“He killed my mother.”
“Yes, but why?” Tola straightened, a bloody cloth in her hand. Her red hair was loose as it always was, beaded braids visible in the light from the hearth in the middle of the room. “Perhaps there is something to be learned from him. Perhaps killing someone is not always the answer.”
“Tie him up,” Sibba ordered. Her shoulder had begun to throb again, now that her life was no longer in danger. The pain made her grumpy, and when Tola tossed a glare at her over her shoulder, Sibba didn't back down. “He is still my enemy,” she said. “I will talk to him when he is tied up.” When it became clear that Tola would do no such thing, Estrid went forward with a length of rope and bound the boy's hands together and then knotted the end of the rope to the leg of the bench.
Sibba sat only when that was done, perching on the edge of the hearth and closing her eyes. The fire was dwindling but still warm and she let it seep into her skin. She was suddenly acutely aware of the sharp, stabbing pain that shot through her arm at regular intervals with the pounding of her heart.
“Here, hold this,” she heard Tola say to Estrid, and then Tola was standing in front of her, her hands examining the arrow shaft that still stuck out of her shoulder. It had come loose in the ordeal and now hung at an angle. Blood dripped down her arm and chest, a slow, steady trickle.
“This is going to hurt,” Tola said.
Sibba started to respond but couldn't speak anymore because that was when Tola began to twist the arrowhead in her arm, trying to angle it for exit. Her lungs seized and her vision swam, and then it stopped. She dropped her head to her knees before she vomited.
“I'm sorry,” Tola said, pulling Sibba back up to a sitting position. Sibba couldn't catch her breath to reply. She kept her eyes closed, afraid of the spinning world around her. “It had to be done.” She pressed a clean white cloth to Sibba's shoulder. The arrowhead was on the bench beside her in a bloody puddle.
“Just bandage it,” Sibba said. “Don’t use your energy to heal it. I’ll be fine.”
Tola looked like she wanted to argue, but Sibba stopped her with a look. “Can I at least stitch it?”
Sibba nodded. The vala pulled a needle and a fine wire from her pouch and set to work. Each jab of the needle sent her mind reeling again, but she breathed slowly as Tola instructed and tried to think of something else.
“How did you get us out of the forest?” Sibba asked.
“What?” Tola bent low, her hair brushing against Sibba’s face, and cut the wire with her teeth, then knotted it with deft fingers.
“I heard you,” Sibba said. “Or felt you pulling at me.”
Tola abruptly pulled away and turned so that Sibba couldn't see her face. “I didn't—”
“No!” The shout came from across the room and there was a crash. When Sibba looked over, Evenon was on his stomach on the floor, his bound hands twisted awkwardly and Estrid sitting astride his back.
“She needs me,” he grunted.
Estrid took hold of the boy's hair and slammed his head into the ground, sending up a plume of dust. Evenon coughed and grew still, but Sibba thought she saw a tear streak down his dirty face. Forgetting about Sibba, Tola hurried over to them and pulled Estrid to her feet.
“You shouldn't have tried to fight him,” Tola scolded her. “You must think of the baby.”
“The what?” The words escaped Sibba before she could think about it, before she could even really process what she'd heard. Ridiculously, she began to scan the room for a child, and then her eyes landed on Estrid's stomach. The girl's hands were splayed across the flat plane of her stomach and the look of shock on her face betrayed the fact that she had not told the vala of her condition. Had perhaps not even known herself.
“I'm…”
Tola, who was busy pulling Evenon back onto the bench, didn't notice the girls' reactions. “Pregnant, yes. You didn't know?”
The silence must have reached her ears then because she turned around, her eyes darting from Estrid to Sibba and then back again.
“Oh,” she said. “I thought—”
“No,” Estrid said, turning her back to Sibba, refusing to even look at her friend. Estrid's deft fingers were reworking the ties at his hands while Tola began to secure the boy's feet.
Seeing that he was secured and that her friends were otherwise occupied, Sibba slipped back outside. The twisted knot in her chest made her want to shut down, to pull away, to seek solace in solitude, to hide her weaknesses, as she had always done. And though she never thought she would, she missed her island now more than ever.
