Sloane walked over and took Rowe’s seat, falling into it with another sigh. She stared up at the icy ceiling overhead, which was dimmer than usual. A storm had been brewing all afternoon and had finally hit now that evening was approaching. When she closed her eyes and concentrated, Sloane could hear the whistle of wind howling outside the castellum. She almost swore she could hear the soft patter of snow hitting the ground, but quickly dismissed the thought. They were in for a rough night and, for once, she felt glad to be confined to the castellum.
‘Some storm out there,’ Sloane said, opening her eyes to look at Orelle and Rowe.
‘How long do you think it will last?’ Rowe added, looking to Orelle.
The Unfaih woman gave a small shrug of her shoulders. ‘Sometimes storms last for a night; other times they go for weeks. There is no way to tell.’
‘I hope it’s over by tomorrow,’ Rowe said.
Orelle smiled at her brightly. ‘Even if it’s not, the Starfall celebration will still be beautiful.’
‘Are you sure we’re welcome at it?’ Rowe asked. It almost sounded like she was hoping Orelle would tell her that she wasn’t.
Rowe had barely left her room since Sloane had recovered. She couldn’t tell if her sister was scared of the Unfaih or if she simply felt uncomfortable in the unfamiliar surrounds of the castellum. Rowe seemed okay around Orelle and Rhyn, but Sloane hadn’t seen her exchange words with any other Unfaih.
‘Of course you are welcome,’ Orelle replied. ‘In fact, I’d be disappointed if you both weren’t there.’
Rowe gave a tight smile in response, as if Orelle had just told her the one thing she didn’t want to hear. There was no way Rowe would refuse to go now though, not if she knew it would mean letting Orelle down.
‘I tried to see Emha earlier today,’ Sloane said, attempting to distract her sister from the fact she had to go to an event filled with Unfaih the following night.
Orelle glanced in Sloane’s direction. The woman’s face showed little emotion, but there was so much concern in her eyes. Sloane saw her swallow before she spoke. ‘I visited two days ago, but the child said not a word to me. How is she?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Sloane said, her voice quiet and unsure. ‘Her father wouldn’t let me near her.’
It hurt Sloane more than she wanted to admit out loud that she had been stopped from seeing Emha. Her last memory of the child was in the Liftsal caves when she’d been hurt by the Captain and was lying so still on the ground. Until Sloane saw Emha with her own eyes, she wasn’t going to feel reassured that the encounter hadn't harmed the girl.
Sloane was also desperate to comfort her. She’d been Emha’s age when her own mother had died and, though it was difficult to recall the days right after it happened, she could still remember the searing pain of her loss. She knew Emha must be going through the same torment, and though there wasn’t much Sloane could do, she wanted Emha to realise she was there for her.
Her eyes saddened as she recalled Vilya’s last moments. Sloane could still clearly picture the image of the woman bleeding out in the castellum corridor. She had tried to help Emha’s mother, but it was already too late when she found her, and not even the Liftsal was able to save the Unfaih woman.
Sloane’s hands tightened around the arms of the chair, and she slowly pushed herself up. There was only one person at fault for Vilya’s death: her father. The Captain wasn’t there to answer for his crimes, but his biggest supporter was.
She started towards the door, her movements far quicker than she expected. Rowe blinked rapidly in response and even Sloane was a little surprised by how swiftly she’d moved. She had started thinking about her brother, and a breath later she was across the room and reaching for the door.
‘Where are you going?’ Rowe asked.
Sloane frowned and turned to look at her sister. ‘I thought I’d check on Ash again,’ she replied. Her words were slow, as though she was uncertain if that’s where she’d been heading. She was already wondering if visiting him was such a good idea.
He had brought out the worst in her when she’d confronted him in his room on the day she woke up. She’d been so close to hurting him when she leapt towards him, her rage building up inside her as she slammed him against the wall. His words had riled her up and provoked the darker thoughts within her, which had made her feel like she was changing for the worse. Was she ready to face him again and risk the anger resurfacing?
