by Elise Kova
It was broken, all was broken around her. The beautiful yet delicate thing that had been built between them was torn to shreds. She heard the ripping sound of her heart over her tears.
“No,” she repeated, her eyes closed. “No, no! This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen! We—” It was a physical pain, it was an awful wrenching deep in her gut. “I can’t, what do I do now?”
Aldrik hovered, blurry through her tears.
“You’re free now. You do whatever you want.” Aldrik averted his eyes away, his jaw taut. He was struggling with her suffering, struggling with not comforting her.
Vhalla saw it, but she did not care. “Without you?” she pushed him.
“Yes, without me!” he bellowed. “Your purpose here is done!”
“My purpose?” Vhalla gaped. Her voice became shrill, “Was that all I was to you? A-a thing? A conquest? Did you just keep me neatly for your father? Or did you want the honor of saying you took the Windwalker to bed first?” Vhalla yelled petulantly at him. Her words weren’t fair. Life wasn’t being fair.
“How dare you,” he growled, taking a step toward her.
“How dare you, Aldrik Ci’Dan Solaris. How dare you make me believe!” She tugged at the chain around her neck, the watch on display. “How dare you make me love you! How dare you go back on your word!” Vhalla couldn’t stop herself. “I wish I’d never said yes. I wish I had never met you!” she screamed.
“Is that so? Well then, let me assure you that the feeling is mutual, Lady Yarl.” Aldrik drew his height, prepared to give her what she wanted. Somehow he knew as well as she that they needed to break beyond repair. That they couldn’t survive if they could still believe in the love they so obviously still harbored. “You, us, it was all one great lie. None of this was real from the start. You’re right, you were just my trophy.”
“Brother, stop this,” Baldair demanded. The younger prince took a step closer to the feuding lovers, seeing the fever pitch they were being worked to.
“Stay out of this, Baldair!” Aldrik froze his brother to the spot with a deadly stare before returning his attention to her. “Our promises meant nothing, we were nothing.”
Vhalla knew he was lying. She could see it written across Aldrik’s face. But it didn’t absolve his words either. They grated against her heart and tore her insides to pieces. Grief wasn’t logical, it was a self-feeding fire.
“What a pathetic creature.” Aldrik looked on in disgust. “As if I would ever love you. I played you like the naïve girl you were.”
She began to laugh. Lips quivered and shoulders trembled with a new madness slipping out along the undertow of grief. He had to keep pushing. He couldn’t stop when he had clearly accomplished his goal. He had to drive things so far into the ground that there was nothing more than a husk of ash left where they stood.
“You’re wrong,” she rasped. Vhalla had never felt so dangerous. She had a weapon far greater than his lies. “I was the one who played you.”
“What?” Aldrik took a half step away. He saw something on her face, the point that they had pushed to.
Vhalla had half a moment to absorb that fear and regret, if only she’d sympathized with him and stopped her words.
“Our Bond is the biggest lie of them all,” she whispered. Aldrik stood frozen with horrific attention. “I never meant to save you. I thought I was saving Baldair that night. I poured myself into those notes for his sake.”
Aldrik had suddenly been reduced to a lost lamb, his eyes darting between her and a confused Baldair.
But Vhalla couldn’t stop herself now, it was her turn to push too far. It was a sinister sort of pleasure to unleash pain, and she couldn’t refrain. He’d cut her so deeply that she wasn’t thinking about right or wrong, fair or unfair. She wanted to drink from the toxic potion of revenge and unleash the only thing that could slay a liar: the truth.
“What are you talking about?” Neither of them paid attention to Baldair’s confusion.
“You’re not the only one who can lie, Aldrik.” Vhalla laughed bitterly.
Aldrik stared at her in stunned horror. It served as kindling for rage, and she watched his body tense. Aldrik clenched his fists. He jerked his head toward Baldair. “You.”
Baldair held his hands up harmlessly.
“You could not let me have this one joy untainted,” Aldrik snarled.
