by Day Leitao
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Liam asked.
“Yes.”
“I was one of those who thought these cities were just legend, superstition.”
Leena stood beside them. “Legends come from somewhere. Come, I have something to show you.” Karina was about to follow the woman, when she turned, “Just him.”
He looked back, shrugged, and followed the woman. Weird.
“You love him, don’t you?”
Karina was startled by the familiar voice. It was just Darian, standing beside her. Ugh, where did he get that idea? “No.” She was probably making a disgusted face.
“Oh.” He was startled, disappointed, or something, and looked down. “I thought…”
Karina pointed to the direction Liam had gone. “I don’t even know him.”
Darian laughed. “Him? It’s obvious you don’t like him. I was talking about my brother.”
Karina caught her breath, stepped back, and knew at that instant that her reaction had betrayed her. There was no point lying or pretending. She took a deep breath. “I wouldn’t call it love, you know? And it’s over. He was tricking me, so it was fake.”
“But that doesn’t change the way you feel, does it?”
“Why are you asking this?”
“I fear you might be hiding something.”
Karina looked at him. “Everybody hides something, don’t they? And I don’t want to look stupid.”
Darian nodded. “There’s no shame in love, you know? If he really did trick you, then the shame is only his.”
Perhaps he was trying to be helpful, but the effect was the opposite. “Well, sure, but it doesn’t change the fact I was an idiot.”
Darian shook his head. “Never an idiot, that’s not how you should think. Listen, I know Cayla has been given you a hard time. She is… difficult, or stubborn, and…”
“And you like it!” Karina laughed.
Darian smiled. “I love it. You’re right.” He got serious. “But how do you think I feel whenever she says my brother is disgusting, ugly, and all that stuff?”
Karina shrugged. “Well, it’s his fault we almost died, so, considering everything—”
“She doesn't need to say he’s repulsive, though. I don’t look that different from him.” He rolled his eyes. “Anyway, I’m gonna talk to her. Please share everything you remember, even details that don’t seem to make a difference. We need to find out what happened with the Darloom castle and figure out other stuff as well. We need the truth from everyone.”
Karina nodded, even if she considered the prospect of sharing those things quite uncomfortable. She then pointed in the direction Liam had gone. “Are we going to talk in front of him, though?”
Darian bit his lip. “Yes, in exchange for letting me out, I promised I’d bring him to you, and bring him with me if you were with us, so I have no choice. But Leena said—” He paused. “He’s fine.”
That was surprising. “If she says so…”
Darian then said, “I didn’t remember any of this. They wiped my memory when I left. For now, as long as we come out of here with answers and knowledge, I don’t care.”
Maybe he was suggesting that their memories could be wiped too. But something didn’t make sense. “Why would they wipe your memory? You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
“When I left this city, I went to the castle live with my father. I can understand the precaution.”
Karina nodded. She then had something else to ask. “How come Sian wasn’t—”
“Raised here? I have no idea. I didn’t even know I had a brother until I went to the castle, some three years ago.”
“Did you know your father tortured him?”
Darian looked down, then closed his eyes. “Yes, I mean, my brother told me about being starved, or punished if he didn’t accomplish whatever his father wanted him to do.”
“Yes, but he also made him withstand pain. I think he burned him with pokers. To train him to withstand pain without crying or yelling.” Karina felt nauseous when remembering her dream. She had no idea why she was telling Darian that, but she thought she should.
“He told you that?”
Karina felt uncomfortable, but she had to explain it. “I saw it in a dream. I know, sounds silly and weird. But also, he wouldn’t remove his shirt or let me touch his back or chest.” Karina realized what she had just said and her face got hot, but Darian just looked curious and concerned, and not the least interested in knowing why she’d want to touch him or why removing his shirt had come up. “I guessed that it was because he had scars, and he confirmed it.”
Darian seemed on the verge of tears. “It’s unfair, right? I loved my mother, but I don’t understand why she did it.” He gestured around him. “Look at where I grew up. I always had everything I wanted, I always had love. Meanwhile, my brother…” He took a deep breath. “Starved. Tortured.”
Karina remembered the awful things Sian had told her and those creatures attacking her, and said, “Well, that doesn’t justify what he’s done. What he’s been doing. It’s just… I thought you should know. But he’s in the wrong, and I guarantee you, it was all his choice. He’s been planning this for months. And he used me. So while I do pity the boy he once was, I don’t pity the man he’s becoming, and I don’t forgive him for what he did to me.”
Darian shook his head. “You shouldn’t. But don’t think love was a bad thing. It never is.”
“You might change your mind when I tell you what I’ve done.”
“I won’t. And you’re here, ready to make it right, even though it pains you. Isn’t that true?”
Karina shrugged. “Maybe.”
“And you had the choice to stay with him. Didn’t you? I bet he didn’t toss you like Liam wants us to believe. I bet you walked away.”
“What was I supposed to do? Become queen and rule over an army of creepies? And plus, I hate politics.”
“It takes guts to go against your heart.”
“It takes brains, but they should always beat the heart.”
Darian had a faint laugh. “Perhaps. Had things been different, you’d be my sister. I’ll still consider you as such, for my brother’s sake.”