Sloane opened the door and left before she could question her decision, but she didn’t get very far. The door had barely clicked shut behind her when she turned and walked straight into a solid wall of muscle.
Her breath caught in her throat as she slowly looked up into Rhyn’s stormy blue eyes. He was staring down at her so intensely, and she froze as she tried to understand what was running through his mind. He seemed troubled, and he didn’t look pleased to see her. Not that she expected him to when he’d been so distant with her recently.
She took a swift step back so she was no longer touching him, pressing herself up against the door behind her.
‘Sorry,’ she muttered, before she tried to move past him.
Rhyn reached out and grabbed hold of her arm. ‘You don’t need to be sorry,’ he said. He almost growled the words as they emerged from his lips. ‘If anyone needs to be sorry, it’s me.’
She glanced up into his eyes again. She felt confused as she stared at him, and all her pent-up emotions began to war within her, each one of them desperate to break loose.
‘And I am sorry,’ he said.
Sloane shook her head, frowning as she tried to understand what he was getting at. ‘You haven’t done anything wrong,’ she replied. ‘There’s nothing to apologise for.’
Even Sloane was surprised by how detached she sounded. She didn’t want it to be that way though. She didn’t want to be stepping away from him. She wanted to be entering his embrace, not running from it. But ever since she’d demanded that he stop lying to himself about what was happening to her, things had felt different between them.
Rhyn had abandoned her. He had immersed himself in his duties to his people, and while Sloane understood how important that was, she also felt like he’d been using it as an excuse to avoid her. She couldn’t pretend that it didn't hurt. After everything they’d been through together, she could no longer deny her feelings towards him—if anything they felt stronger than they had before.
But her love for him was mixed up in pain and loneliness right now. She needed him more than ever. But every day that passed he was growing more withdrawn. And Sloane was beginning to realise that perhaps her feelings weren’t returned as she once believed they were.
‘Are you coming to Starfall tomorrow night?’ he asked, filling the silence that seemed to stretch between them like a suffocating void.
Sloane nodded but looked away, unable to meet his eyes. She didn’t like the awkward way he was speaking with her, like they were merely two acquaintances passing in the corridor. She wanted to honestly talk to him about the changes she was feeling, about how her body felt foreign and no longer her own. But she didn’t think he’d want to hear her worries, so she cleared her throat and looked back down the corridor.
‘I should be going.’ She glanced down at his tight grip on her arm, and he immediately dropped his hand and stepped back from her.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow night,’ he said formally, before walking away without a backwards glance.
Sloane stared after him. His shoulders were stiff, and his steps were rigid. He was nothing like his usual self, and she knew that it was because of their argument on the wall. She understood that the uncertainty ahead of her was hard for Rhyn, but if she could find a way to deal with it, then he surely could. She wondered if there was something else bothering him, and she hated the anxiety his behaviour was causing her.
As he turned the corner and disappeared from sight, Sloane found her shoulders dropping. A part of her wanted to go after him. She wa
nted to demand answers from him about why he was acting in such a way, but a niggling feeling in her gut stopped her. She had already been through so much and was still struggling to adjust to her new abilities. She wasn’t going to go chasing Rhyn down. If he wanted to act weird around her and avoid her, then that was on him. She refused to spend another minute worrying about it. At least, that’s what she told herself. Completely pushing thoughts of Rhyn from her mind was easier said than done though.
She paced down the corridor towards Ash’s room, using the same route she’d taken with Rhyn the other day. There was a guard following her at a distance, but he’d been shadowing her steps for days and was the least of her worries.
She hadn’t been to see her brother since she’d first recovered from her injury because she was afraid of how she might act. She’d spent a lot of time considering the few words they’d exchanged though.
