I braided my hair back and went to meet Kiva in the training arena, checking the connection with Res along the way. I couldn’t dismiss the fear the link would disappear. His sleepy contentment floated back to me like drifting clouds across a summer sky.
In the courtyard, rain fell gently, sliding off my leathers in droplets. I’d just joined Kiva at the edge of the archery section, my black-gold bow in hand, when a familiar drawling voice said, “Cute outfit.”
I spun to face Shearen, two Vykryn at his back, including the one whose ribs I’d broken. The boy looked like a jungle cat about to tear apart his dinner.
“Those went out of style in Rhodaire a while ago.” Shearen grinned, and the soldiers with him laughed.
My free hand tightened into a fist, the wound from the night before twinging. Kiva touched my shoulder, but it wasn’t necessary. Being around Razel had helped me learn how to keep my mouth shut when necessary, like when we were faced with three highly trained Illucian warriors clearly trying to cause trouble.
Trouble was the last thing I could afford now.
I turned around and pulled an arrow from my quiver. Kiva stayed angled toward the men, watching my back.
“I guess we really did beat you all into submission,” Shearen said. “Not that it took much effort. Rhodairens are weak. You hid behind the crows, and without them, you’re nothing.” Derision dripped from every word. He truly did hate us. The feeling was mutual.
“Your people deserve what happened to them,” he pressed, his voice scraping against my skin. “If it were up to me, I’d have seen you all burn. Maybe I’ll still get to.” He laughed, but it cut short abruptly, followed by a sharp yell and a loud crash. I whirled, arrow nocked and drawn, then relaxed.
Ericen had slammed Shearen into the ground, his boot on the back of his neck, one arm wrenched painfully behind him. “I’d appreciate if you didn’t talk to your future queen that way.”
“You bastard—Ah!” Shearen’s face twisted in pain as Ericen tugged harder on his arm. His friends stepped forward. I leveled the arrow at them. They stopped.
“All right!” Shearen yelled. Ericen released him, and he scrambled to his feet, massaging his injured shoulder. He glared murderously at Ericen, but behind the anger, something else seethed.
“Watch your back,” he hissed, but for some reason, I didn’t believe the threat for a second. He was like a cat puffing out his hair to look bigger, only he lacked the teeth and claws to back it up.
Without another word, Shearen pushed past his friends for the exit, and they followed.
I only lowered the arrow once they were gone. “We could have handled that ourselves.”
Ericen opened his mouth to respond, then shut it and stalked away, his shoulders hunched in frustration.
I turned back to Kiva, whose face was frozen in a wide-eyed stare. “Did you see him take that guy down?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“I’ve never seen someone move like that. Be careful around him, Thia.”
A chill trickled along my spine, and I turned grudgingly back to the targets. “Come on. I need to shoot something.”
* * *
I went looking for Ericen when Kiva and I finished. A servant showed me to his rooms, though I had a feeling he wouldn’t be there. Finding them empty, I traced my way back to the main hall, then out into the rapidly chilling evening.
Rocks crunched underfoot as I followed the curving path to the stables. Whenever I’d been angry or sad, I would spirit myself away to the rookery, where the quiet presence of the birds made me feel safe. When Ericen had shown me the stables and I’d seen the way he looked at the horses, I knew they were a similar refuge for him.
In some ways, we weren’t so different, and I didn’t know what to make of that.
The grounds were quiet, the horses stabled for the night and the workers and servants reduced to a skeleton crew. But the large front door was cracked open, and a sliver of firelight spilled out.
I slipped in, spotting a figure halfway down the walkway. Bathed in a pool of moonlight from the open windows above, Ericen leaned his elbows on the edge of a stall door, his face pressed against the massive black head of his stallion, Callo. His eyes were closed, his shoulders rounded, as if he’d gone to sleep. He looked peaceful.
