by Rebecca Ross
I had never been a Lannon.
This thought centered me, enabled me to continue onward.
There was more dried blood smeared on the walls, on the floors, as we came to Declan’s cell. Fechin unlocked the door, and for a moment I stared at it, the gaping entrance. I was about to pass over a threshold and come face-to-face with the prince who had once been betrothed to my sister, the prince who had crushed her bones. Who had murdered her.
Aileen’s voice came this time, a whisper in my mind. I want you to look Declan Lannon in the eye and curse him and his House. I want you to be the beginning of his end, to be your mother’s and your sister’s vengeance.
I stepped into the cell.
This chamber was bare, but the corners were scattered with bones and strung with cobwebs. There was a cot for the prisoner to lie down and sleep, one blanket and one bucket for refuse. A set of torches were pegged into the walls, hissing with light. And there, chained to the wall by both ankles and wrists, sat Declan Lannon, his tawny brown hair tangled and greasy on his brow, his large frame dwarfing the cot. A beard covered his lower face, and a wicked smile cut through it like a crescent moon when our eyes met.
My blood chilled; he recognized me, somehow. Just like Thane Tomas had. Declan knew exactly who I was.
I stood and stared at him; he sat and stared back, the darkness moving around us both like a wild, hungry creature, and the only power I had to ward it off was the torch in my hand and the fire that ignited in my chest.
“You look just like her,” Declan said, breaking our silence.
I did not blink, did not move, did not breathe. I was a statue, a man carved of stone, who would not feel anything. Yet a voice told me, He is speaking of your mother.
“You have her hair, her eyes,” the prince continued. “You inherited the best of her, then. But perhaps you already knew that? That you are half a Lannon.”
I stared at him, the blue glint of ice in his eyes, the stray blond threads in his hair, the pale sheen of his skin. My voice was lost, and so he kept speaking.
“You and I could be brothers. I loved your mother when I was a boy. I loved her more than my own mother. And I once resented you, that you were Líle’s son and I was not. That she loved you more than she loved me.” Declan shifted, crossing his ankles. The chains scraped and clanged over the stone, but the prince did not seem the slightest bit uncomfortable. “Did you know that she was my teacher, Aodhan?”
Aodhan.
Now that he had spoken my name, had fully acknowledged me, I found my voice in my throat, lodged like a splinter.
“What did she teach you, Declan?”
His smile deepened, pleased that he had taunted me into a conversation. I despised myself for it, for longing to know more of her, and that I had resorted to asking him about it.
“Líle was a painter. It was the one thing I begged my father to let me learn. How to paint.”
I thought back to my mother’s letter. She mentioned she had been instructing Declan in something. . . .
My father had never once told me my mother had been a painter.
“What made your lessons cease, then?”
“Líle,” Declan replied, and I hated the way her name sounded on his tongue. “She broke my betrothal to your sister. That was the beginning of the end. She no longer trusted me. She began to doubt me. I saw it in her eyes when she looked at me, when all I wanted to paint was death and blood.” He paused, flicking his fingernails, over and over. The sound filled the chamber like the ticking of a clock, maddeningly. “And when the person you love more than anything in the world is afraid of you . . . it changes you. You do not forget it.”
I did not know what to say to him. My jaw was clenched, anger pounding a dull ache at my temples.
“I tried to tell her, of course,” Declan went on, his voice like smoke. I could not block it out; I could not resist breathing it in. “I told Líle that I was only painting what I saw day by day. Severed heads and sliced-out tongues. How my father chose to rule. And how my father was raising me in his mold. I thought your mother would understand; she was, after all, of the Lannon House. She knew our sensibilities.
“And my father trusted Líle. She was the daughter of his favorite thane, that old lump of a man, Darragh Hayden. Líle will not betray us, he said. But Gilroy forgot that when a woman marries a lord, she takes on a new name. She takes a new House and her allegiance shifts, almost as if she had never been fastened by blood at all. And how Kane of Morgane adored her! He would have given everything to keep her with him, I bet.”
He finally quieted, long enough for me to process everything he had just spouted.
“I take it old Kane is dead?” Declan asked.
I decided to gloss over his inquiry by asking, “Where are the Haydens now?” I already knew where one Hayden was: several cells down.
He chuckled, a wet cough in his lungs. “Wouldn’t you like to know. They’re dead, of course, save for one. Old Faithful Tomas. His brother—your grandfather—rose up after he saw Líle rebel, after he saw a pretty blond head on a spike. He chose his daughter over his king. There’s a special punishment for Lannons who turn on their own.”
I needed to depart. Now. Before this conversation got any deeper, before I lost my composure. I began to turn my back to him, to leave him in the darkness.
“Where did your nursemaid hide you, Aodhan?”
My feet froze to the floor. I felt the blood drain from my face as I met his gaze, his smile like tarnished silver in the torchlight.
“I tore that castle apart trying to find you,” Declan murmured. “I’ve oft wondered about it, where you hid that night. How a little child escaped me.”
Where are you, Aodhan?