Vhalla was so startled by Aldrik’s shift back to describing her as his “one joy” that her better sense clicked back in. She hadn’t meant for Baldair to be wrapped into their fight, only to bring Aldrik’s rage further upon herself, upon the fading embers of their futile love. She was crushing her and Aldrik’s future. Not his and Baldair’s.
“Aldrik, he had nothing to do with this.” Vhalla took a half step in front of Baldair, stopping the older prince’s advance.
“A new low, even for you, brother,” Aldrik said with disdain. “Getting your whore to protect you.”
Vhalla’s arms hung limply at her sides, suddenly at a complete loss.
“Don’t call her that! You don’t mean it.” Baldair’s defense was touching, but completely ignored by Aldrik.
“Oh? Slut then?” Aldrik grimaced as the word tore itself from his tongue. “Who’s next, now that you’ve had both princes? Going to crawl into bed with my father?”
Vhalla stared in disgust that such a thing could even be voiced.
“We never slept together!” Baldair bellowed.
“I should have known from that day in the garden,” Aldrik continued, ignoring them. “When I found out you had met before.” Aldrik focused on Baldair. There was a surprisingly honest torrent of hurt behind his eyes. “You had to do it again. To think, I really thought things could be different between us.”
Baldair had met his limit now. “Why would I want them to be? So I can spend time with my bastard of a brother?”
“Do not call me that,” Aldrik roared.
“What? We know it to be true, black sheep.”
Aldrik lunged faster than Vhalla had time to react. He was quick, but Baldair was large, and the younger prince only needed to brace himself against his brother’s swings.
“Stop, both of you!” Vhalla clenched her fists. Her wind wasn’t strong enough to pull them apart.
The brawling siblings didn’t hear her.
It dawned on Vhalla what she’d done. She’d backed the man who had just lost the one person he’d loved into a corner. And now, she was crumbling the last lifeline Aldrik had. If he didn’t have Baldair on his side, who would look out for him?
Fire roared and Baldair fell to his knees, hissing.
“You,” the younger prince gasped for air. “You never use your magic on me.”
Aldrik drew back a fist, alight with flame. “Perhaps you should get your sword and we’ll make this a real fight? We’re not boys anymore.”
Baldair roared and lunged for Aldrik, tackling him at the waist. They rolled, a tumbleweed of fists. They couldn’t seem to stop hitting each other long enough to get upright.
“Stop!” Vhalla cried. “Stop it, both of you!”
She was unheard. The men had reverted back to children, unwilling to listen to any reason. Aldrik was the first to his feet, landing a solid hit on his brother.
“Aldrik, stop!” Vhalla jumped into the fray, finally taking action. She put herself between the princes, but only after Aldrik had begun moving his fist for another hit. She watched as his dark eyes widened, how she loved those eyes.
Vhalla took Aldrik’s strike clean to the cheek and was sent reeling by it.
Aldrik stopped, panting. His hands twitched, jerked in her direction to hold her, to comfort her. Vhalla stepped away from him, righting herself.
“Don’t touch me,” she whispered.
“Vhalla, I didn’t mean to hit you.” The prince was instantly pleading. “You-you moved and I-I couldn’t stop—”
“It doesn’t matter.” Vhalla shook her head. “This is the destruction anger reap
s.”
Baldair said she had inspired change in Aldrik, but it hadn’t been enough. People didn’t change when asked by others, no matter how important the asker was. True change had to come entirely from within. He wouldn’t change until he saw the full extent of his actions as a liar, a puppet master, as a destructive man to both himself and others. He didn’t know how much his anger, even when it was directed at himself, hurt the world around him. Every moment spent with him was silently condoning it all.
He’d never know unless someone had the strength to stand up and show him.
The mantle had fallen to her. Vhalla prayed he could rise to the challenge, rather than being broken by it.
Aldrik took another jerky step toward her.
“Don’t come near me.” Vhalla stepped away.
“Vhalla, you must understand—”
Aldrik was stopped by a strong palm on his chest.
“Didn’t you hear her?” Baldair stared murderously at Aldrik. “She doesn’t want you near her.”
