by Sam Farren
On the sixth day since waking fully, Reed dragged in a tin bath and one bucket of water after another.
“Bet it’s been a while since you cleaned up,” Reed said, sitting on the bed. “Damp cloths just don’t cut it, after a while.”
“The last time I bathed was in a stream. Eos kidnapped me in my nightwear.”
“She didn’t!” Reed gasped, shaking her head. “What are we going to do with her?”
Reed couldn’t smother a grin.
The implication that something could be done about Eos, that there was hope for her yet, gave Castelle greater pause than her battered leg.
“Here, honey,” Reed said, offering her arm. “You’re lucky the jaws of that bear trap didn’t join. Two inches is the difference between breaking your leg and losing it.
“It’d hurt less, had I lost it,” Castelle said, taking Reed’s arm and pivoting on the spot.
“Easy to say when you still have it. Here. Nice and slow, like we practised,” Reed said, helping Castelle to her good foot and letting Castelle lean against her as she hopped across the room.
Each step sent a judder of pain through her leg, and each judder of pain meant she wasn’t in bed, staring at the ceiling. Reed was offering her less and less opium by the day, and the bare floorboards beneath her feet brought her out of the perpetual haze surrounding the bed.
“That’s it. Nice and easy,” Reed said, easing her into the bath. “Take all the time you need, honey. I’ll be right outside.”
Castelle wore nothing more than an oversized nightshirt. The hems were soaked as she slid into the bath, but it was no matter. The fabric was already drenched with sweat and Reed had brought another. With the bedroom door closed, Castelle pulled it off, dropped it to the ground, and closed her eyes.
The water was still hot. Steam rose along the bridge of her nose, mouth submerged, broken leg and splint propped awkwardly out the end. Her leg had stopped bleeding through the bandages. That was good.
Over the last few days, despite the fog painkillers forced Castelle to wade through, she’d come to two important conclusions. Firstly, she wasn’t a Princess anymore, and hadn’t been for almost a decade and a half. Everyone who’d bowed and simpered and called her Your Majesty or Princess had been biting back a grin. She hoped it had been a fantastic joke for them all.
She was no longer a Princess without a Kingdom. She was just a woman in a nation with no need of a monarchy, a woman who had spent fourteen years believing the blood in her veins was more important than the changing of seasons, the building of settlements, the harvesting of crops, the counting of cattle.
She was a woman without anything.
And that is where her second realisation came from. Eos had not met with her in a fortnight, despite being under the same roof. Eos had used Layla’s name to give Castelle some desperate hope to cling to, something to get her through the unimaginable pain the bear trap had wedged loose within her, and could not face her. Eos could not bring herself to admit that for all the lies Castelle had been raised by, she had told the most scathing of all.
“Reed?” Castelle called through the door.
“You done, honey?”
“May I ask you something?” Castelle asked, reaching for the hard bar of soap Reed had likely shaped with her own hands.
“Anything at all.”
“You’re a doctor, aren’t you?” Castelle asked, eyes on her bandaged leg as she lathered the soap between a hand and shoulder.
“You got me,” Reed said, grin in her voice. “My mother, gods rest her spirit, was the local doctor around these parts. I grew up thinking it was normal to have people bleeding out in your living room while someone was being patched up in the kitchen. We didn’t have much in the way of money or resources, back then. The whole island, I mean. Everyone made do.
“I still take care of the locals around here. It’s not usually anything big. Fevers, stitches, removing broken glass from places it has no business being. You’re the most excitement I’ve had in years.”
Castelle nodded, rubbing the lather over her shoulders, her collarbone. Lavender had been worked into the soap, and the more she breathed it in, the dirtier her skin grew, the more grime caught under her nails. She rubbed and rubbed, skin turning red raw.
“If you hadn’t become a doctor, what would you have done?” Castelle asked.
Reed had been waiting for another question to break the long silence.
“I would’ve become a sheep farmer, most likely. Or a fisher, if I fancied a longer commute to work. But with things the way they were, with all that trouble so long ago, Fenroe needed all the healers it could get.”
Castelle sunk back into the water and blew bubbles. Reed’s options were endless, and even if she never helped another person for the rest of her life, she still would’ve been a doctor, would’ve helped countless people, saving more than she could count. Her title was not an empty word, was not a status without substance, and without it, there were so many things she could do.
Castelle stared at her hands, misshapen by the water.
What did she know of herding sheep or tilling the land? What good was she as anything other than a pawn for two reclusive Lords?
Fenroe needed doctors. It needed shepherds, farmers, fishers.
It didn’t need her.
“Reed,” Castelle said. “The water’s cold. I’m done.”
Castelle didn’t sleep, that night. The painkillers had left her blood and exhaustion was no longer hers to be pushed down by. Reed had changed the bedsheets after Castelle’s bath and aired the room out, but the bath had not eased anything within Castelle. The curtains were closed, for fear of mercenaries pressing their faces to the glass and demanding Castelle follow them back to Laister.
Even the stars were banished from her.
Midnight hadn’t long since passed when someone pounded at the door. Castelle’s eyes hadn’t once drifted shut, but she bolted upright, torn from the depths of a dream.
