The Beauty of Darkness (10 page)

The saddle blankets we wore were woven in Vendan colors and patterns. As far as they were concerned, we were a barbarian squad. Who else would be out here?

“Shed the blankets!” I yelled.

The patrol slowed as if they were conferring, but their weapons were still aimed. When they were within shouting distance, we identified ourselves, with our hands in the air, as Dalbreck soldiers. They cautiously approached, then stopped six lengths away, still poised to run us through. I ordered everyone to dismount and to keep their hands in sight and off their weapons. I helped Lia down, then Sven and I stepped forward.

“You bloody fools,” Sven yelled. “Don't you know your own prince when you see him?”

Between our grime and blood spattered clothes, I wouldn't have expected anyone to recognize us.

The captain squinted. “Colonel Haverstrom?
Sven?
”

I heard a collective sigh from the others. My muscles went slack for the first time in weeks. We were almost home.

“That's right, you knucklehead,” Sven said, his tone full of relief.

“And, as much as I look like a stray dog, Prince Jaxon,” I added.

The captain looked at me strangely, then glanced at the soldiers on either side of him. He dismounted and stepped forward to meet me. His expression was grim.

“Captain Azia,” he said, introducing himself. “The entire Dalbreck army has been searching for you…”

Something about his expression was all wrong.

And then falling down on one knee, he added, “Your Majesty.”

 

CHAPTE
R
SEVENTEE
N

The moment stretched as long and fragile as spider silk blown taut in the wind. Longer. Impossible. Sven's eyes watered. Tavish looked down. Orrin and Jeb exchanged a knowing glance. Even Kaden and Griz froze, though I wasn't sure if they understood what the captain's words meant. The young soldiers on either side of the captain looked confused. Even they hadn't known. A fierce ache gripped my heart as everyone waited to see what Rafe would do. A cruel moment. But it was his and his alone to finish.

Your Majesty.

I only had a crescent view of Rafe's face, but it was enough. He stared down at the captain as if he didn't really see him. Only the clenching of his jaw, still streaked with dirt and blood, revealed anything. And the slow curling of his fist. Every small controlled gesture told me the news hit him hard—but he was well-trained. Prepared. Sven had probably been preparing him for this moment since he was a child. Rafe would do what was required of him, just as he had when he came to Morrighan to marry me. After two measured breaths, he nodded at the captain. “Then you've done your duty.”

A prince, in the turn of a moment and a few words, was now a king.

Rafe motioned for the captain to rise and said quietly, “When?”

It was only then that Sven put a hand on Rafe's shoulder.

The captain hesitated, looking at the rest of us, unsure if he could speak freely.

Rafe eyed Kaden and Griz, then asked Tavish and Orrin to take them for a walk. He may have trusted them with a sword, but not his kingdom's secrets.

It happened weeks ago, the captain explained, only a few days after the queen had died. The inner court was reeling, and it had been decided to keep the king's death a secret. With no one on the throne and the crown prince missing, the cabinet wanted to hold back the news from neighboring kingdoms that Dalbreck was without a monarch. They explained the king's lack of public appearances as mourning for the queen. The cabinet ministers ruled discreetly while a desperate search was launched for the prince. With top officers missing along with him, they assumed he was alive but ensnared in an unauthorized but well-deserved retaliation against Morrighan. The whole kingdom was still enraged over the breaking of the contract, and they wanted retribution. When they searched Sven's office, they'd found messages sent to Sven from the prince about a meeting in Luiseveque but could turn up nothing else besides Sven's orders to Tavish, Orrin, and Jeb to meet there too. They feared they'd all been found out and thrown into one of Morrighan's prisons, but careful inquiries turned up nothing. It was as if they had all vanished into thin air, but hope was never lost. Their skills were known.

When the captain finished, it was Rafe's turn to explain. “I'll fill you in as we ride,” Rafe told him, saying we were tired, hungry, and some of us in need of medical care.

“And those two?” the captain asked, nodding toward Griz and Kaden in the distance.

