“Twylla, no one thinks—”
“You lied to me!” I shout at the heir to the throne. “You have all lied to me.”
“I have never—”
“Is any of it real? Any of it at all? The Telling? How do the traitors die if it’s not real, Merek?”
He covers his face with his hands as I talk. “Please let me explain.” He moves them from his face and holds them out to placate me. “Please.”
It’s the fact that he said please, more than his face or reaching hands, that makes me stop. It reminds me who I’m talking to, because the pleading tone sounds so wrong coming from those lips. I give a stiff nod and he nods in return before he begins to pace, and I stand, rigid, in front of him.
“We—the kingdom was in crisis. The people were becoming nervous, restless. It wouldn’t have taken much for real trouble to start. We had to give them back their faith. It was one of my mother’s ideas.”
“Of course,” I choke. “But how did you pull it off? Because until today I believed I had taken the lives of thirteen men. If not by my hand, then how?”
“Poisoned before you went into the room,” he says slowly, and I can see him weighing his words against my reactions. I try to keep my face blank and calm. “In their last meal. They were given drafts of oleander. All of them.”
“Did they know it?”
He shakes his head.
“So they all died thinking it was me? Tyrek died thinking I killed him?”
Merek hesitates and then shakes his head.
“What does that mean?”
“He alone knew it wasn’t you.”
I have to lean against the altar to keep myself upright as my mind scrambles to put things together. “That’s why he had to die, isn’t it? Because he would have told me the truth if he thought it was hurting me.”
Merek looks at the floor. “He knew. He planned to tell you.”
“So he was killed.”
“He fancied himself in love with you,” Merek says weakly.
“Is it treason to fall in love with me?”
“Please, Twylla. Lormere was heading for disaster. You have to understand,” he begs, and I step back, repulsed by it. “The kingdom was threatened and the people needed … They needed hope, Twylla. People need something to believe in. And the legends say that Daunen comes to bring hope …”
Though I knew it already, hearing the confirmation is as bad as standing in the temple and not feeling the Gods. It’s real now.
“So I am a symbol? All of this, all of my life here, I’ve merely been an emblem to the realm? Why?”
Merek looks wretched, his mouth drawn down in misery. “My father had died. Alianor had died. Years had passed since my mother and stepfather had married, and yet they still didn’t have a daughter. The people … They were scared of what would happen to Lormere when my mother died if I had no queen to take the throne with me. She recalled being told the old legends of Daunen, stories of the daughter of a Goddess who came to Lormere in times of trouble to be hope and justice. And then my stepfather remembered you. Red-haired, with that voice … There hadn’t been a Daunen for a century; no one alive could remember the last time. We were at war when last there was one; people were dying—but once Daunen was amongst us Lormere rallied and won. Because she gave them back their faith. So if we had a Daunen, it would pacify the country, give them the sign they needed that things were well. And I needed a bride. The royal family has always been of the blood; if I were to marry someone not of the blood, she’d have to be nothing short of a miracle.”
He looks at the floor. “But we had to make it real, don’t you see that? We couldn’t bring in a commoner, call her the daughter of the Gods, and then give her the throne; the people would never accept it. We had to make them believe it was divine; we had to make it watertight.”
“So you added a little footnote to the legend? The new Daunen has powers from the Gods so she can kill with one touch?” I scoff. “It’s neat, I’ll grant you that. Who would want to argue with it, given what might happen to them?”
“Twylla—”
“I was kept in a tower, guarded from all, while you pretended that I was a tribute to the Gods? You gave me a pretty temple and told the world I was a killer, and because we’re ignorant peasants we believed in it. Do I have that right?”
He sighs. “Twylla, I wanted to tell you. But then I went on progress and …” He trails off. “I’m sorry. But it had to be done. We weren’t trying to be cruel—” He pauses, swallowing before he continues. “You were the daughter of a commoner. We couldn’t announce you as my betrothed without making it indisputable. My mother invented the idea of the Morningsbane as proof of it. The records of the last time we had a Daunen were vague about how she meted out punishment; it wasn’t hard for my mother to add in the elements needed to make it convincing. If we said you could drink poison, it would provide the proof we needed that you were like us: Chosen by divine right … and the obvious choice for my bride.”
“But Rulf knew? And Tyrek?”
Merek turns away. “Rulf had to know, but my mother cut out his tongue so he could never tell. The boy wasn’t supposed to know at all. I don’t know how he found out. When my mother discovered that he knew …”
My stomach lurches and I have to clamp my teeth together to stop myself from retching. Because of me, all because of me. A man had his tongue removed and his son was murdered, all to make me into an icon.
“I thought I was blessed by the Gods. You let me sing in their name and worship them in a temple. Did you ever believe in the Gods, Merek?”
After a long moment he shakes his head. “Does it matter?”
“It did to me,” I say quietly, and then I turn away, walking past him.
“Where are you going?” He follows me.
“Back to my tower. I need to think.”
“What is there to think about?” He stops me with a touch on my arm, and I turn to him.
“Why it was that the man I am to marry allowed me to think I was a killer. That is what I need to think about.”