“Coming, coming,” Reed called, pulling half a dozen latches across. “What is it? Is someone hurt?”
“Nothing like that, ma’am,” came a woman’s voice. “I’m sorry to trouble you at such a late hour, but it’s of the utmost importance.”
“I’m a doctor, honey. I’m more than used to it. What’s the matter?”
“An abduction of a young woman. Nasty stuff,” the woman said solemnly.
Reed gasped. Castelle pictured her hand covering her heart, her brow rising.
Her own fingers wrapped in the bedsheets. For weeks, paranoia had been but an extension of anxiety. There, ever-present, but without a body of its own. The feeling was such that she could never explain it to another person and have them experience a tenth of the apprehension she did, but now it had been made flesh, about to barge into the house.
“At the hands of a Yrician,” the woman continued. “I’m sorry to say it’s not my first time dealing with something like this.”
“Well, how may I help you?”
Reed was earnest, so far as the stranger was concerned. After listening through the walls for days on end, Castelle could hear the prick of delight lingering in her voice.
“I was speaking with the fishers a village over. They claim you were acquainted with a Yrician, some years back,” the woman said.
“Oh, yes. Almost two years ago, it must be,” Reed agreed. After a suitable pause, she said, “Gods. You don’t think it’s her, do you?”
“I’m told the Yrician was of the usual height – barely over five foot – with a scarred face.”
“Yes, that’s right. That’s—she did,” Reed said, pointedly breathless. “About three inches, above her right eye.”
A pause.
“Only the one scar?” the woman asked.
“Well, she was forever pointing out another by her ear, but it was more of a nick than anything. You had to know what you were looking for.”
The woman ruffled a handful of papers.
“Is
there… any chance she’s gathered more scars since?”
“Always. I’ve been a doctor for twenty-two years. I don’t count anything out. Last I heard, though, she was in Amaros. It’s not exactly a bloodbath, over there.”
“I may have got my lines crossed,” the woman murmured. “You haven’t seen her recently? Heard from her?”
“Oh, we’re not on the best of terms. Did I mention she went to Amaros with my sister?”
The woman cleared her throat. Reed sighed, apologised, and promised to keep an ear to the ground.
The door slammed closed. The house was still, silent, till Reed burst out into laughter.
“You don’t have a sister,” Eos said, likely from the shadows.
“A Yrician with a scar? The usual height? Does she think that’s a good enough description to go by? Gods, Eos. You really are in trouble this time, aren’t you? What were you thinking?”
“You know me,” Eos said, and muttered something in Yrician.
Castelle pulled the covers tightly around herself. Her heart hadn’t pounded like that since her foot had pressed to the metal in the bear trap’s throat, whole world slowing, letting her know there was nothing she could do to stop what was coming, nothing, nothing.
Burnt bridges meant nothing. Her fathers’ people were already at Llyne, were already swarming across the land, and Castelle couldn’t leave.
She couldn’t even silently thank Reed for all she’d done by stowing away in the night and keeping her out of danger.
The next mercenary might want to check the cottage, just to be certain.
For the first time in years, Castelle pressed a fist to her chest and muttered to the gods that she was there, that she was listening, that she would ask nothing of them but sleep.
Long hours later, her prayer was answered.
The morning brought a hearty breakfast and a pot of dark tea, and Castelle ate more than she had in the last two weeks combined. Reed hurried out of the room, muttering something about being needed in the village over to deal with a crushed hand, and left with a wave over her shoulder.
The moment the front door closed, there was a knock on her bedroom door.
“Come in,” Castelle said, pulling the blankets tightly around her chest.
Eos didn’t need to duck through the doorway, but did so anyway. She was no longer wrapped in clothes made for the road. She wore plain breeches and a shirt that fit her too well to have been borrowed from Reed, and mismatched socks covered her feet. Her hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail, and inside the cottage, her scars were softer.
She was no longer a guard, an assassin, a kidnapper.
She looked like someone’s wife.
Castelle had spent weeks wondering why Eos hadn’t visited her. Now that she was sat on the stool in the corner, Castelle didn’t want to see her as much as she’d imagined.
Eos tapped the heels of her palms together.
“Reed said I should speak with you,” Eos said.
Her accent was raw, after days of hearing Reed’s voice.
Castelle shuffled in the bed, sitting upright.
She wouldn’t give Eos an inch.
“How are you feeling?” Eos tried, brow furrowed. “Your leg. Reed says it is broken, but there is no infection. The wounds are starting to heal. That is good.”
“There’s your answer,” Castelle said.
“Hm,” Eos agreed. Her eyes searched the ceiling for a familiar stain she’d lost track of. “I should apologise.”
“Should you?”
“I want to apologise,” Eos said, picking at her fingers. “For how I reacted when you told me your story. For what I said, after you shared so much with me.”
Castelle had packed it in the back of her mind, had focused on nothing but her broken leg for a fortnight. The words had come so easily, so clearly. How could that have been her speaking? How could she have been moved to spill her guts on the ground because of misunderstanding and irritation alone?