✽ ✽ ✽
The soft shuffle of feet through the snow alerted Sibba to Tola's presence. The vala did not even pretend to think that she had sneaked up on Sibba. Without speaking, she lowered herself down beside Sibba on the fence railing and wrapped a fur blanket around both their shoulders.
Neither said anything and the silence seemed to drag on for hours, though it couldn't have been more than a few minutes. Sibba thought of everything she wanted to say, everything she could say. But Sibba kept her lips pinched tightly closed and her eyes turned up to the stars. The distant sparkling dots reminded her of the white diamonds on the Crowheart girl's head.
“I’m sorry,” Tola said, breaking the silence, “about Evenon. About stopping you. But I know what violence and death lead to. More violence. More death. I grew up surrounded by people who didn’t understand the value of life. I was sent away because of it.”
Sibba sighed. “You were right.” There was so much Sibba didn't know, and she thought that Evenon might have the answers. To get them out of him, she would have to talk to him. And to talk to him, he would have to be alive. “He and I have both hurt each other, but I think we can help each other if we gave each other the chance. If we could be honest with each other.”
Tola nodded and the silence returned, more comfortable this time but still charged with unspoken things. Sibba thought about honesty and the secrets her mother had kept and the way that Estrid had turned her down all those years ago. It still hurt, even if she knew now that it had never been love.
“I told Estrid I loved her once,” Sibba said. “She turned me away. She loved—loves—someone else.” She closed her eyes against whatever Tola would say next. Why? or What's wrong with you? or Couldn't you see she wouldn't love you back?
Instead, Tola was quiet for another insufferable stretch of time. Sibba was afraid she would start talking again, disclose some more shameful secrets, but instead, Tola finally whispered, “I cannot fall in love.”
“What do you mean?” Sibba asked. The cold was finally creeping in beneath the warmth of her flush, and she wrapped the blanket tighter around her shoulders. The fur smelled like smoke from a hearth fire and made her think of the inside of the house, Estrid alone with Evenon. Though not truly alone. Not with a baby growing inside of her.
“To give myself to someone—body and soul—would mean sacrificing a part of my spirit, binding myself to them,” she said. Sibba turned quickly to look at her, surprised by this admission, and found her face too close to Tola's. The girl's green eyes, surrounded by black kohl, searched Sibba's face. Her thin, pink lips parted and warm breath brushed Sibba's cheek. “I draw my power from my spirit; if I give it away, I give away my powers.”
“When you find the right person, perhaps you'll be ready to make that sacrifice.” It was a whisper, a hope, a wish that Sibba spoke into the world.
Tola looked away, and Sibba let herself feel a bit happy about the pink flush that rose in the girl's cheeks. “My powers are too valuable. Without them, perhaps you would have wandered the draugnvithr for eternity. Perhaps the ax wound would have killed you. The gods have given me this gift for a reason, and I will use it for as long as I can.”
“But your mother? She must have found someone if she had you.”
“My mother had me because Chief Isgerd found someone suitable and ordered her to. She never learned how to love and I wonder if
that’s what ruined her. I’m afraid…I’m afraid I’ll end up just like her. But I’m also afraid of losing that huge part of myself.”
Sibba felt Tola shrinking away from her, the gust of air that squeezed between them, and she could do nothing to stop it. Wasn't she the one who wanted to escape? The one who wanted to leave the Fields with no ties? Didn’t this make it easier? “Maybe it's for the best,” Sibba said, willing her voice not to tremble. “A life without love is a life without pain.”
Tola smacked her teeth and turned her eyes back to the sky. “Or perhaps a life without love is no life at all.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Rayne
Rayne did her best to concentrate on the chessboard that was set up between her and her sister, but her mind wandered hopelessly. It had been like this since Imeyna, since Seloue, since the kiss, since Tierri had confessed how much he knew. Nothing seemed to matter except for the sprawling possibility that things could be different, and she could be the one to usher in that change. Not for her father or for the Knights, but for herself. For Tierri. For Seloue. For hundreds of slaves. It was a dazzling prospect that weighed heavily on her shoulders.