The corner of Rafe's mouth pulled. I tensed, waiting to see what he would call them. Barbarians? Prisoners? He seemed unsure himself. I prayed he wouldn't say Rahtan or Assassin.

“Vendans,” he answered. “Whom we can moderately trust for now. We'll keep a close watch on them.”

Moderately trust?
They had just helped save our lives. For the second time. But I knew they'd done it not for Rafe's benefit or Dalbreck's—only mine—so I reluctantly understood his caution too.

The captain's expression turned hard, and a deep line creased between his brows. “A platoon of ours has been missing now for weeks. We've been hunting down men like—”

“The platoon is dead,” Rafe said flatly. “All of them. I saw their bloody weapons and valuables brought to the Komizar. Those two weren't involved. As I said, I'll explain as we ride.”

The captain paled. An entire platoon dead? But he made no further comment, complying with Rafe's wish to explain as they rode. He shot a last sideways glance at me but was too polite to ask who I was. He'd surely seen me riding in front of Rafe on his horse and probably assumed something unsavory. I didn't want to embarrass Rafe or the captain with the truth at this point. We'd all heard what he said about the rage they still nursed toward Morrighan, but as the captain returned to his horse, his soldiers eyed me with curiosity too. With the remnants of my clan dress, and my skin still spattered with blood, I surely looked like a wild barbarian in their eyes. What on earth was their king doing riding with me?

The glances and stares didn't escape Rafe. He looked down and shook his head.

Yes, he had much to explain.

*   *   *

I didn't get even a passing moment to hold Rafe. To tell him how sorry I was. To convey any kind of sorrow at all. The convoy resumed immediately. Maybe it was just as well for Rafe to have a chance to absorb this news without words from me stirring his emotions further.

I had met his father once. Briefly. He was an old man walking up the steps of the citadelle, a limp in his gait, and he required assistance. That sight had sent terror pulsing through me. He was old enough to be my father's father. I had assumed the worst about the age of the prince, though I knew now, it wouldn't have mattered how old or young the Dalbreck king would have been. My terror was rooted in the reality of this man arriving in Civica to sign marriage agreements. At the sight of him, I saw my choices being crushed, my voice being silenced forever in a foreign kingdom I knew little about. I was property to be bartered like a wagon full of wine, though perhaps less precious and certainly far less enjoyed.
Hush, Arabella, what you have to say doesn't matter.

I knew this king had to have some redeeming quality for Rafe to love him and for Sven to tear up at the news, but I couldn't forget that this king also told his son,
Take a mistress after the wedding if she doesn't suit you.
Only for Rafe's sake could I mourn him.

With thirty soldiers to escort us now, I had suggested I ride my own horse farther behind in our caravan. I knew it would be a more comfortable ride for all concerned if I wasn't there as Rafe and Sven tried to explain where they had been for the last several months. How angry would Dalbreck be that I was the cause of their prince's disappearance? I'd already heard the tone with which the captain said
Morrighan
, as if it were a poison to be spat out.

The wind picked up, cool and crisp. I missed Rafe's warmth at my back, the comfort of his arms around me, the nudge of his chin at the side of my head. My hair stank of oil, smoke, and dirt, even the river that had nearly killed us both, and yet he had nuzzled close, as if it smelled of flowers, as if he didn't care if I was or ever had been a proper princess.

“Rafe seemed shocked. I take it the king's poor health was one of his lies too?”

I hadn't noticed that Kaden had come up alongside me. He had probably been tallying the lies ever since I left him on the terrace.

I looked at him, his shoulders slumped. Spent. But the weariness I saw in his eyes came from someplace else, from words that had carved out pieces of his flesh, one calculated day after another. My words. I scrambled for a defense, but there was no more anger in his expression, and that left me hollow. It gave me nothing to push back against. I had no game pieces left to play.

“I'm sorry, Kaden.”

His lip lifted in a pained expression, and he shook his head, as if to ward off any more apologies from me. “I've had time to think about it,” he said. “There's no reason I should have expected the truth from you. Not when I was the one to lie and betray you first back in Terravin.”