The voices aligned, sharpened. Young Declan and old Declan. The past and the present. The smell of burning herbs, the distant echo of screams, the cold scent of manure, the weeping of my father. The damp smell of this cell, the heap of bones, the stench of refuse in the bucket, the gleam of Declan’s eyes.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” I said.
He leaned his head back and laughed until I thought I would kill him. And the bloodlust must have been bright in my gaze, because he leveled his eyes at me and said, “It’s a pity they didn’t hide your sister as well as they hid you.”
I reached for my hidden dirk before I could stop myself. The blade was waiting at my back, beneath my shirt. I drew it so swiftly that Declan was momentarily surprised, his brows arching, but then he smiled, watching the light flash on the steel.
“Go on, then. Go ahead and stab me until my blood fills this cell. I’m sure the people of Maevana will appreciate it, that they won’t have to waste their time weighing my life.”
I was trembling, my breath coming and going through my teeth.
“Go on, Aodhan,” Declan taunted. “Kill me. I deserve to die at your hand.”
I took a step, but it wasn’t toward him; it was toward the wall. I had his attention now; I was moving and acting in an unexpected way.
He was quiet, watching as I approached the wall, just above his cot.
I took the point of my knife and began to carve my name into the stone.
Aodhan.
He would have to look at it at least for two more days. My name entrenched in the stone of his cell. Just above his reach.
Declan was amused. He must be remembering that night when he carved his name into the stone of my courtyard, thinking it would outlast the Morganes.
He was opening his mouth to speak again, but I turned and found myself crouching, to conceal how badly I was trembling. I looked at Declan, and this time I was the one to smile.
“I have your son, Declan.”
He was not expecting that.
All that confidence, all that amusement, broke in his eyes. He stared at me, the one who was now turned into stone. “What are you going to do with him?”
“I plan to teach him to read and write,” I began, my voice growing steadier. “I p
lan to teach him to wield words as he wields swords, to respect and honor women as he respects and honors his new queen. And then I will raise him up as my own. And he will curse the man he came from, the blood he descended from. He will be the one to blot your name out of the history ledgers, to turn your land into something good after it has been nothing but rot since you were born upon it. And you will become a distant mark in his mind, something he may think about from time to time, but he will not remember you as father, because you never were. When he thinks of his father, he will think of me.”
I was done. I had the final word, the final carving.
I stood and began to walk to the door, tucking my dirk away, flexing my stiff fingers. I was almost to the cell door, to knock for it to open, to leave this cesspool, when Declan Lannon’s voice split the darkness, chasing my heels.
“You forget something, Aodhan.”
I halted, but I did not turn around.
“Once a Lannon . . . always a Lannon.”
“Yes. My mother proved that, didn’t she?”
I left the cell, but Declan’s laughter, Declan’s words, haunted me long after I returned to the light.
FIFTEEN
BROTHERS AND SISTERS
Two Days Until the Trial
Brienna
“I know I am not standing trial as the Lannons are,” Sean Allenach said as he walked beside me in the castle gardens. “But that doesn’t mean my House shouldn’t pay for what it has done.”
“I agree,” I replied, savoring the morning light. “I know once this trial is over, Isolde will meet with you about reparations. I believe she hopes to see your House pay the MacQuinns over the next twenty-five years.”
Sean nodded. “I will do whatever she believes is best.”
We fell quiet, each of us lost in our own thoughts.
Sean was born three years before me. We shared Brendan Allenach as a father, but more than our name and our blood, I was beginning to realize that we shared hope for what our corrupted House could become. That the House of Allenach could be redeemed.
I was relieved that Sean arrived in the royal city, just as he had promised the queen after she had healed him on the battlefield, seeking me out immediately upon his arrival.
“I wonder if the queen will see it fit to put the Allenachs on trial,” Sean said, breaking my thoughts.
If Brendan Allenach had not been slayed by Jourdain on the battlefield, the House of Allenach would certainly face a trial similar to the Lannons’: Brendan Allenach would have met the chopping block. And though Sean had thrown his support behind the queen, had urged his father to surrender in battle, I had no doubt that Isolde would call for another trial after her coronation, for the Allenachs, the Carrans, and the Hallorans.
I didn’t want to mention this yet, though. I stopped, the garden around us withered from years of neglect beneath the Lannons.
“It’s not just money and goods that will be required of you and your people, Sean. You were right when you wrote me last week: You will need to sow new thoughts in your House, beliefs that will grow to become goodness and charity, not fear and violence.”
He met my gaze; he and I didn’t look much alike, save for our tall and slender builds, but I acknowledged there was a draw between us, as brothers and sisters will always have. And that made me think of Neeve, who was Sean’s as she was mine. Did he know of her? Part of me believed he had no inkling that he had another half sister, because Jourdain’s weavers had vigilantly guarded her over the years. And part of me longed to tell him, that there was not just two of us but three.
“Yes, I wholeheartedly agree,” Sean responded gently. “And what a task that will be, after my father’s leadership.”
He sounded overwhelmed, and I took his hand in mine.
“We will take this one step at a time. I think it will help you to find like-minded men and women in your House who you can trust and appoint as leaders,” I said.
