“You wanted to know what I did that would cause Odhran to try and kill me,” Peter said, straightening out of his defensive crouch. “I promised Katy I would return. You knew that. But before that, I made another promise. I promised her that I would find a way to save her from the power that was eating her from within. I would stop it so that it wouldn’t frighten her anymore.”
No one spoke for a long minute. Katy was too confused to even try to sit up straight, so she stayed on her side against the cool, slick floor.
“Peter,” his uncle finally whispered, “what have you done?”
“I didn’t tell you because I knew you would be displeased,” Peter said. “I believed I could search for an answer and have enough time to find it before her birthday.” He sighed. “I didn’t expect for the forest to begin growing again.” His words came out faster and faster. “But I have it all planned. If you let me take the men, I will find the answer. And as soon as I return, I’ll do anything you wish! I will marry Saraid! I will take the throne and you can abdicate as early as you wish! But please, please don’t deny me this bit of honor!”
Katy looked at the king to see his reaction, but it wasn’t the king who spoke first. “Benjamin,” Briant glared at the young man. “Out.”
“What?” the young man cried. “I’m not—”
“Out!” Antony roared, and Carey stepped to the side to clear the path to the door.
Benjamin sheathed his sword and muttered to himself all the way out. No one else spoke until he was gone and the door was shut once again.
“Peter, there is something you need to know,” his uncle said. Then he glanced down at Katy. “Oh, for the isle’s sake, someone get her off the floor!”
Peter turned and fairly lifted her to her feet, but the touch wasn’t friendly or gentle the way Katy was used to. As soon as she was standing, she took a few steps back until she was behind him, but he only reached back and dragged her forward again until she was part of the circle with the others. “Alright,” he snapped. “What is it that I need to know?”
“This is a secret that only the king, his circle of knights, and the official crown prince is allowed to know,” the king said gravely, his bushy eyebrows drawing together.
“And why wasn’t I told then?”
“Because you weren’t officially the crown prince,” Antony said stiffly. “Technically, you’re still not. Not that it matters anymore.”
The king sent Antony a look of annoyance. “Everyone believes that the heavy damage inflicted on the isle’s large towns was sustained during the Olc’s War.”
Katy remembered that from Sir Christopher’s lessons. But now that she thought about it, she also remembered the odd look of disgust on his face during those lessons as well.
The king continued. “But as damaging as the war was, most of the ruin was caused by the act of a prince named Calder.”
Peter didn’t speak, only glared at his uncle.
Antony took up the story. “He had fallen in love with an olc girl. Promised to marry her even. But when it came time to tell his father of the arrangement, the prince grew frightened and denied the engagement, said he’d never promised her such a thing. The girl went home to her father, a chief of one of the olc clans, and told him what had happened. The chief called upon Atharo for justice to be done.”
The king spoke again. “The chief begged that no prince be allowed to break a bond so sacred as his word. And when the king denied his request, the chief pleaded for Atharo to punish the prince and for any who followed in his footsteps to suffer a thousand times what his daughter had.”
“And did he?” Peter asked.
The king nodded. “Lightning rained down from the sky. The earth cracked open, and all of our greatest cities and harbors were decimated. Of course, the king wasn’t about to stand for such from the chief, for the chief had been the one to pray to Atharo. So he declared war, and the Olc War went on for sixty days before the humans finally emerged victorious.”
“If victorious is the right word.” Tomas snorted.
“I thought the crown discouraged belief in Atharo, or any talk of him at all,” Peter said in a sour voice.
The king shrugged. “The war wasn’t the end of the isle’s struggles. When the other isles turned their backs on us for the king and prince’s dealings, our own people rioted, many taking up the cause of the olcs for fear of Atharo’s further judgment. And so the crown has made an effort since then to quell all thought of rebellion by discouraging the people from any sort of attachment or belief in Atharo.”
“And yet we keep a firin here at the castle?” Peter sheathed his sword with unnecessary force.
“We,” the king indicated to himself, Peter, and the knights, “cannot afford to forget what happened in the past. But the people can.” He rubbed his face. “Peter, it appears that you have left us no other choice. We must give you the chance to search for a way to save Katrin.” He glanced at Katy, his eyes deeply troubled.
“I will—” Peter began.
“But if you cannot find what you seek, there is only one way to save her.”
