Autumn Queens & Shadows, page 15
“How do so many Isliners get into the villages without being noticed?”
They exchanged glances, but ultimately knew they couldn’t lie their way out of this one. “We believe,” one piped up, “some of our own are letting them through. Or at least the villagers who keep mind of the guard rotations or know some of the guards and their habits.”
Another stepped forward. “Also, they attack certain villages. Mostly the ones who are majorly against our queen.”
“Against?”
They all winced despite my calm tone. “I…I didn’t mean it like that. Not in support of the way she rules,” he quickly corrected. “She had adapted methods that we as a kingdom have always strayed away from. They’re…eccentric some would say.”
“Eccentric?”
“We worship the God of War, and for our armies to be reduced to not even a quarter of what they’ve always been is seen as abnormal. Some fear we are no longer following our ways anymore. Boys and girls do not need to be taught about strategies, tactics, and philosophies of war, they need to experience it while holding their steel and learning to fight. We are born with tactics and strategies, it is the Isjordian way.”
We were all born with them, it wasn’t a matter of being born with them. It was a matter of knowing how to use them. “Worship? You? Since when?”
“Our beliefs might not have been strong, but our ideologies are. All which stem from our faith and our blessing.”
“Clearly, since you let war ridden thoughts rot the very soil you stand on. So much so that it was going to kill the entire realm. Do you know who brought life back?”
They all exchanged some more uncomfortable looks. “Queen Snowlin, I believe. After she defeated the White Flame Guardian.”
“Wrong. Your queen, her magic and her damn tactics. You talk about worship, yet you worship the wrong god.”
Walking deeper in the village, I inspected the house painted with blood and the words our famous mythical creature in a white cloak had taken time and patience to write so neatly and with excellent penmanship. Any more perfect of an execution and I would have thought a god themselves had done it.
The old gods are gone and so are their kings.
Where had I heard that before?
She had waited for me. Standing against her room window and leaning on the sill while wind blew snow inside, coating her long hair and the ground. On the small table by the sofa I slept in were a few dishes covered with silver domes to keep them warm.
“Were you nice to my poor soldiers?” she asked, sipping her drink one last time before setting the crystal tumbler on the windowsill.
“I’m always nice, sweetheart.”
She pushed away from the window and took a seat on a velvet stool across from me. “Any traitors?”
I sighed, leaning back on my seat. “Only confused subjects.”
Her head tilted to the side, studying the whole of me for a moment. “What does that mean?”
“They knew who they served, but they weren’t past finding loyalty elsewhere.”
“And? What happened to them?”
“Dealt with.”
“The way an Eldritch Commander deals with almost traitors?”
“Only this Eldritch Commander. I’m the nice one, remember?”
“What did you want to talk to me about?” she asked, pulling the domes from the food plates.
“That clown who keeps painting your villages with motivational quotes.”
Her glass of water stopped midway to her lips. “The White Veil? What about it?”
“It? So, you don't think it’s not someone playing dress up?”
“It has never interested me much.”
“Lying eyes and all.”
She raised those same lying eyes to me. “Eyes don’t lie, Malik.”
“Yours do. But why are they lying to me?” Leaning forward to pry a piece of bread from her fingers, I said, “People say it comes to you, it heeds to your call for help, bows to you, follows you. Why does this thing do all that, Thora?”
Her eyes dropped to the piece of bread that I plopped in my mouth. “What are you asking?”
“I’m asking, what did you do?” Had this been ten years ago, I would have known, I would have been the first to know. She would have whispered it in my ear like she whispered all other secrets of hers, she would have giggled, feeling coy. She would have looked up at me, so innocently, blinking those dark lashes until I’d agreed that what she’d done was fine, that it wasn’t wrong. I would have told her it was dangerous without her turning to give me the dismissive looks she now gave me when I showed any ounce of concern or care. She would have glared at me, argued with me, she would have pushed me until I would have broken apart and let it go. I would have broken and accepted it before she would have told me anything at all, but I loved seeing every flash of emotion across her face when she would have argued with me. There was nothing I liked more.
“You think I have somehow summoned it?” She sat back, crossing a leg over the other, the frilly cotton nightgown parting at the side to reveal one long lean leg. “You think I've grown myself some dark powers and called for the gods to send me a little helper? Seduced, perhaps?”
“Did you?” I asked, leaning forward and pulling the material of her nightgown over her bare leg.
Her eyes chased the motion and then rolled back to mine. “What if I did?”
“I’d be very impressed. The Dark God must be very impressed if he sent such a helpful divine weapon.”
“But there is no weapon, Malik. It is the Winter God’s doing. The wind, the snow, the people all say he is displeased. Reasonably so,” she said, the lies melting off her tongue like butter.
“That’s working oddly well in your favour.”
“What can I say? The odds treat me kindly.” She leaned over her knees and picked through her meal to dip her spoon straight into the pudding, ignoring the untouched main course. “Now I have two divine beings acting on a displeased god’s behalf. Condolences, husband,” she said, licking the spoon clean. “I promise your suffering will be for a good cause.”
“Why are you in such a good mood?”