“I doubt he cares.”
“We can’t be sure. I want you to know that whatever happens, whatever we do, I don’t want to hurt him. Maybe I know him very little, but he’s still my brother. So, in a way, I love him as well, and I’ll do what I can to protect him. We have that in common.”
“Not really. I actually want him to suffer, and suffer slowly, for everything he did to me.”
“She’s right.” Cayla was beside Darian and turned to him. “You weren’t trying to convince her that your brother is anything better than a slimy worm, were you?”
Darian took a deep breath and told Cayla, “Come, I need a moment with you.”
Karina was left alone again, but not for long, as Liam returned.
He laughed. “She was showing me a secret cave. Funny, right? That they should trust me.”
He still looked insanely good looking, but it didn’t annoy her or anything.
“Why? Shouldn’t they?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t trust a stranger, but they trust me. Maybe they know I can be trusted.”
Karina remembered what Darian had told her about wiping memories and suppressed a chuckle.
27
Memories
Cayla and Darian headed to the trees, away from the others.
“What did she tell you?” Cayla’s face was curious, almost anxious.
“She’ll tell us later.”
Cayla looked down. “I thought we kept no secrets.”
Darian kissed her forehead. “It’s not a secret, but it’s not my story to tell. She’ll tell us all.”
Cayla moved away from him. “Fine, I guess.”
She looked uncomfortable, and Darian was about to make her even more so, but he had to ask some questions. “Cayla, we need to know e
verything. Everything. We need to understand.”
“That’s why I wanted to know what Karina—”
“She’ll tell us. But I don’t think she’s the only one who has untold stories about my brother.”
“You shouldn’t call him that.”
Darian sighed. “Sian, then. You knew him as a child, didn’t you?”
Cayla fidgeted and looked away. “Not much. I rarely saw him.”
“But you did.”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, yes. I guess.”
“You guess. As if you weren’t sure.”
Cayla sighed. “I saw him very little, that’s all.”
“Fair enough. There’s one thing that I want to understand, just one thing. Why do you dislike each other?”
“Darian, he tried to get you killed once. Maybe you forgive him, maybe you believe his lies, but I don’t.”
“We don’t know if it was him, but I’m not talking about that. I mean before. Before everything, before you even met me, you disliked each other. There must be a reason.”
Cayla shrugged. “How am I supposed to know? He hates everyone.”
“That’s not true and you know it. I saw him at a ball. People flock around him.”
“Maybe they want to lick his boots.” There was something uncertain about her voice. Darian could feel the avoidance and the lie beneath it.
“They would have flocked around my father then. But that’s not the issue, Cayla. Both of you have a grudge or something. There must be a reason. Tell me. I swear I won’t judge you.”
“Me? I’m not the psychopath who’s leading a hoard of monsters.”
Darian breathed to keep his calm and continue speaking in a steady voice. “I know. And if we’re going to defeat him, every piece of information can help.”
“I don’t think stuff that happened eight years ago makes any difference.”
Darian spoke in his softest voice. “What happened?”
Cayla sighed and looked away. “You know kids. Pranks and stuff. Some silly kid stuff, that’s all.”
“Tell me, please.”
Cayla closed her eyes and stared at him, her voice shaking. “You’re not gonna like it.”
“It could be important.”
Cayla shook her head. “I doubt it, I doubt it. But I’ll tell you, and it’s just stupid and childish, and you’re going to think…”
“You don’t trust my love for you?”
She had a half smile, then looked down. “I was a child, Darian, I was a child. Stupid, maybe.”
Darian braced himself to find out what was inside a hornet's nest.
Cayla took a deep breath. “I rarely saw him, and that’s true. Some official business when he was with his father, things like that. He didn’t live in the castle with us.”
Darian’s insides stirred. “He was sent to the military academy when he was five.”
“Oh.” Her face showed traces of shock and disgust. “I didn’t know that. I thought it was some school or something. Anyway, I rarely saw him, until this one trip. I was nine. My father was courting Nia, and he decided we’d all travel together for a vacation. We went to an island far in the ocean. Your father took Sian. My sister stayed in the castle. At that time, I had two friends, two girls who spent time with me. Their parents were important people in my father’s government, and the girls went with us, they were sisters. One of them was my age or a bit older, the other was eleven, her name was Anna. Looking back, it sounds silly, but I sort of looked up to her because she was older, and just seemed so confident, so sure of herself. I don’t know. Stupid.”
Cayla fidgeted. “Sian was weird. I think he was ten or eleven, but he was as tall as he is right now. Maybe just a little shorter. With the body of a ten-year-old. Try to picture that. When we were on the island, he didn’t talk to us, and the girls started calling him names. Not in front of him, but among us. Walking stick or something. I don’t remember well.”
Darian got the sense that she remembered that very well, though.