The horse’s ears flicked, and he snorted, lifting his head. Ericen went rigid, spinning on the spot with one hand on a sword hilt. I froze.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…” What didn’t I mean? I’d meant to come looking for him, but I hadn’t expected to find him so vulnerable. It felt like an intrusion.
He relaxed, letting his hand drop to his side. “It’s all right. What are you doing here?”
I approached slowly. “I came looking for you.”
“Funny. I could have sworn you’ve been avoiding me since last night.”
I paused at the edge of the barn door. “Is that why you threw Shearen on his back? Old-fashioned jealousy?”
Ericen smirked, crossing his arms. The moonlight caught the edge of his black jacket, illuminating the definition of his arms. Kiva’s warning echoed. “First, Shearen has a boyfriend. Second, he deserved it.”
“No doubt. But that’s what I have Kiva for.” One overprotective friend was enough. “But I haven’t been avoiding you. I left the ball early last night, and I was in town this morning.” Neither of those were lies exactly.
“Right. Your new hobby.” He sounded skeptical. “Maybe I could go with you—”
“No.” The word came too quickly, and I cursed silently as his mouth pressed into a thin line. “What I mean is, being here—it’s not easy for me. Visiting the Colorfalls is a break from it all. It’s still Illucia, but it’s…I don’t know. Easier.”
He regarded me with a sidelong look, and for an instant, I saw Caylus, his curls falling over bright, curious green eyes, head tilted in question. I blinked the image away to find Ericen regarding me strangely.
“I understand. Though I have to say I thought we’d moved past that.”
A warning prickled in my chest. “Moved past what?”
He looked at Callo as he said, “What my mother did.”
“You mean ripping everything and everyone I ever loved away from me?” My voice surprised even me with its cool edge.
He stiffened, fingers curling and uncurling into fists. But he didn’t respond. For some reason, his silence was worse. It broke something inside me, and what came rushing out was hot and sharp.
“You destroyed our way of life!” My voice erupted. It seemed strange it’d taken this long for this conversation to happen. But as I stood glaring at him, my hands clenched, I understood why. Because until now, until this moment, it wouldn’t have mattered.
My hatred for him when we’d first met had softened. At the beginning, I’d thought accusing him of taking everything from me would have just given him satisfaction. Now, some absurd part of me actually expected him to apologize, to explain, to say it wasn’t his fault.
I wanted him to give me a reason not to hate him.
Ericen was quiet for a long moment, focused on Callo as the horse ate. Finally, he found my gaze, his blue eyes nearly silver in the moonlight. “Do you know why my mother attacked Rhodaire?”
“Because Illucians are power-hungry mongrels who want to own the world?”
He smirked, and the familiar one-sided twitch of his lips made me want to punch him. “Yes, that’s part of it. But with Rhodaire, it was personal.”
“Some rogue soldiers from the Turren Wing killed part of your mother’s family,” I said quietly. “But they were punished by us and her.” She had used their anger at Rhodaire for stripping them of their ranks and crows to sway them to her side and carry out Ronoch. Then she’d executed them.
“Do you know exactly what they did?” When I shook my head, he continued.
“They cornered her husband, mother, and older sister, and she was forced to watch as they ordered their crows to tear her family apart.”
I felt behind me for the barn wall and leaned against it, my throat tightening.
“My mother didn’t even want to be queen.” A despondent smile crossed his lips. “She wanted to breed horses. But with her sister dead and her father soon after, she had no choice.”
She had had her family and future taken from her in one bloody night. I understood what that was like. And Ericen—he hadn’t called Razel’s husband his father.
“Your father…” I began.
He shook his head. “They didn’t touch her, not like that. I never even met him though. Calling him ‘Father’ seems…strange.”
I understood. I’d never known my father either. He felt so far away, like a figment of my imagination or a memory faded over time.
“I wasn’t part of the raid that killed your crows,” he added quietly. “I was still at Darkward. If that means anything.”