“It is part of Daunen’s role. It always has been.”
“But I’m the only one who thought she herself was the ax, am I not?”
Merek clasps his hands together, pleading. “The little we could find in the legends said that Daunen sent those who would destroy Lormere—traitors—to their deaths. My mother made it literal, so that no one would make an attempt on your life. If it was thought you were immune to poison, who would poison you? If it was thought your skin could kill them, who would dare get close to you? Times have changed; the Gods didn’t have the power they used to. We had to give it back to them.”
I stare at him before I turn my back on him.
“Don’t go, Twylla, please. Please try to understand. We couldn’t tell you; if we wanted the kingdom to believe, then you had to believe, too. You were a child when you came here; you couldn’t have concealed it.”
“I have been keeping secrets since birth,” I spit at him. “I was to be the Sin Eater of Lormere, remember?”
“If I’d been here … It will be different now, I swear. It will all be different. No more secrets.”
I cover my face with my hands, desperate to put something between me and him. I stay like that, my fingers as a shield, until I’m calm enough to be able to speak to him without screaming. “It’s a lot to understand, Merek. It’s going to take time. I can’t reconcile to this so fast.”
After a long moment he nods. “You may ask me anything, at any time. I will answer all of your questions and with truth.”
“Thank you,” I say softly, and then I leave him there in the empty temple.
Lief trails behind me, silent as we walk back through the castle to my solar. And as soon as we have crossed the threshold, it is me pressing him to the door, kissing him as though my life depends on it.
* * *
We sit hand in hand on my floor, kneeling and facing each other. My body hums with pleasu
re that we’re touching, that it means nothing, and yet means everything all at once. I can’t keep my fingers still, rubbing the tips of them over his knuckles and across his palm, and he does the same, tracing around my nails and tangling his fingers between mine and we’re both smiling, so much so that my cheeks ache from it but I can’t stop.
“You have to explain,” I say.
“You owe me an apology,” he teases.
“Please, Lief. Tell me how you knew. Tell me how you could see it for a lie when I couldn’t.”
He sits back, looking at me with his head tilted. “Twylla, you Lormerians might have a formidable army, but you don’t have better science than Tregellan. Nowhere does. Our medicine, our apothecary knowledge is far more advanced than yours. We’d know if there was a poison that could be transmitted through the skin—believe me, we’d have used it. Lormere has survived a century without Daunen, to the point where it’s become a myth, a fairy tale, like the Sleeping Prince or the songs you sing. And then there is one again. Why? Why would the so-called Gods have suddenly sent their daughter back? Unless it wasn’t the Gods at all, but someone else—for some other, less divine reason?”
I stare at him as I think. The Daunen before me saved Lormere during the war. Tregellan had invaded, and Merek told me his grandmother was ill and not expected to survive childhood. Was the last Daunen like me, a girl being primed for the throne in case the true heir died? Is that how Daunen came to be? Was she invented as a puppet to masquerade as a child of the Gods to appease the realm?
“Why didn’t they tell me when I came?” I said. “I would have understood it was for the good of the realm—I loved the queen. Why not trust me?”
Lief draws circles on the back of my hand. “I suspect because of Sin Eating. Even now, the way you talk about it, you hold it so close to you. It’s such a big part of you that they had to give you something bigger. They had to give you a duty that would be bigger; they had to make it a destiny. You of all people wouldn’t question a destiny, because you were born and bred with one,” he says softly. “And who wouldn’t prefer a destiny that involved living in a castle, instead of Sin Eating?”
“Sin Eating …” I repeat. I’d forgotten, or I’d not let myself remember, but now I do.
* * *
I was small, so small that Maryl was a baby. I’d spent hours rocking her, hushing her, anything to stop that horrid high-pitched crying where her face turned red and she drew her tiny knees to her chest. My mother had stayed in her room, only coming out once to put her to the breast. Finally Maryl was asleep and I was exhausted, nodding off in my chair.
“Come.” My mother’s door had opened and I dragged myself into the perfumed fug.
“What we do,” she said, as though we were midway through a conversation, “is ancient. It’s timeless. It has always been and must always be.”
My eyelids drooped as she spoke, the warmth from the room lulling me.
“Before Gods, before kings, there was us,” she said. “They took us when they took the kingdom, piece by piece, and told us why we did what we do. But we don’t do it for them, my girl. We do it because someone must, and before Gods and kings there were sins. There have always been sins. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
I nodded, the nod of someone jerking awake, not a nod of understanding.
“We are ancient,” she said. “We make them safe.”
* * *
I look away from Lief, releasing his hand. It makes sense, but I don’t want it to. I don’t want it to be so simple. I’ve spent four years dedicating my life to this and moving steadily toward becoming Merek’s wife. To find it’s nothing to do with my destiny at all, that it’s a life based on the color of my hair and my singing and a madwoman’s delusions of grandeur is harrowing. And so many people have died because of it.
“Do you have Sin Eating in Tregellan?” I ask Lief. He nods. “Tell me how it works.”
He looks nonplussed. “The same as here, I suppose. The Sin Eater eats from the coffin while the family says good-bye. Then the funeral. It’s the same custom, a part of the ceremony.”