“You can’t keep me from her!” Aldrik shouted.
Vhalla picked up the parchment detailing her title from the floor.
“Vhalla! Vhalla, wait!”
She ignored him, the last of her heart shriveling.
“I am your prince. I order you to come here.”
“What?” Vhalla spun. He said the one thing that could make her return to him, but certainly not in the way he’d been hoping. “I want you to have one thing perfectly clear, Prince Aldrik Ci’Dan Solaris.” Vhalla refrained from using the words my prince any longer. “You do not own me.”
She held out the paper as proof of her words. The only thing she had left to her name was the name itself.
“What more could you possibly want from me that I have not already given you?” Vhalla panted softly, worked to a frenzy. Her question wasn’t hypothetical, and she waited for his response. The only benefit of doing so was watching the truth dawn on him.
Then again, Vhalla mused, she was not innocent. Vhalla dropped her hand holding the paper with a sigh. She had fed into him, she had ignored his problems and idolized his secret mannerisms that made him shine in her eyes. She’d mentally made him into the man she’d wanted him to be; she hadn’t loved the man he truly was.
“Goodbye, Aldrik,” Vhalla whispered.
His face fell. All emotion collapsed like a house of cards in the wake of world-shattering panic. Aldrik heard the finality Vhalla put in her tone. “Wait!” he cried. “Where are you going?”
Vhalla kept walking for the door, folding the parchment before putting it in her pocket.
“Answer me!” he pleaded, he ordered. “Vhalla, Vhalla, please! Answer me!”
Vhalla plunged herself into the night air beyond, listening to Aldrik’s cries muffled through the doors. The two soldiers stationed on either side gave her extremely curious looks, but Vhalla held her head high. The camp was certain to be ablaze with talk the moment the guard changed.
Vhalla bit her lip so hard she split it on her teeth. She had the one thing she’d been fighting for since leaving the capital: her freedom. But it had cost her nearly everything. Vhalla realized she’d walked out of the camp palace with nothing but the clothes on her back and the decree from the Emperor. She’d left everything in that poorly built, glorified shack. Strewn about the floor of Aldrik’s room were all the things she’d taken to the North: her clothes, her armor, a few meager possessions, and her heart.
VHALLA DIDN’T WALK. She drifted through time and space from one location to the next, gravitating toward the only place she could think of to go: Fritz’s bedside. She’d taken the long way, wandering through the wreckage that surrounded her. The battle already seemed like another world and, somehow, it had suddenly turned into a loss.
Elecia was gone and Fritz was asleep, as were most of the people in the large cleric’s tent. Vhalla situated herself on the bare ground next to her friend. It wasn’t long after she’d settled that his eyes cracked open, his head turning slowly to look at her.
Fritz stared at her for a long moment, peering thoughtfully at her face. “What happened?”
Vhalla raised a hand up to her cheek, noticing where Fritz’s eyes had gravitated. The skin near her eye was puffy and tender, likely red or a purple color. A bruise that hadn’t been there the last time he’d seen her.
“A lot,” Vhalla whispered.
“It looks it,” Fritz agreed. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She mused over this. Her immediate answer was no; not even by a small margin did she want to talk about her falling out with the man who was supposed to be her intended. The watch almost burned against her chest, and Vhalla thought of all the times Aldrik had kept silent when she desperately wanted him to open up. She thought of Larel, and the memory of the woman reminded her that friends were there to help in moments like this.
“Aldrik and I, we’re over.” Saying it aloud made it all the more real.
Thankfully Fritz spoke and saved Vhalla from being unable to. “Did he do this?” Fritz ran his fingers over her face.
“Yes.” Vhalla didn’t even try to lie, she was done with lies. “He was aiming for someone else,” she continued at Fritz’s frown. “But, yes.”
It was Fritz’s turn to be at a loss for words.
Vhalla shook her head. She didn’t want people to think of Aldrik as abusive. “It was really an accident, I got between fighting brothers.” She laughed weakly. “Aldrik wouldn’t have intentionally hit me.”
“If you say so.” Her friend didn’t seem convinced.