Peter shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
But Katy did. And for some reason, she was not as frightened as she should have been. Perhaps this would be better than living alone, on the run for the rest of her life. And most importantly, she would never hurt anyone ever again. Gently, she took Peter’s arm and traced her fingers over the raised flesh. Avoiding his gaze, she spoke softly. “You would be saving me from myself.”
Peter stared at her for a long moment before he fell back a step, pulling his arm from her hand. “No! I couldn’t!”
“You promised,” Antony said, sheathing his sword. “If you cannot succeed in fulfilling the promise in one sense, you must fulfill it in another or you’ll bring disaster on us all.”
“Peter,” Katy said, trying to smile but failing as tears ran down her face, “if I hurt someone during my manifestation, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. What...what you would be tasked with doing wouldn’t be murder. You would be protecting everyone under your crown. Think of the children and the parents. If nothing else, think of the children.”
He glowered at her for a long time before swallowing hard and turning back to his uncle. “If I am allowed to go, I must know she’ll be safe here.”
“We cannot allow her to walk around unaccompanied!” Sir Antony cried, but the king shook his head.
“She will be given escorts from now on. She’ll be allowed to move about the castle, but she will never be alone.” He turned to Katy. “Is that reasonable to you?”
Katy nodded.
“Now, how long until you reach twenty and one?”
Katy took a deep breath. “Six weeks.”
The king shook his head and muttered something to himself before turning to Peter. “Very well, then. You have one and a half months until you must return here. Your promise must be fulfilled one way or another, though, by her birthday, otherwise she will manifest and it will be too late. Understood?”
Peter flexed his jaw several times before closing his eyes. Even then, it was a long, long time before he whispered, “Yes.”
The king let out a heavy breath. “Good. Now Peter, I suggest you escort Katrin back to her room. After that, come to my chambers. I have something else I need you to see.”
* * *
The silence between them as they walked back to her room was like sitting at the bottom of a hill with a loose boulder atop it. Peter’s stride was long and fast, and Katy nearly had to run to keep up. That he wasn’t in any mood to talk was obvious, but Katy couldn’t let him go without at least trying to make peace.
“Peter, I’m sorry—”
“Sorry isn’t good enough!” He whirled around and glared down at her. “I thought you had changed. During the dance tonight, I thought you’d finally learned to stop hiding, to remember who you were at one time.”
“And that would be?”
“Confi
dent. Sure of herself. Unashamed of who she was.” He leaned closer. “Brave. But that girl I knew is apparently gone.”
He might as well have taken a knife to her heart. She stopped trying to run. “I couldn’t live with myself if I killed someone!” Her words echoed down the long, dim hall.
He came to a stop outside her door, but he didn’t turn until she came around to face him. When he did, his eyes bored through her like icicles. “You couldn’t live with yourself? Really? And now, if I fail, you’ve doomed me to do just that.” And then, without another word, he was gone.
34
More Ancient Blood
“There’s been no sign of the vine or its maker.” Peter’s uncle didn’t look up from the scroll he was reading as Peter entered his chambers. His words were smooth and flat, a sure sign of how angry he was.
Usually, a rare moment of wrath from his even-tempered uncle would have unnerved Peter, but he was already too agitated to care. So Peter said nothing as he came in and stood against the door. Instead he stared at the lush red rugs and heavy tapestries that covered the floors, walls, and windows. They were too close to the color of blood for his liking.
“So you’ve kept this secret all this time.” The king finally fixed him with a cold stare.
“I had no reason to think it was wrong.” Peter crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “Since I was never told otherwise.”
“Your father never told you to take care with your promises?”
“My father told me to never make a promise I couldn’t keep.”
“And you thought you could change the nature of an olc? That didn’t seem impossible to you?” the king snapped.
“My father never told me what she was!”
“But you had your suspicions?”
“I did. I also believed my father when he said that she was different from the others. That she had a purpose. So yes, I did believe it was possible. I still do.”
The king took off his spectacles and threw them on the table so hard one of the lenses cracked. Muttering a curse, he rubbed his eyes. “Your father was an idealist, but you’re worse than he ever was!”
Peter jutted his chin out. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“The man was a fool, Peter! And it got him killed! Now I am trying with everything in me to prevent the same happening to you!”
“I can—”
“I let you run with the knights.” His uncle jabbed his hand at Peter, holding up his fingers as he counted. “I let you go back to retrieve her. I let you spend hours in that library poring over books we should have rid the castle of hundreds of years ago.”
“You only let me get her because I promised to do that, too.”
