at me. And then I stopped in front of a face that made my heart clench.
Amazing, how different he looked. Max was a young man in this painting, barely more than a teenager. His face was a little softer, yes. But it was the look in his eye that so starkly separated this boy from the man I knew — a sharp, cold stare.
“He looked very different.”
“He was different, back then. He was less… afraid. When he wanted something, he was willing to do whatever it took.” She lapsed into silence. Then she added, with a hint of sadness, “He had incredible potential.”
The way she said it made my jaw clench. He had incredible potential, she said, as if there was something this boy had that the man did not. Willing to do whatever it took, she said, as if that was something to be admired.
Max had seen the cost of war, and decided it was unacceptable. That wasn’t fear. That was compassion. And this arrogant child that stared down at me from the wall? He wasn’t brave. He was foolish. I had seen many young Threllian soldiers with that look in their eye — the kind that told me they had already granted themselves absolution, and whatever they were about to do to me was merely a step in “whatever it took.”
He hadn’t lost something. He had gained something.
I turned away.
“The Syrizen told me the refugees have been settled,” I said. “I want to see them before we do anything else.”
“Afterwards, we can—”
“I see them first. Then we work.”
My voice must have told her it wasn’t worth the fight, because she let out a little, frustrated breath.
“Fine. If you insist.”
These weren’t homes. They were slums.
The Threllian refugees had been settled into large, ugly buildings at the edge of the city, constructed of crumbling stone and rotting wood. The apartments themselves were small, which would have been fine had they not also been ramshackle and ill-kept. The surrounding areas were no better. They stood just outside of the Capital, close enough to see the walls looming and then the Towers beyond them — close enough to make my palms sweat when I thought of the battles that would be inflicted upon this city, not long from now.
“This territory is safe,” Ariadnea told me, when I asked about it. “Fully undisputed. And neither Aviness nor Zeryth wants to damage the city they plan to take, not within the walls or outside of it.”
I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. And now, the chilling possibilities of everything I’d failed to stipulate in my contract loomed over me like a cold shadow. I’d spent hours dictating my demands, so careful to close every possible loophole. But how could I have stopped this? What words could I have used to define that their washrooms should be functional and their windows unbroken?
The refugees were busy, settling themselves into their new lives, making the best of it. But my magic tasted their uncertainty just as strongly as their excitement. They knew, after all, what a war-battered country looked like. They knew what dangers it held.
Nura had wandered off with the Syrizen. But Sammerin remained beside me, silent in a way that told me he was thinking what I was.
“I should have been more careful,” I muttered.
“You were never going to be able to control every outcome.”
But couldn’t my life buy more than this? I didn’t say the words out loud, but Sammerin placed his hand on my shoulder, a brief, wordless comfort for the things I did not voice.
Later, I helped Serel move into his new apartment. “Move,” actually, wasn’t quite the right term, because that would imply he had belongings to unpack. He brought only one small bag with him from Esmaris’s estate, a worn leather satchel that he had carried with him the day he arrived at the estate. I wandered around counting water stains in the ceiling as he shelved three shirts and two sets of trousers. Four books, worn and torn, that he meticulously arranged in the corner where the wall met the floor — he had no bookshelf. Then, upon his single set of drawers, he placed three items: a silver necklace that I knew had once belonged to his mother. A tin flute, which he had learned to play quite beautifully over the years. A little carved bone figurine of a bird.
And, at last, his sword — by far the most valuable item in this place, probably worth more than this apartment itself.
“I almost didn’t keep it,” he remarked, as he set it down and regarded it with a wrinkle over his nose. “It’s… well, it’s his. You know?”
“I know,” I said. Thinking of my bloody jacket that I had so happily discarded as soon as I’d arrived at Ara. Thinking of the way my hair had looked shriveling in Max’s fireplace when I’d hacked it off.
“Still.” He brushed the hilt, patting it lik
e an old friend’s shoulder. “Just in case.”
Just in case.
I wanted so badly for my friend to never have another “Just in case.” I wanted him to be able to leave steel behind. I watched as Serel circled the room, examining his new home. A lump rose in my throat.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize it would be—” I stumbled over my words. “I’ll get you somewhere better soon.”
“What? This is terrific.” He gave me a grin. Gods, there was nothing quite like Serel’s smile. It illuminated his whole face. He went to the windows and extended his arms. “Look at this. This is what freedom looks like, Tisaanah.”
The “freedom” that he was gesturing to was, in fact, an utterly breathtaking view of a narrow alleyway, a pile of trash, and a brick wall with some very unpleasant Aran words painted on it.
“So what if it’s not pretty?” Serel added, as if he could hear my skepticism. “None of the best things are.”
In any other scenario, I would have happily taken the door he’d left open for my self-aggrandizing, silly joke. But I could barely speak.
I wanted to believe him. But I watched his silhouette as he dropped his arms and looked out into the Capital slums, watched his smile fade and a wrinkle form between his brows. And in that moment, I could feel it: his doubt.
Freedom, yes. But he, and so many others, had once again been ripped away from everything they knew and thrown into a world that had no care for them.
I would need to care enough to make up for it all.
I went through the rest of the day in a haze. I trained. I strategized. I followed Nura, and the Syrizen, and Zeryth as we ran over strategies and maps. I kept careful track of Reshaye, and carefully patched the gaping wound of anxiety in my chest. And of course, I showed none of it. There were few things I was more adept at than hiding uncertainty, so now I draped mine in calm confidence that was smooth as silk.
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