Lox hesitated, but I wasn't saying anything. I'd gone very still, and I couldn't focus on any one thought for very long.
"You might have been preoccupied these past weeks in Akadia, Cyric, so perhaps you didn't notice Molec's behavior. But he was becoming unmanageable. There was no telling what he might do next, things that could put the entire army in jeopardy… I had less than minutes. I had to make the decision that was best for all of Akadia. Are you, even now, thinking along those lines?"
I met his gaze—where before I'd been watching the floor. I heard these words repeated back in my head, until it became true that he was saying them. And then I wondered that he spoke of Molec, and even me, but didn't think of mentioning the person he'd left that had loved him most. But I wouldn't ask, myself, because I didn't want another answer that I already knew.
Lox frowned his best expression of disapproval when I didn't answer him. "You know, I find it hard to fathom, Cyric, when you escaped the attack yourself, that you could suspect me of false motives for doing the same." He paused for a moment, then continued on. "Oh, I know you said that you were forced. But I can't help but wonder if you'd have minded very much if she'd just taken you away completely. All the way to Yanartas." He waited again, watching my face, then tipped his head, glancing back over the throne-room. "Your recent behavior might lead some to believe so. I would aim to change that, and keep all this about the party between us. We wouldn't want you to become the victim of some misconstrued attack."
This time when he looked at me, it was only for a second, and my mind was distant again, but now instead of the party, it had flipped much further into the past, standing outside the barracks hall, passing Tobias on the steps where Lox had said nearly the same words to him that he'd just said to me.
"As for the palace," Lox went on, "you were right. It won't stand much longer. I've already spoken with the engineers; they plan to start with its demolition this afternoon." He stepped down from the throne, and stopped beside me, his attention still elsewhere as he spoke. "Be sure to leave before it comes down, right, son?"
He walked on, not waiting for me to respond. I could hear his steps ringing through the hall, and my mind was still on Tobias.
When he'd gotten some yards off, I turned around, calling to him at the same time.
"I knew about the letters."
Lox froze. My heart slammed in my chest, and my ears were ringing. I watched his arm shift first, and then his head slowly turn around—until he was facing me completely, framed by gold pillars.
"That they were fake. I knew before you sent me to kill them. Did you know that I did?"
He blinked a few times, glancing me over. And then his eyes glazed, like they were darker than dark, sucking in the light around him. "I don't see why it matters, son." He tipped his head down. "They're dead now either way, aren't they?…"
Before he turned back around, his mouth pulled to a snicker. And then his image melted, fading into reds and yellows, until I was in a room, dark and cold. Fog poured through a window. I was holding a knife. I raised it in the air… — and then I stabbed it downwards, into the chest of the man asleep below me. A horse cried outside the window and footsteps brought someone closer. A second figure appeared in the doorway, calling out my name, but only a moment before I launched my knife in his direction, striking him through the heart.
Hands wrapped around my neck, tugging me down into the bed; but instead of a dead man's they were warm and soft. They found my face and then her lips did; she kissed me as she turned me over. And my hands were on her and in her hair. She put her lips to my ear and whispered, "I don't believe you killed them."
I was in a hall of doors—made of heavy wood like the palace in Karatel. Each I passed was shut suddenly by a laughing Katellian servant, beautiful; twice I saw Lox with her before the door could close. At the end of the hall stood Veera, in a dress that kept shifting between colors. Red meant that she was drinking too much at a party. Blue had me spinning her around beside a fountain. Green and she was sitting across from me on the edge of a bath, dipping her feet in the water.
She watched the doors shut as I did. Then reached her hand out and cried my name as the walls turned golden and an explosion of flames drowned out her voice.
I saw a Behemoth and then a pounding door inside a cave.
Ellia looked at the sun as she laid beside me. "I didn't feel it," she said, frowning, "but Tobias was certain." The cave door shook and scraped again. Ellia tucked her head into my neck. "At least I still have you," she told me. I stabbed Raand. Veera called my name. Ellia kissed me on a balcony. A dragon threw its head back above trees. The cave door shuttered and screeched.
I shot up into pitch darkness. I was covered in sweat, and I couldn't breathe; my torso was craning with the effort of it like I'd suffocate myself. A distant cry came from my window, signaling the Akadian night. I pushed off sheets and crossed the room. I coughed as I found my desk and opened the first drawer. I dug my hand inside to find nothing. I opened the next drawer, scattering papers only to find nothing again. I threw the drawer at the ground in a fit. Then I stood up, wiping sweat from my eyes, and coming to enough to realize that I wasn't going to be able to find what I was searching for. I screamed and kicked the desk hard twice, and then I put my hands up on the sides of my head and pressed in with my palms. The distance between me and what I wanted spanned itself out tauntingly, but I pictured the crown anyways, and then I pictured its owner.
My lungs slowly settled in their strain for air. The blood racing through my veins pulsed slower, though it continued to feel like a poison, like the poison that Silos described was killing the Behemoths. I'd thought it before. I thought it every time I had a nightmare. Akadia was like a substance my body couldn't survive, or else I was. Me and all the things I'd done.
The blackness of my room I couldn't take. I moved to my window and looked outside of it, so that I wouldn't be forced to see things in the darkness that I didn't want to. Here there were torchlights and lit streets and balconies.
These dreams I had most nights—making me ill whether they were true or not. Like the ones tonight. Real memories, such as my conversation with Lox. That was the time he'd confessed to allowing everyone in the palace to die. It hadn't been more than a few days after the attack. At that time I'd been ill not just at night but all the time. There were few things then that I could do to calm myself, but I'd had to learn them.
I pushed my hands over my face and into my hair, shaking as I did, but not with laughter or anything else explicable. I ended up slunk down, with my elbows on the window ledge, and I looked past the city, at the desert where the smoke rose orange from the behemoth's cavern. I couldn't see the granted mountain from here, but there was a large mound of overturned earth on the other side of the desert—what excess had come from digging out the cavern. There was a ramp leading out that side of the lakebed; wagons used it, though it was hard to pull them up if they were loaded. Sometimes the Behemoths were made to do it, under tight chains, with the supervision of many men. Silos didn't like it. They used sparks to drive them on, an invention of Bellerophon's. They were made of just a small bit of explosive powder, nothing like what the Democedian's had used to blow the palace; just something that caused a flash of light and deafening pop. I suspected the fear they caused in the Behemoths was the reason for Silos's aversion.
Silos's question from earlier in the day came back to my mind now. But instead of it I thought of my answer.
There were things that I played in my head in the long hours of the day, and like a decision already made for me, I added it in with them. I tested it in my mind even now.
And then the night didn't seem so dark.
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Fallen Kingdom (Fallen Trilogy book 2) Page 26