He was obviously hiding things from her. He had admitted his father had a plan, and Sloane was confident Ash knew more about what it involved than he was letting on. After what her father had told her in the Liftsal cave, Sloane felt like so many fragments of information from her past were missing. She wanted to know more about her father’s knowledge of the Liftsal and the Brakys. She had a feeling that Ash knew the truth, or at least part of it. But getting that information out of him wouldn’t be easy.
‘You’ve returned,’ Ash said, looking up as she entered the room. He was perched on his bed, and his eyes were calculating as he watched her. There was a cunning edge to them that made her feel like she was walking into a trap.
Sloane tried to ignore the way he stared at her and walked across the room to lean against the wall opposite the bed.
‘Doesn’t it bother you that Father abandoned you in a prison here?’ she asked. ‘He escaped his own cell and left you to rot in the one next to his.’
‘He would have helped me if he could,’ Ash replied, barely batting an eyelid at Sloane’s question. He didn’t appear bothered, but she knew her brother. It would be killing him that his beloved father had left him captured by the enemy.
‘Why did you help him start this war?’ Sloane asked. ‘So many innocent people died in the battle. It didn’t need to happen.’
Ash shook his head. ‘We both know it would have happened eventually,’ he replied. ‘Humans need Aeris to survive, and the Unfaih are a threat to that. It was only a matter of time before they attacked us, and we wanted to strike while we had the advantage.’
‘But you didn’t have the advantage, did you?’ Sloane said. ‘If you had waited longer more ships would have come, and you would have had more soldiers. The Unfaih had shown no signs of attacking. You rushed into that battle.’
‘We thought we had the element of surprise,’ Ash replied, a small flicker of regret entering his eyes before he quickly snuffed it out and his expression turned cold again. His gaze dropped to the ground, and he stared at it as if he were hoping that by refusing to look at Sloane she would disappear.
Sloane grunted and pushed herself off the wall. ‘You’re lying. Father didn’t care about that, did he? He just desperately sought the Liftsal and didn’t want to wait. What does he want with it?’
Ash briefly flicked his eyes up to look at Sloane, and she caught a hint of confusion in them. He stayed silent and didn’t respond though, before he quickly returned his stare to the floor.
Sloane let out a frustrated breath and decided to change the subject. ‘He told me about our mother,’ she said. ‘That she was descended from the Unfaih.’
Sloane carefully watched Ash’s reaction, trying to see if he had heard the same thing and whether he knew if the Captain had spoken the truth.
He slowly lifted his gaze from the floor, his cold eyes hardening as they met Sloane’s. ‘That’s impossible,’ he growled. ‘We are nothing like them.’
The rage in his words sent shivers down her spine, and she attempted to remain calm as she studied his response. He spoke with genuine hatred about the Unfaih, just like her father had done in the Liftsal cave, and uncertainty swirled within Sloane as she watched her brother. He seemed to despise the Unfaih as much as the Captain, but Ash had still denied what his father had said about their heritage. He almost seemed offended at the suggestion.
Sloane desperately wanted to know the truth. The anxiety she felt over what was going to happen to her was like a caged monster within her chest that was rattling against the bars containing it. Had the Captain lied to her in the cave? Was Ash lying to her now, or was he just as much in the dark as she was?
She wanted answers, and she needed confirmation that there was some truth to the Captain’s claim. She’d been clinging to the smallest thread of hope since she’d awoken—hope that she wasn’t doomed to become a Braky. And she needed to know if the basis for that hope was something real, or if it was weaved from lies and never truly existed at all.
Ash’s eyes were still hard and uncompromising. He barely even blinked as he stared his sister down, daring her to claim that their mother was descendent from the Unfaih again. She couldn’t tell exactly what he was thinking, but his response was the most emotional reaction she’d seen from him for a while. It gave her reason to believe that perhaps her father hadn’t said anything to Ash and that he was just as shocked as her at the thought of their potential ancestry. Either that, or the Captain had been lying to her, and he had only used her mother as a means to distract Sloane so he could escape with the Liftsal.