Those images had branded themselves on the back of her eyelids, had seared into her dreams and left her open to whatever lie would make sense of the uprising. They had been hers, locked within her, yet now Eos knew a part of Fenronian history that would never grace any book, told from behind the cabinet her mother always wanted moved from the dining room.
“Well?” Castelle managed.
“I did not respond wisely. Kindly,” Eos said. She stopped fidgeting long enough to press her fingertips to her scars, tracing tributaries without a source, fading before they reached the salt of the sea. “I told you of the civil war in Nor. How Yricians were used. I was—there were things… I saw things. Things like you saw. Not the same, but similar. Similar enough. My face, it was… well. You can see for yourself. Your words brought everything I have spent years trying not to think of to the surface, and I froze.
“I was not kind. I was speaking to you, but I wasn’t. To myself, I think. After the war, during the war, my family, I—”
If Eos had spent the last dozen days searching for a way to voice these things, it showed. She had paled and it didn’t suit her. Her eyes were wide, replaying a past as bloody as Castelle’s.
That was the sad truth of it. Castelle had seen things so terrible she’d convinced herself all the world’s ills had fallen upon her, and she’d shouldered an aeon of cruelty by age fourteen. In truth, there was misery enough for everyone, senseless and bloody.
Castelle sat straight. Eos met her eye for a brief second and cleared her throat.
“Col Answorth died six years ago. He visited Amaros and contracted something close to a plague. He did not make it back to Fenroe. Victoria Letas was found guilty of poisoning a political rival and sentenced to death, nine years ago,” Eos said, eyes back on the ceiling. “Isha Brookes died within weeks or storming the castle. She earnt a shallow wound, and though it was treated, an infection spread through her.”
“Eos?”
“These people did not go unpunished. They do not rule over the land, do not revel in the spoils of a Kingdom usurped,” Eos said. Shaking her head, she rubbed her fingers against her jaw and murmured, “Children.”
Tears would’ve spilt, had Castelle mumbled her agreement.
There was no spark of joy in the news, no justice long denied to her. She had spent a lifetime hating them, had seen them in the back of her mind day after day, and all that time, they’d been dead. Their spirits were safe from her scathing thoughts, safe from her sobs.
“Thank you for telling me,” Castelle said. “Not just about them. About you, as well. With everything that happened, with the way we met, we’ve had no choice but to work off broad assumptions.”
“You are not your parents. You are not your fathers,” Eos said. “Layla told me it would be so, but I would not believe it. I would not let this land be lost again.”
Castelle’s nails dug into her palms through the bedsheets. She wasn’t bleeding out, bone glinting in the sunlight, yet Eos was still speaking her cousin’s name.
She couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t, couldn’t.
Yet—
“Is she really alive? Layla, is she…?”
“She is, Princess,” Eos said. The word didn’t sting as much as it could’ve. What did titles matter when family came into it? “We have been friends for years. She sent me to find you, and knew that if I wandered into the temple and told you the truth, all of it, you would not believe it.”
“Gods, Eos. I swear, if there is some lie in this…” Castelle said, gripping her blankets like a bear trap clutching bone.
Eos held out both hands.
“Layla lives on Yarrin. That is where we were headed. She is a priest at one of the larger temples on the island. When I met her, she already knew who I was. Not everyone on this archipelago merely sees a Yrician. She knew me by name, knew much of what had happened in Nor, and how I had helped put an end to most of it. We began to talk. I have done many jobs for her, but this has taken the longest to put together. We
started reaching out to Rhea more than a year ago.
“It made sense for me to extract you. I came to Laister, worked in a local mill for months, until the Lords sent people out, recruiting those to work within the temple.”
Castelle screwed her eyes shut, blotting out tears.
“We’re going to Yarrin?” she croaked.
“As soon as you can walk,” Eos agreed. “This has complicated matters, but it was a complicated matter to begin with. Layla has waited all this time. Weeks or months will not make a difference.”
“All of that,” Castelle murmured. “Just to see me. Gods! What a fool I am. I should’ve left with her, all those years ago.”
Eos said nothing more, letting Castelle drink down the news. Layla, alive. Layla, putting this all into motion for her. Rhea hadn’t betrayed her. Castelle had been right to trust her. Rhea had risked so much to help Layla, to help Eos, to help her. Gods! She longed to see her again, to put her arms around her and thank her, but they were more than a fjord apart.
Wiping her eyes dry, she found Eos staring at her.
“There’s something else, isn’t there?” Castelle said.
Her stomach sank, but no deeper than it ever had. Whatever the price was, she’d pay it, so long as she got to see Layla again.
“You understand there are many across the archipelago who claim they have Greyser blood, whether through indiscretions, or forgotten relatives. That is one truth, in all of this. One thing the Lords may have downplayed. There are those who would seize the throne, claiming it was not truly abdicated or abolished.
“Not by the family’s dated laws, its rituals. Brackish is a symbol of the Greysers’ hold over the archipelago. So long as it is on the islands, a Greyser will always hold the throne.”
“I’m starting to understand why you took the spirit-sword,” Castelle said.
“Yes. Layla was concerned what removing you from the forest would do, if only for the morale of Fenroe. It is finally thriving, Princess. Layla would stop at nothing to save you, truly, but she also—”