Edlyn captured Rayne's queen and peered up at her sister from beneath her long, dark lashes without a hint of her usual gloating. “Where are you today?”
The knife in its sheath pressed against her thigh. “I'm here.”
“You've been distant lately. I hope you’ll come back before the gathering.”
“I wouldn't miss it.”
Edlyn would be eighteen in a few days' time. That meant her betrothal would be made official, as would her position as Queen of Hail. It also meant that Rayne, who had not followed far behind Edlyn, would be eighteen in less than a year. It was the age of majority, when her sister would become the most powerful woman in the country. But she would squander that power, waste it on propagating their father’s legacy of slavery, destruction, and war.
Her right hand slipped into her pocket and gripped the knife's hilt, a reminder of why she was here and what she had to do. A clean slice across the neck with the blade that both Tierri and Rayne would claim had last been seen in Danyll's possession. A fresh smear of her blood on the Crowheart door, a scream that would draw the guards. She would fall to her knees and weep at her sister's side, just an innocent, tragic princess.
Just inside the closed door, Danyll and Tierri spoke in a low rumble of deep, quiet voices. Tierri's back was to her; Danyll had not let Edlyn out of his sight since the assassination attempt, and his narrow eyes regularly swept over Rayne as if searching for any sign of treachery. He had not accused her of the poisoning, but he also no longer let his guard down around her. But he had missed the knife in her pocket and the determined line into which her mouth was set.
She countered Edlyn but it was a sloppy move and Edlyn knew it. She moved her bishop diagonally across the board. “Check.”
“I could use some sleep,” Danyll was saying. Tierri shifted his weight and looked over his shoulder at the girls. Rayne tried to ignore him, tried not to see, but she had been hyper-aware of him. Just the sound of his voice or a glimpse of him through a doorway set her heart to racing. When they had walked up the stairs to Edlyn's room that morning, it felt like the sparks between them should have been visible. But he had given her no indication that he had even given their kiss another thought.
Tell me to stop. A part of her wished that she had, but a bigger part of her wished that he had not left that night.
Rayne moved her knight to protect her king, and Edlyn dispatched him quickly. “Check,” the girl said again.
“How did you get so good at this?” Rayne asked.
“Practice,” Edlyn confessed. “Years and years of practice.” Years and years of solitude, of time spent across the board from Prince Danyll, being brainwashed into thinking she needed him just because he was the only one there.
“I'm sorry,” Rayne said, dropping her voice but not taking her eyes off of her pieces. She saw no way out of this one; anywhere she went, she would lose. “For leaving you alone.”
Edlyn scoffed. “It wasn't your fault. You were taken from us. I'm sorry I didn't…that we didn't…”
Rayne looked up at her then but Edlyn’s eyes were somewhere else, years in the past, on a scene that haunted Rayne every night. How had she never thought about the fact that Madlin had to haunt her siblings just as much? Her hand moved almost of its own accord, knocking down her own king as she reached across the board and grabbed Edlyn's fingers.
“Me, too,” Rayne admitted.
“I think about her a lot.”
“Every day.”
“Maddy didn't deserve it. Mother blamed Father, you know? We all thought the Knights had taken you in revenge. We kept waiting for your body to appear on the pikes, but it never did, and maybe that was worse. The not knowing. The blame—”
Edlyn stopped abruptly when a hand landed on her back. Rayne looked up into Danyll's black eyes and did her best not to recoil. As much as she looked like a crow, he looked like a snake. “I'm going,” he said. “Tierri is here. I trust him.” He looked pointedly at Rayne, but she made sure not to look away. He would get no sign of guilt from her. When he left, Tierri slipped out behind him without a backward glance to stand guard at the door. It was her turn now.
“The blame is Father's,” Rayne said, standing and pacing, the game forgotten.
Edlyn watched her. “The blame belongs to us all.”