‘I think it’s true,’ Sloane said, her voice remaining calm despite her uncertainty and the turbulent emotions riling within her. ‘And I think you know it is.’
‘You can believe what you want,’ Ash replied, with a careless shrug. His demeanour changed as he tried to hide his emotions from her once again. She could still see the turmoil within his eyes though, and she wasn’t so easily convinced that he didn’t care.
She wanted to threaten him. She wanted to beat an honest response out of him. But she contained her rage in the tightly balled fists at her sides. Ash had seemed confused by their father’s claim despite the fact he had been so quick to deny it, but Sloane couldn’t be sure why. As much as she may have wanted it, she didn’t believe that threatening Ash would help.
‘Don’t you think Mother would be disappointed in you for fighting the Unfaih?’ she asked. ‘Especially if they are her ancestors.’
‘Disappointed in me?’ Ash said, lifting himself off the bed to stand tall. ‘What about you?’ He seemed completely indignant at her accusation, and he pointed a shaking finger at her as he spoke.
‘I have just done my duty to my people,’ he said. ‘While you have betrayed them.’
He took a step closer to Sloane, and she clenched her fists tighter at her sides, ready in case he attacked her. But there wasn’t anger or aggression in his eyes this time. Just shock and disappointment.
‘You make Father and me out to be the enemy,’ he continued. ‘But we’re not the ones selfishly keeping miraculous healing water a secret. We’re trying to help our people. Can you say the same yourself? You killed countless men on the battlefield. You may think I’m evil, but you are wrong. If you asked any other person in our camp who they believed was the enemy, they would tell you that you need to look more closely in the mirror.’
Sloane’s whole body froze as he spoke, but her heart only beat more furiously in her chest. Whether or not she believed her father and Ash were the enemy, she couldn’t deny the fact she had killed many of her own people for the Unfaih. Ash narrowed his eyes on her, but she refused to look back at him. Instead she turned and quickly left the room, walking away from it as fast as she could.
He was just trying to upset her. She knew that. The problem was, it was working.
Chapter Seven
The castellum was a flurry of activity in the lead up to the Starfall celebration. Though the winds of the storm had howled throughout the night, the day had dawned brightly with a perfectly clear blue sky. Sloane wanted to bask in the
sunshine and make the most of the day by attempting the obstacles Elyx had set out for her again. But the course had been cleared away to make room for the festivities, and there was no chance to train as Orelle had recruited Sloane to help with the preparations.
The celebration was to take place in the courtyard, and Sloane spent the morning assisting the Unfaih by setting up long trestle tables and bringing out chairs to line each side of them. She enjoyed the work as it kept her busy and distracted her mind from the many problems that kept competing for her attention.
The only downside was the fact that Rhyn was also helping with the preparations. He always seemed to be working on a different task to Sloane though, and neither of them exchanged a word despite the many hours that passed.
She kept sneaking glances in his direction, but he didn’t once look her way. A part of her hoped that he simply hadn’t noticed her out there, but she knew that Rhyn saw everything and there was no way he wasn’t deliberately avoiding her.
The fact that he hadn’t so much as greeted her set Sloane’s teeth on edge, and she found herself roughly dumping chairs onto the ground and muttering dark things under her breath. She still didn’t understand why he was keeping his distance, and she was starting to believe that perhaps he wasn’t interested in her anymore. She wished he would just come out and tell her if that were the case. She might not be able to control her feelings towards him, but at least she could attempt to rein them in once she knew the truth.
She promised herself that she’d confront him that night at the celebration and that she would finally get an answer from him one way or another. She’d never been afraid of confrontation before, but the thought of demanding answers from Rhyn and facing his rejection sent chills through her body and made her stomach churn with unease.
Once the tables were set out, Sloane went in search of another task only to have Orelle signal her to come back inside.
The Rift War (The Liftsal Guardians Book 4) Page 7