“Truly,” Vhalla assured. “I’m a Lady of the Court now.” She was eager to change the topic.
“What? Really?” In Fritz’s excitement, he spoke a little too loud and moved a little too fast. Vhalla pushed lightly on his shoulder, preventing him from sitting as another patient muttered and cursed at the noise. Fritz scooted closer. “How?”
“Aldrik, he ...” Vhalla stilled. She was tired of having revelations that made her chest ache with how hollow it was. “He traded his freedom for mine.”
Vhalla clutched the watch around her neck tightly. How had she not seen it that way before? The pendulum of her emotions toward the crown prince swung from all-consuming love to raw anger.
“I don’t really get it all,” Fritz sighed. “But this means you can return to the Tower, right?”
Vhalla looked up at Fritz in surprise. She hadn’t thought about it. Returning to the Tower, living a normal life; it all seemed so out of reach that Vhalla hadn’t considered it. Now, it stared her in the face, and it was positively terrifying. She couldn’t go back to the South. She couldn’t march alongside Aldrik and his new bride. She couldn’t pretend everything was normal when she didn’t even know what normal was, when she felt like she didn’t even know who she was anymore.
“Fritz ... I ...” How could she tell him? What was she going to do? “I can’t go back.”
“What?” Fritz’s face fell into a frown.
“I can’t—I can’t go back there. I’m not ready.”
“Vhalla, all you’ve wanted to do is go home,” Fritz pointed out.
“I know.” She sat, running her hands through her hair, angrily combing out snags. The Emperor had given her freedom, but taken away the one thing she wanted to do with it and tainted the joy of everything else. She was certain the wretched man gleaned great pleasure from what he’d done. “But I can’t be near Aldrik right now—I can’t.”
“It’s a long march back ...”
“I know. And I can’t go to the Tower and just be a student once more as though nothing happened. I don’t want to go to the Court and be their lady, their war hero, and prattle off stories. I can’t go home ... I can’t step foot in my mother’s and father’s home as I am.” Vhalla swallowed hard. Her options were running out. How was freedom more confining than servitude?
“As you are? Vhalla, I know your father would love to see—”
“I can’t!” Vhalla press
ed a palm over her mouth, being shh’ed by another trying to sleep. “I can’t, Fritz. I don’t want to ruin my memory of that home by returning a confused mess with so much blood on my hands.”
“What do you want, then?” Fritz changed his approach.
“I want ... I want to forget all this for a while and wander, to be lost for just a little while.” Vhalla suddenly knew where she needed to go.
“And where can you do that?” Fritz saw it on her face also.
Vhalla absorbed her friend’s condition, freezing her words in her mouth. She saw Fritz’s bandages, the blood seeping through them. He was in no position to travel, and if she told him, he would push himself to do so. As much as Vhalla wanted her friend with her, she wanted his health more.
“I’m not going to tell you,” Vhalla said honestly.
No more lies.
“Why?” Hurt shone brightly in Fritz’s eyes.
“Because I don’t want you coming with me. Not with your injuries,” Vhalla explained hastily.
“I’m fi—”
“No, you’re not.” Vhalla shook her head. “You’re in no position to travel at the speed I will want to go. The war is over, Fritz. You survived. Don’t kill yourself now and put that burden on my shoulders.”
He sighed, a small pout overcoming his face. “Tell me anyways; when I’m well I’ll come and find you.”
Vhalla laughed softly. She leaned forward and pressed her lips to Fritz’s forehead, remembering all the times Larel had done the same to her. It was a bittersweet gesture.
“I don’t want to be found just yet,” she reminded him. “I’ll find you. I’ll come back to the Tower.”
“When?” Fritz pressed.
“When I’m ready.” Vhalla straightened. “You take care of yourself. Order Elecia to do so.”
“She’s the one who orders me!” Fritz whined.
“Gotta have a firm hand.” Vhalla smiled tiredly.
“Wait.” Fritz grabbed her wrist as Vhalla went to stand. “Vhalla, I will see you again, right?”