He smiled. “I suppose I cannot ask you to come back and help me?”
“I’m sorry, Sean. But it’s best that I remain with my people now.”
I didn’t want to tell him that I needed as much distance as possible from the Allenach House and lands, that my utmost need, besides protecting and supporting the queen, was to remain with Jourdain and his people.
“I understand,” he said softly.
I looked down to our hands, at the edge of his sleeves. He was wearing the maroon and white of the Allenachs, the leaping stag embroidered over his breast. And yet . . . his wrists. I hated to imagine it, but what if my brother was marked? What if he bore the half-moon tattoo on his wrist, just beneath his sleeve? Did I have the right to search for it?
“What are your thoughts on allegiance?” I quietly asked.
Sean lifted his eyes to mine. “I plan to swear my fealty to Isolde before her coronation.”
“What about your thanes? Will they support you in this?”
“Four of them will. I am not so certain about the other three,” he replied. “I am not oblivious to the fact that they murmur about me when my back is turned. That they no doubt believe I am weak; they think I would be easy to uproot and replace.”
“Would they dare to plot against you, Sean?” I asked, a flare of anger in my voice.
“I don’t know, Brienna. I cannot deny that their talk centers on you returning to the Allenachs.”
I was speechless.
Sean gave me a sad smile, squeezing my hand. “I think they consider you above me, because you were Brendan’s only daughter. And one daughter is worth ten sons. But more than that . . . while you plotted and overthrew a tyrant, I was sitting at home in Castle Damhan, doing nothing, letting my father trample his own people into the ground.”
“Then you must do something, Sean,” I said. “The first thing I would have you do is remove the half-moon from the Allenach sigil.”
“What half-moon?” He merely blinked at me, perplexed, and I realized he had been in utter darkness of our father’s involvement.
I took a deep breath. “After the trial, return to Castle Damhan,” I said, letting go of Sean’s hand so we could continue walking. “I want you to call your seven thanes together in the hall before all of your people. Have them pull up their sleeves and lay their hands on the table, palms to the sky. If they harbor a half-moon tattoo on their wrists, I want you to dismiss them. And if all seven of them bear the mark, find seven new thanes, seven men or women you trust and respect.”
“I am not sure I understand,” my brother said. “This half-moon mark . . . ?”
“Signifies allegiance to the Lannons.”
He was quiet, drowning in all of the orders I was giving him.
“After you have weeded through your thanes,” I continued, “I want you to once again summon every Allenach to your hall. Take down the coat of arms and cut out the half-moon mark. Burn it. Order a new sigil to be made with its omission. Tell your people you are going to swear fealty to Isolde before her coronation, and you expect them to follow your lead. If they have concerns about it, they should come and speak to you. You should listen to them, of course. But also be firm should they oppose the queen.”
Sean snorted. At first, I thought he was mocking me, and I abruptly glanced up to him. He was smiling, shaking his head.
“I think my thanes are right, sister. You are far more capable of leading this House than I am.”
“Beliefs such as that will not get you far, brother,” I returned, and then softened my voice. “You will be more than Brendan Allenach ever was as lord.”
I was just about to ask him more about his thanes when Cartier met us on the grass, his shirt smudged as if he had leaned against a dirty wall, his hair lank and tangled. I instantly was struck by worry; he must have had a long conversation with Isolde about Ewan, and it must have gone awry.
“Do you mind if I steal her away for now?” Cartier asked Sean.
“No, not at all. I have an audience with the queen anyway,” my brot
her said with a bow of his head, leaving me and Cartier to the wind and clouds.
“Is something wrong?” I asked. “What did Isolde say?”
Cartier took my hand and began to lead me away from the openness of the gardens, to a private shadow. “Isolde has given Ewan’s safekeeping to me. I must keep him hidden until the trial is over.” He reached into his pocket, bringing forth a folded piece of paper. I watched as he opened it, revealing a beautiful illustration of a princess. “There is something I must ask of you, Brienna.”
“What do you need me to do?”
Cartier looked down to the illustration, and then slowly passed it into my hands. “I need you to go talk to Keela Lannon in the dungeons. Ewan tore this page out of a book, saying it reminded him of the time Keela wanted to be ‘princess of the mountain.’ He thinks if you are the one to go to her with this message, she will trust and listen to you.”
I studied the illustration. It was beautiful, depicting a princess mounted upon a horse with a falcon perched on her shoulder.
“Should I go now?” I asked, feeling Cartier’s gaze on my face.
“Not yet. There is something else.” He took my hand again, guiding me back to the guest wing of the castle. I let him lead me to his room, and that’s where I first saw the list of grievances against Keela.
“I received this list from the queen,” he said as we sat at the table, sharing a pot of tea, reading and strategizing over how to combat them.
They were serious offenses, with exact dates and names of the griever. A great majority of them spoke of how Keela had ordered her chambermaids to be scourged and then have their hair shorn. How she had withheld meals and made her servants do ridiculous, demeaning things, like lick milk up from the floor and crawl around the castle like dogs.