“No, Lief, that’s not how it works here,” I say softly. “It’s not a part of the ceremony here.”
He shrugs. “I suppose Sin Eating is one of those things that was left over after belief in the Gods died out. Maybe it would have been too much change to drop it from the funeral ceremony, so they kept it.”
A token gesture. It seems all of my destinies are like cobwebs, easily dusted away in the sunlight. “What does Tregellan believe in?”
“Nothing, really. People had faith in the Gods before the monarchy fell. But it died out during the revolution. People didn’t have time, I suppose. There are those in the smaller hamlets that still believe in some Gods.”
“Our Gods?”
“No. They believe in the Oak and the Holly.”
“ ‘Your Gods’?” I say. “You weren’t mocking me? Tregellan has different Gods?”
He nods. “I wasn’t mocking.”
“How could there be different Gods, Lief?”
“I don’t believe there are any at all,” he says quietly. “But I believe there are men and women whose lives are made easier by believing someone is watching over them.”
My stomach swoops again. That’s what my mother meant. “I felt nothing in my temple,” I say jaggedly. “Nothing. Even then, when I wanted to.”
He pulls me against him, holding me as I try to understand what it is I’ve always known but never understood before.
“I’m sorry,” he says finally.
I shake my head.
“What are you going to do?” he asks.
“I don’t know. But I don’t think I can stay here and pretend to represent the daughter of a Goddess.”
“What about the prince?” he asks me.
“I … I can’t marry him. Not now. I can’t stand beside him and give myself to him and this family.”
“Not after the lies.”
“And not when I’m in love with someone else,” I say without thinking.
“What?” He sits up.
The realization stuns me and my ears ring, blood rushing to my head and my skin as I realize what I have said. And how true it is. Suddenly it is the truest, surest thing in the world. I am in love. That’s what’s been wrong with me. I have been falling in love. For someone who sings of love, I didn’t recognize it at all.
“I’m in love with you,” I whisper.
He devours the words right out of my mouth, pressing his own against mine and swallowing my worries. I let him, willing to sacrifice my questions temporarily for the taste of him, for his hands on my waist.
As soon as he pulls away I miss him, moving closer, desperate to gorge myself on contact after being starved for so long. He obliges, putting his arms around me, and I turn to rest my back against his chest. It feels right. This is where I am supposed to be.
“What are we going to do?” I say finally.
“What do you mean?” he murmurs against my ear.
“What do we do now? What happens next?”
“That’s down to you,” Lief says slowly. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.” I shake my head. “I want to leave here, but I can’t. I’d never get away, not even with your help. But how can I stay?”
“Would … would you come away with me, if there was a way?”
In answer I twist and pull his face to mine, holding his jaw as I kiss him.
“So …” He pulls away, looking at me intently. “Was that a yes? Are you saying that you would be with me?” He tries to mask his hope, but it’s so open on his face.
“I want to be with you.” I think of the queen. She tried so hard to make me into her puppet, and yet she threw someone into my path who wouldn’t allow it. In little over a moon, Lief has undone four harvests’ worth of her work. I imagine her fury when she learns we defied her, and it makes me smile. I lean against him again, relishing the contac
t.
“So what happens next?” he asks.
“We ask the Gods for a miracle.” I smile weakly.
I feel his grin against my temple and he reaches around me to take my hands in his. “I might know of a way out. I’ll have to check, but I’m sure Dimia mentioned a passage the servants use to sneak in and out of the castle and visit the village. Tomorrow during your audience with the king, I’ll sneak off and see whether it proves true.”
“You can’t.” I remember what Merek told me in the temple. “My audience with the king is postponed. He caught a fever during their hunt so there is no audience while he recovers. Oh!” I say, realizing what it means. “We could go tonight, while all eyes are on the king.”
“I doubt Merek’s eyes are on the king,” Lief says drily. “I suspect his thoughts are all for you. Besides, I don’t know where this passageway is, or where it comes out. And we’ll need horses if we’re to get out of Lormere. We can’t afford to get caught in the act of trying to leave; we have to be well away before they realize we’re gone. Far enough away to be unreachable. She’ll come after you, you know. She won’t let you go.” He squeezes my fingers gently between his.
“Luckily for you, neither will I,” he continues, planting a kiss on my ear as if sealing a vow. “We’ll go via my mother’s,” he continues. “She lives beyond the West Woods; I’ll send a message on ahead and we can change our horses there, collect whatever provisions we need, and then go farther into Tregellan. We’ll head north, toward Tallith. We’ll be well beyond their reach there.”
I nod, happier. “It’s a good plan.”
“If I’m honest, Twylla, it’s not the first time I’ve thought about it.” He smiles.
“Oh,” I say softly, my face once again splitting into a grin. I’m not the Sin Eater’s daughter; I’m not Daunen Embodied; I’m something else, something new. Not a monster in a castle, not a nightingale trapped on a thorn. “When can we go?”
“A few days,” he says. “That’s all I’ll need to get everything ready. You must pack what you want to take and keep it ready.”
“I don’t want anything from here,” I say swiftly.
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