“Why do you always assume I’ve done something?”
“Because you have.”
She threw her dessert spoon on the table a little ungently, letting the metal thud hard against the wood. “And if I have?”
“Stop spinning us in circles.”
“I’ll do whatever I wish.”
Ignoring the cold glare she had fixed on me, I picked up the spoon she dropped and her pudding bowl. “Owning up is more honourable than having to find out for myself that even the wind beats at your pace in this kingdom, yet every Isjordian seems to think you go against the wind, challenge the wind, lose against it, too. The Thora Krigborn I know doesn’t lose, she only gracefully pretends to.”
“Don’t pretend you know me.”
“There is one person who pretends well here, Thora. And it is not me.”
After a few moments of what seemed less like contemplation and more like spiteful seconds, she said what she’d told me many times before, “I will not become what I hate.”
“You’re not him.” Thora Krigborn was nothing like her father. She could pass a dandelion without blowing it just in case someone needed that wish more than her. Her rage was also just as soft as the rest of her, but when need be, she sent it to war for the sake of those she loved. But that was it. How could anyone ever think she was her father’s daughter? Sometimes, it hurt to think how much violence it had taken this girl to be as soft as she was.
“You don’t know what I am.”
“You are not Silas Krigborn, and I need you to say that back to me.”
She shook her head. “You don’t know what I am capable of.”
“No one knows what you’re capable of. But I am someone—someone you trusted with a lot of knowledge.”
“A mistake,” she dismissively said, uncapping a bottle of wine and filling two cups. She pushed one before me. “Don’t you think? You only told me something of yours because you wanted something of mine. You never intended to tell me anything. It was purely a transaction which you realised a little too late just how to your disadvantage it was.”
“On the contrary,” I said, pushing the glass back to her. “I told you everything of mine because I wanted everything of yours.”
“You weren’t supposed to do that,” she said, resting her tired, lying eyes on the cup I’d put in front of her. “You weren’t supposed to get better without me.”
“I got better because of you.” Her eyes rose back to me then, still lying and all. “If I wanted to come back, I had to. There was never something wrong with you, Thora. To hurt is human. To hurt as intensely as you do is no fault of nature, only of man. I played a part in making you feel as if there truly was something wrong with you. When I found that day you in that forest, I suddenly felt tired of feeling insane alone, so I never told you that there was nothing wrong with you to begin with. I wanted to keep you, Thora. If I kept you, I would have ruined you like I ruined everything. I was so close to committing to it. But each time you begged me for help, it reminded me of myself. Except I didn’t beg for help, I begged for desolation. But when you are desperate enough to beg at all, help and ruination do not seem so far off one another. You wouldn’t have even noticed me slowly kill you from the inside out. It is what I did best. I was the master of it.”
She just looked at me. Utterly lost. Her heart was so loud and mad that I could hear it all the way across from her.
“It is just grape juice. I don’t really drink either,” she said, rubbing a hand down her arm and standing towards the bathroom.
It had really been just that.
I didn’t blame her for wanting to see, to test me. I didn’t blame her at all. The way I was before I left…I was not an easy person to trust. Somehow, she had trusted me then still.
My brother sat back on a sun chair facing the daisy gardens, watching the kids surround Snow who had laid on the grass, snoring away. Rain was weaving daisies in her hair and Sam had one of her hands in his, trying his best to massage it.
“How is married life treating you, little brother?” Kil asked, offering me a glass of his daughter’s famous lemonade which I was about to refuse when Rain turned to show me a big, hopeful grin.
I took a sip, trying not to wince, and gave her a thumbs up. “Could be worse.”
“Then you’re having a great time. Fantastic, even. As someone married to a Skygard sister, might I give you some advice? If she tells you to shut up, just do it,” he said, grinning in his wife’s direction.
“I don’t know if you’re really that happy or just love being miserable.”
“Are you kidding me?” he asked, chugging the rest of his bitter lemonade down, wincing and coughing hard at the taste. “She needs to get up, she wants me to help. She needs a bath, she wants me to bathe her. Her feet hurt, she wants me to massage them. She can’t reach for something, she wants me to do it for her. On top of that, she’s having my child. Best nine months of my life.”
“Then give her what she wants.” Strange how ten years ago, it had been him who’d wanted more children.
Slowly, he turned to me, took a sip from his lemonade, and said, “No.”
“That’s a good way to ruin what you two have.”
“That’s a fantastic way to lose the love of my life and the mother of my children.”
Snow laughed as Rain ran circles around her, singing some song in Calgnan while she clutched the odious cloth doll she loved.
“Where the hell did she get that thing?”
My brother hesitated a little, meaning that he was debating if the next words he’d say would somehow irritate me. “Driada had made it. When I cleaned out her room, I found that, some baby clothes, and a few sets of sheets with different patterns of flowers embroidered in it.”
We’d never talked about her after that night at her grave. Never stepped in her room again. Never mentioned her name again. She was dead, and that was it. There was nothing more to it. Only pain. I know my mother wouldn’t wish for her name to invoke pain in others, so I tried my best to not mention it. Not even to myself. “You cleaned out her room?”