“No,” Rayne said. The knife was burning in her pocket. She resisted the urge to rip it out and throw it across the room. “Father has done to you what he has done to the whole country. Locked them away, shut down the people that don't serve a purpose for him or that oppose him in any way.”
“But it's necessary,” Edlyn said, “to keep the peace.”
Rayne stopped pacing and her fingers twitched toward the knife. “Is that what you believe or what he believes? Wouldn't it be more peaceful to give everyone freedom and opportunities?”
“They squander them.” Edlyn stood, her tiny fists balled at her sides. “They ruin their chances by doing things like kidnapping princesses and blowing up royal estates.”
Rayne threw up her hands in frustration. “They do those things only because Father won't let them do anything else.”
“Why would he?” Edlyn's high-pitched voice matched her own. “The slaves are violent and rebellious. To free them would be to ruin us!”
Rayne sank onto a settee, her head falling into her hands. When she looked back up, Edlyn was still standing, her cheeks flushed and her teeth grinding together. No one had probably ever challenged her and King Innis's beliefs. With his iron fist and threats of a slaver's band, who would?
“Please, Edlyn.” Rayne's hand was in her pocket, the hilt of the knife against her palm. Tell me to stop. “You have to understand.”
The door opened behind Edlyn and Tierri stepped through. Rayne watched the way his gaze flitted between the girls and then down to Rayne's hand still buried in her pocket. He had expected to come in and find her dead, she knew.
“I can't,” Rayne said to him.
Edlyn turned, saw him, and looked back at her sister. “Can't what?”
“She doesn't know, she thinks—” An idea blossomed in the back of her mind and the open door called to her. “Get your shoes,” Rayne said to Edlyn. “There's someone I want you to meet.”
✽ ✽ ✽
There was no elaborate carriage this time, no horses and no guards. Instead, there were just two princesses and a general slinking through the darkness. As they approached the gate, Tierri held them back until a guard's back was turned and they darted forward, slipping outside the curtain walls while the man called to one of his companions.
“I think we need better security,” Rayne mumbled to him.
“Getting out is easy,” Tierri replied, ushering the two girls ahead of him beneath the eaves of nearby shops. “It's getting back in that will be tricky.”
/> “Getting out has never been easy for me,” Edlyn said. “Believe me, I tried for years.”
Rayne was in the lead, her black hood pulled up over her hair. She threw a glance over her shoulder at her little sister. “You did?”
“Oh, sure. Danyll and I were not always close. It's hard, though, to trick a wielder.”
Tierri grunted from behind them.
When they finally emerged into the marketplace, the sun had just dipped below the horizon but it was still packed with people.
“Fish for dinner!” A merchant waved a paper-wrapped fish at them and it surprised Rayne if only because she hadn't noticed the smell. Tierri was right; she had gotten used to it. A slave girl approached the man, her cut sleeve revealing a silver band.
“Does she look savage?” Rayne asked Edlyn.
Edlyn narrowed her eyes at her. “Given the opportunity, I'm sure she could be.”
“Who wouldn't be?” Tierri asked. “Locked up, her family and her freedom ripped away from her. Who would blame her for wanting her captor dead?”
The slave girl turned her wide eyes on the trio. Surely she was too far away to hear, but there was still fear there—fear at seeing noblewomen, fear at being seen by a general in golden armor.
“Does that sound familiar?” Rayne asked her sister as they pushed past the girl and the fish stalls and into the crafter's row. “Are you violent and savage?”
“That's different,” Edlyn said. “It's for my own safety.”
The red door to the jewelry shop was closed, and the window display had been removed in favor of white butcher paper. “Wonder where he went,” Rayne said to Tierri.
“Probably to Flagend,” Tierri said. “To buy a replacement.” The idea sent chills up Rayne's spine. She couldn't imagine believing that people were so easy to replace.
They passed through crafter's row, Edlyn stopping once to admire silk scarves but quickly being pulled along by Rayne. As they rounded a corner into a residential area, a figure walked ahead of them in a red cloak, standing out like a rose in a field of ashes.
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