It did, and I hated that it did, because Ericen was supposed to be my enemy. I was supposed to come here and pretend to be the good little fiancée while I organized a rebellion against his kingdom and hatched a crow.
I wasn’t supposed to care about him.
“Why do you help her, Ericen? Why are you going along with any of this? You must know it’s wrong. The conscription, the conquering, all of it.”
“Of course I know! But Illucian soldiers serve for life. If I left, I’d be hunted down and executed without mercy.” His eyes narrowed. “Don’t look at me like that.”
I drew back. “Like what?”
“Like you feel sorry for me. I’m not telling you this to earn your pity. This is just the way it is.” He shrugged, as if that simple action could dismiss the severity of his words. “I will earn the respect my mother denied me. I will take her place as Valix and king and do something better with this kingdom than she has.”
“By killing rebels and conscripting children?” I asked.
A muscle flexed in his jaw. “I didn’t volunteer for that raid. My mother ordered me to go in exchange for your trips into the city without guards.”
My anger seized, as if it’d struck a wall. He’d made a deal with his mother. If he hadn’t, who knew what trouble those Vykryn could have caused. They might have been tailing me the night of the ball and followed me to Caylus’s. And Res… I shuddered and prayed Ericen thought it was the cold.
“Thank you,” I said. A wind gusted through the stables, taking the tension with it.
“I meant what I said, Thia,” he said softly. “I don’t want to be your enemy.”
I felt as though I’d reached the edge of a cliff, and tipping over, letting myself fall, could mean redemption…or destruction. Could I really trust this boy, who was at once everything I had learned to hate and yet none of it at all?
“If not enemies,” I began, “then what?”
“Friends?” he suggested, stepping toward me. “I’m in rather short supply.”
“Have you tried being nice to people? I’ve heard that works wonders.”
He smirked. “Sounds boring.”
I laughed, and his eyes gleamed as though the sound delighted him. He leaned against the stall door, his lips curving in something dangerously close to a smile.
“Come spar with me tomorrow,” he said.
“What?”
He pushed off the stall. “In addition to the raid, my mother made me agree to another deal. If I want to be Valix after her, I have to win the Centerian.”
I drew a sharp breath. “You’re entering that bloodbath?”
He pressed on as if he hadn’t heard me, stepping closer. “And since it’s your fault I had to make that deal in the first place, the least you could do is help me prepare for it.”
“My fault?” I repeated.
He stood directly before me now, his broad frame blotting out the moonlight trickling in behind him. “Unless you’re afraid, of course.”
The thrill of danger alighted across my skin like an icy breeze. “Oh, this is going to be fun.”
Twenty-One
I sat with Kiva on the couches that evening, having just relayed what had transpired in the stables over slices of whiskey cake, an Ambriellan dessert I’d fallen in love with the time I’d visited. I felt like I always had the night before Negnoch; not ready to sleep but desperate to go to bed and for tomorrow to come so I could see Res.
“There’s something broken in him, Kiva,” I said quietly, the image of Ericen with his head pressed against his stallion’s still fresh in my mind.
“I’m sure there is, but it’s not for you to fix. Have you forgotten who he is?”
I cast her a halfhearted glower. “No. But I don’t think he has to be our enemy.” She laughed, and I pressed on. “I’m serious. He doesn’t want to be his mother. He wants to be better.”
Ericen hadn’t told me those things from a place of self-pity; he’d told me because he intended to do something about it. He wanted to fix his broken pieces. I understood that, just like I understood his desire to be better than his mother. My mother had made mistakes, ones whose echoes now haunted me and Caliza both. We’d inherited the consequences of her decisions, and I would do better.
She set her half-eaten cake on the table. “You could never trust him.”
“I think I could, in time. I think even you could, if you let yourself try.”
“No thanks.”
I sighed, setting my empty plate beside hers. “Have you ever heard the story about how the crows were created? The one from Saints and Sellas.”
“I never read those fairy tales. They’re a waste of time.”