“I found Sam there one day. He asked me about her, and I found out that day that I couldn't just let dust pile up on her memory. I either had to forget her, or remember the best of her.”
I took the lemonade from his hand and drank until the bitterness of it softened the burning at the pit of my stomach. “Back with the sappy shit?”
“Thora said that to me when she found me there the next day, staring at the white sheets covering her furniture, not knowing what to do.” He drank straight from the lemonade pitcher, coughing and sputtering. “I thought she’d resented me that day after she begged me to save her and I didn’t. She hadn’t, though.”
“You can’t save everyone, brother.”
The sappy bastard just looked at me for a few silent seconds. “Not everyone. Was hoping I could save just a few at least.”
Rain ran up to us and climbed my lap. “You finished the lemonade?”
Kilian and I both stared at the empty pitcher and then winced when our stomachs groaned in unison at the pain we’d inflicted to ourselves without realising. “I guess so, baby doll.”
She giggled and shot up, snatching the pitcher from her father’s hands and shoving her doll on his lap. “I’ll go make more!” she exclaimed, running towards the castle. “Aunt Penny! Let’s pick some lemons!”
“Hells save us all.”
“You will drink my daughter’s lemonade and you will love it,” my brother said, patting my shoulder and handing me her doll.
“What do you know about the White Veil?” I said, throwing it back at him.
His head turned to me, brows furrowing. “She isn’t telling you anything?”
“Nothing.”
He nodded to himself. “Then I know nothing.”
The lying bastard. “I thought you wanted me to help her?”
“Help her?” He chuckled. “Thora doesn’t need help dealing with Iskyla. She’s been spinning that woman in circles for five years now. She just needs you to stand very handsomely next to her. So do that, my adorable little brother.”
“Kilian,” Snow groaned, trying to roll on her side and failing.
My brother immediately shot to his feet and gave me a lopsided smirk before running to her side and hoisting her up in his arms. “Let’s get you something to eat.”
“I’m not hungry,” she grumbled.
“You look like you’re about to tear my face off. I say you’re hungry.”
She leaned and whispered something in his ear that had my brother grinning.
I would have gagged, but someone dropped on Kilian’s seat, and sighed. “You don’t want to know, trust me,” Cai said.
“Wasn’t intending to ask.”
Kilian went past us, throwing a wink. “Enjoy solitude, kids.”
“What’s the deal with this White Veil?” I asked Cai.
“She didn’t tell you?”
“No?”
Leaning back on the seat, he closed his eyes. “I don’t know anything.”
Fisting his shirt, I pulled him to me so he could see I meant the threat beside hearing it. “If you end up knowing something and she gets her sweet backside in danger, you’re the first I’m tearing to shreds, sugar plum.”
He pushed my hand off him. “If you act any more obsessed, people are going to think you’ve built her a shrine somewhere.”
He had no idea. I was the fucking shrine.
Sighing, I got to my feet and headed to find Penelope carrying Rain on her shoulders while she picked lemons from her father’s lemon tree. “Baby doll. Remember about our training?”
She dropped the lemons immediately, a few hitting Penelope on the way down. “Yes. Put me down, Penny!”
“Call Atlas,” I said to Pen, taking Rain down from her shoulders.
“Atlas? Why?” she asked, rubbing a bruised spot on her forehead.
“To observe.” To keep me from doing something my father would do.
Everyone but me knew something in Isjord. I’d been my brother’s Eldritch Commander, his eyes, his ears, I’d been his enforcer. I knew about a thousand ways to get someone to tell me all their secrets and none involved me using any magic. Perhaps I’d gotten rusty. Or perhaps I was giving a certain songbird too little credit.
Casmere had fallen silent. The one city that never fell silent. There was always a sound of nature, either it be sea or wind or a wild sailor selling his stinkiest fish. But the Seer Sea was tranquil despite the approaching harsh winter. The wind was quiet, too. And the stinking fish remained piled up in their crates, their dead eyes all on the scene laid ahead.
The scene smeared with small bits of Isline soldiers.
The third scene of the sort that I had seen this week alone.
In the midst of all the gore and death that had slapped like red oil paint in an empty canvas, stood someone donned in a white pearlescent cloak that pooled to the ground, blending with the white of snow, its face hidden under the shadow of the hood. Whatever hid under it emitted no signs of life nor death. No heartbeat, no emotions. Nothing. Empty. Only a senseless amount of magic that was somehow seeping all around it, being absorbed by the ground, air and even the stones on the village walls. I’d never seen an Aura more in sync with the nature around it. Every magical being in Numen held a specific scent, something that was modified around their magic and made it their own. There were only four other creatures who did not have that separation, whose nature blended entirely too closely with nature. My brother and the three Skygards. But one stood behind me, the other was pregnant and beside my brother who’d never lose her out of his sight, and the last one was miles away gentle parenting the future bride of Hells.
The White Veil’s head turned to Thora who stood by my side, bowing at her before evaporating into nothing, only flakes of snow remaining where it once stood. Every ounce of the magic it carried disappeared with it. Too seamlessly. As if the magic had been there to begin with.