It was true. He had lied and betrayed me, but somehow my lie seemed like the greater crime. I had played with his need to be loved. I had listened sympathetically to his deepest, most painful secrets that he had never shared with anyone. He let me into a raw corner of his soul, and I used that to gain his trust.

I sighed, too weary to parse out guilt like chits in a card game. Did it matter if my pile was bigger or his? “That was a lifetime ago, Kaden. We were both different people then. We both used lies and truth for our own purposes.”

“What about now?”

I saw him holding it out to me tentatively,
truth
, a treaty written on the air between us. Was truth even possible? I wasn't sure what it was anymore, or if now was the time for it.

“What is it you want, Kaden? I'm not sure why you're even here.”

His blond hair whipped in the wind. He squinted into the distance, but no words were forthcoming. I saw the struggle, his search for the false calm he always painted on his face. It was beyond his grasp now.

“You're the one who just proposed truth,” I reminded him.

An anguished smile pulled at his mouth. “All those years … I didn't want to see the Komizar for what he was. He saved me from a monster, and I became just as driven as he was. I was ready to make an entire kingdom pay for the sins of my father—a man I haven't seen in over a decade. I've spent half of my life waiting for the day he would die. I blocked out the kindnesses of every person in Morrighan that I ever met, saying it didn't matter. It was the cost of war. My war. Nothing else mattered.”

“If you hated him so much, Kaden, why didn't you just kill your father? Long ago. You're an assassin. For you it would have been an easy enough matter.”

He cleared his throat, and his hand tightened on the reins. “Because it wasn't enough. Every time I imagined my knife slitting his throat, it didn't give me what I needed. Death was too quick. The longer I planned for the day, the more I wanted. I wanted him to suffer. Know. I wanted him to watch everything he had denied me slip from his fingers one piece at a time. I wanted him to die in a hundred different ways, slowly, agonizingly, day by day, the way I had when I begged on street corners, terrified that I wouldn't bring in enough to satisfy the animals he sold me to. I wanted him to feel as sharp a lash as the one he took to me.”

“You said it was beggars who beat you.”

“They did, but only after he laid the first marks, and those were the deepest ones.”

I flinched at the cruelty he had suffered, but the horror of how long he had planned and hungered for vengeance left a sickening lump in my throat. I swallowed. “And you still want this?”

He nodded without hesitation. “Yes, I still wish him dead, but now there's something else that I want even more.” He turned to face me, worried lines fanning out from his eyes. “I don't want any more innocents to die. The Komizar will spare no one, not Pauline, Berdi, or Gwyneth—no one. I don't want them to die, Lia.… and I don't want you to die.” He looked at me as if he could see death's pallor on my face already.

My stomach rolled. I thought of the last words Venda had spoken to me, the missing verses someone had torn from the book,
Jezelia, whose life will be sacrificed.
I hadn't shared that verse with anyone. Some things I had to keep tucked and secret for now. Truth was still far off for me.

“It's a whole kingdom in jeopardy, Kaden. Not just the few you know.”

“Two kingdoms. There are the innocents in Venda too.”

My eyes stung, thinking about Aster and those who were slaughtered in the square.
Yes, two kingdoms in jeopardy.
Anger bubbled inside me at the scheming of the Komizar and the Council.

“The clans deserve more than what they've been dealt,” I said, “but a terrible threat grows in Venda, one that has to be stopped. I don't know how to make it all work, but I'll try.”

“Then you'll need help. I have nothing to go back to, Lia, not as long as the Council is in power. And I'm just as hated in my birth home of Morrighan. I can't even go back to the Vagabond camps anymore. If I'm with you—”

“Kaden—”

“Don't make more of it than it is, Lia. We want the same thing. I'm offering you my help. Nothing more.”

And there was the truth that Kaden was trying to believe.
Nothing more.
But what I saw in his eyes was
more.
There was still so much need in him. It would be a difficult path for me to navigate. I didn't want to mislead or hurt him again. Still, he was offering me something I couldn't turn down. Help. And a Vendan assassin in my employ was something of unquestionable value. How I would love to see the cabinet's reaction to that—especially the Chancellor and Scholar.
We want the same thing.