Cayla swallowed. “Anna even put something on his food. Not poison, just something to make it bitter. He ate it all, never showed that anything was wrong. She followed the servants to the kitchen and passed her finger on his plate. It was horribly bitter, according to her. No idea how he did it. The girls started saying he was a sorcerer and wanted to prank him. Nia heard us one day, though, and pulled me aside. She wasn’t angry, but disappointed. She told me to look into my heart and judge if what I was doing was right. It was a long conversation, and I agreed that I shouldn’t mock a defenseless boy.” Cayla snorted. “I thought he was defenseless, and I sort of pitied him. Anyway, I told my friends to stop the name-calling, and I forbid them from pranking him. I was polite to him when I saw him. I even asked what he was reading. Small conversation, you know?”
“You did a good thing.”
She looked down and shook her head. “They started teasing me, saying I was in love with him. Like I told you, he was thin, weird, and not someone any girl would want to… And it wasn’t true.”
Her words dissipated the very awkward image of young Cayla with a childhood crush on Sian that had been forming in Darian’s mind. He exhaled, relieved.
Cayla must have noticed. “Darian, please! You should have seen your brother when he was a kid. He didn’t look the way he does now.”
It was almost impossible to imagine Sian without his confident stance and smile. “So you agree he looks good now.”
“He’s a hundred times better looking than he was before. But that’s still not much. Imagine how angry and humiliated I felt. I forbade them to tease me or say any of that, but they kept their looks and sniggers. They were my friends—or I thought so. I wanted to prove them wrong, so I started calling him names again, but that wasn’t enough. They still had funny looks. I just wanted it to stop. I wanted to prove to them that I didn’t feel anything for him, so I planned a trap. Don’t look at me like that.”
Darian didn’t think he was looking at her any differently, but perhaps he was. “I’m just listening.”
Cayla sighed. “It was childish, and it was stupid. We sent him a love letter.” Cayla was uncomfortable saying these last words. “Anonymously. Telling him to meet his secret admirer in an old, abandoned house.”
“Weren’t you like, nine, you said?”
“Anna was eleven. It was a childish love letter. And you said you weren’t going to judge me.”
“I’m just curious.”
Cayla sighed, uncomfortable. “The house had a basement, and its floor was very old. There was a hole in the floor, which we covered. Stupid, stupid. But he didn’t show up. He was indeed unfazed and aloof, or perhaps he just wasn’t interested in any of us. At dinner, he acted normal, as if nothing unusual had happened, except that he glanced at us three now and then, more than usual. He was curious. He knew the letter had come from us, or at least one of us. We didn’t have many days left, but I knew he would show up to the house. I knew it. For curiosity, at least. Anna was a good writer, and she wrote another letter. This time it was beautiful and poetic, and…”
“So she was the one with the crush.”
Cayla seemed surprised, then she shook her head. “You’re right, Darian, so right. I can’t believe I never saw it. Perhaps the letter was real, and Anna was spilling her heart in it. He didn’t show up on the second day. The girls got creative and found ways to make the trap worse than it was before. The idea was that the more he delayed, the worse it would get.”
“Children can be cruel.”
“Not all children. Well, he showed up on the third day, a lot earlier than the suggested time. The girls were outside looking for something else to put in the basement. I was the only one he saw. I was alone, and I could have told him to walk away, but I didn’t. He knew it was some kind of prank and told me he was there was to make the letters stop. I asked him to come closer. He was sarcastic and told me that if I loved him so much, I’d walk to him. I did. I tricked him, by wal
king around an imaginary hole, while he walked just a couple steps forward—and fell. The girls had put pig excrements there, Darian. It was disgusting. I didn’t know that. And the fall was higher than we imagined, as we later found out he broke his arm. But it didn’t seem so at the time. He was calm and didn’t say anything. He didn’t seem hurt. The girls came back, and, because they were listening, I told him some things that were, uh, not nice, like how I pitied him or something. They were looking at me from a distance and egging me on. He just sat there, looking bored. Eventually, we left and locked the door. He didn’t show up for dinner. I got worried and considered going back and opening the door, but I was afraid of what the girls would say, so I didn’t do anything.”
Cayla took a deep breath. “The next day, while we were playing outside, he showed up. His left arm was bandaged, and that’s when I realized we had gone too far. I mean, he’d broken his arm. I had just humiliated and hurt an eleven-year-old boy.”
“You were nine.”
“That doesn’t justify it, does it? Anyway, he challenged us to fight him. My friends ran away, saying it was all my fault. I stood my ground. He taunted me, but I just stood there. Still, he immobilized me, then pointed a dagger to my throat, saying he could kill me there and then. It was true, he could. But he said that he’d never sully his hands killing me, that I didn’t even deserve that, then he walked away. I didn’t tell anyone. Sian didn’t tell anyone either.”
“And that’s why he doesn’t like you.”
Cayla closed her eyes as if in pain. “The story doesn’t end there, Darian. We returned to the castle, and I started to see my friends for what they were: cruel and obnoxious. I decided I didn’t want to have anything to do with them anymore. I spoke to my father, but he thought Anna was a good influence on me, so well mannered and all. I just wanted them sent away, and then… I told him. I told my father what they did to Sian, excluding my participation in it. I told him the kind of things they said, the kind of things they wanted me to do. He said they would be sent away.” She took a deep breath. “They were. They never got to their destination, though. They died in a lift accident.”