I smiled. “It’s my favorite out of all of them. My mother told it to me one night with only a candle burning in my room. After that, I memorized it.”
Kiva shifted in her seat, leaning back against the armrest so she faced me, and I began to talk.
“When the Sellas made the crows, the night lasted for a year. They drew their power from the night and from it formed the crows. Its darkness became their feathers, its vastness their power, its tranquil silence their quiet wisdom. The night grew angry with the Sellas and refused to give way to the day. Time passed. Crops and people alike started to sicken from the lack of sunlight, withering as the night grew lush and full. The Sellas begged the night to end, but it refused.”
I remembered each moment of the night my mother had told me the story with stark clarity. I’d snuggled deep into my covers, my mother’s rich voice enveloping me. Outside, the night had been thick as velvet, as if waiting to be formed into something greater than itself.
“The Sellas went to the crows, born of night, and asked for their help as repayment for creating them. The crows agreed. The sun crow gave them light in ribbons of gold, the fire crow and storm crow, warmth in crackling fires and pleasant winds. The water crow and earth crow revived their crops, and the battle crow kept them safe from the creatures that haunted the night. The shadow crow challenged the night to a battle, and the night agreed. They dueled, battling at the speed of darkness, too fast and shadowed for the Sellas to see. The fight went on and on in silence, the only indication it raged wisps of black that escaped from the night like ink dispersing in water, until finally, the crow emerged from the dark, victorious.
“The night kept its word and ended, returning to its natural cycle with day. The Sellas thanked the crows and welcomed them into their homes. And so began the relationship between them.”
The firelight flickered, throwing shadows across the room. “When I asked what the speed of darkness was, my mother said, ‘Snuff out the only candle in a room. Watch how quickly the darkness comes.’ And she blew out the candle at my bedside, dousing us in night.”
“I’m guessing there’s a moral here?” Kiva asked.
/> “Darkness spreads quickly,” I replied. “Quicker than light. If we keep doing what we’re doing, if Rhodaire and Illucia keep retaliating against each other, it’s never going to end. The darkness will spread and spread until everything is consumed.”
She regarded me with heavy eyes. “Pain begets pain,” she whispered. “That’s what my mother said to me when she told me what happened to my father. I asked her why she didn’t destroy the people who did it, and that’s what she said.”
I nodded. “The only way to end the cycle, the only way to truly defeat Illucia, is to help them change. They need a better ruler. A better leader. And I think Ericen could be him.”
Kiva pulled a couch pillow over her face, groaning. “You want to ally with him too, don’t you?”
“I figured our job wasn’t hard enough already if you have time to flirt with Auma every day.”
She chucked the pillow at me, and I laughed, snatching her remaining cake and scurrying to the other side of the couch before she could stop me from eating it.
“What about you?” she demanded. “Falling for those green eyes of Caylus’s, are you?”
I scoffed, but she wasn’t wrong. They were pretty. I dropped onto the couch across from her, cake still in hand. “Talking to him is so easy. I love how curious he is about everything.”
“You just like having someone as nosy as you are.”
I smirked. “I just don’t understand how someone can be so observant and so oblivious at the same time. He doesn’t notice anything!”
She gave me a coy smile. “He notices you.”
My face heated, but she was right. Caylus didn’t notice a liquid boiling over above the fire, but he noticed which tea I liked, which muffin was my favorite, and had both ready and waiting when I arrived.
“You notice him too,” she added. “I think you’d live in that workshop if he’d let you.”
My blush deepened. “He’s easy to be around,” I muttered.
“Easy to look at too.”
I laughed. An image surfaced in my mind: him standing face-to-face with Ericen, his eyes hard as jade. At the same time, I thought of him in his workshop, his long limbs twisted into awkward positions in a too-small chair in an attempt to get comfortable, the sunlight illuminating streaks of red in his messy auburn hair, Gio snuggled on one shoulder.
The Storm Crow Page 20