“But I could have made a fuss, and I didn’t!” He took a few steps toward Peter, holding his hands out, his eyes suddenly pleading. “What is it about this girl that makes you fight everyone and everything to the bone? I mean,” he gestured to one of the tall windows, the one with the best view of the isle, “you have everything! A beautiful, intelligent woman who would make a fine queen. Knights who would follow you blindly wherever you wanted to go. People who look up to you and see you as everything I am not.” He shook his head. “What draws you to this...this creature who hides inside herself and watches the world as though she’s not even a part of it?”
“You saw what she did for Dom tonight.”
“I did.” He sighed and tugged at his white beard. “And that’s what makes this so much harder.”
“She’s been doing that her entire life...for me.” Peter walked over to the table with the scroll and picked up a pen for want of something to do with his hands. “The other children never accepted me. Not even Odhran’s children.”
“I’m not surprised. Your father raised you with the manners of a prince, not street rats.”
“It wasn’t just that. I don’t know what it was, but it was like they could sense...” He shook his head. “They could sense something else was different.” Then he looked up at his uncle and frowned. “Besides, you saw me when I first arrived here. It didn’t help that I was the son of the great Sir Christopher but could barely lift a sword.” He paused, his voice softer this time. “There’s a power that’s imparted when someone tells you that you can be more than you are. She made me feel needed.”
She had made him feel strong.
“Saraid seems to think those things.”
“She does, and I’m grateful for it. But Katy believed them before I was ever a prince. At least to her.”
His uncle stared at him for a long moment before rolling his eyes and throwing back his cloak so he could stand up. Then he waved for Peter to come.
Peter followed him down the length of the large room to the back, where furniture was crowded along the fourth wall. A vanity larger than his mother’s, a monstrous wardrobe, and a strange variety of tapestries squeezed in to cover the entire back wall. Peter had seen all of this before, of course, but he’d always thought the collection simply an odd nod to the different tastes of his ancestors’ past. As his uncle began fumbling with the tapestries, however, he began to think otherwise.
“More secrets, Uncle?” he asked dryly, peeking around to see what the king was doing.
But his uncle only held a finger up to his lips for silence. A moment later, he pulled the tapestries back, revealing a wall of stone. But unlike the other walls of stone in the room, one of the bricks had a dark red smear across it. Well, multiple smears, really. Peter leaned in closer.
“Is that...blood?”
Without a word, his uncle pulled a knife from his belt and pricked his finger. Once a large bead of bright red had swelled on top of his finger, he brought it to the wall and brushed it against the stone. After a moment of watching the blood glisten against the gray stone, Peter gasped as the wall shimmered and disappeared.
A small windowless room with a single table lay beyond where the wall had been, and his uncle motioned for Peter to enter as he held the tapestry back. As angry as he was with his uncle, Peter obeyed without question. Something told him that many, many of the questions that had haunted him for years were about to be answered.
The room was made of the same dark slate as the walls that made up his uncle’s room, but it was far smaller than any room Peter had seen in the castle. A single rectangular table stood in the center. And most importantly, the room had been locked by magic. His skin tingled all over as he turned slowly in a circle, taking it all in.
The king grabbed a torch from the bedroom wall and brought it into the little room, letting the tapestries fall shut behind them. They didn’t say anything, however, until his uncle had hung the torch on an empty rung on the wall.
“How did—”
“There is another reason our ancestors decided to hide the truth from the people. After Prince Calder’s father outlawed magic, I mean.”
Peter held his breath, not quite sure he wanted to hear and yet desperately curious.
“See this?” The king moved to the table and pulled the black velvet sheet off it, revealing a long, thin glass box. On the inside was Peter’s father’s sword.
Peter frowned. “I just got this back from Odhran. Why hide it away in here?”
“After the Olc War, the people feared magic,” his uncle said, pulling back the case’s lid and cautiously lifting the sword out. He held it away from his body with the tips of his fingers. “So the line of kings believed it would be prudent to wipe away every trace of it from the isle. There was only one problem.” He held the sword out to Peter.
Peter was confused, but he took the sword. “What was that?”
“Do you know why gems were banned from the general populace?” his uncle asked.
“They magnify magic.”
His uncle nodded. “They were once used here as weapons of the greatest caliber, for olc and man alike could harness them.”
“What man was able to use magic?”
“We were able to remove magic from the world aroun
d us,” his uncle said, still knitting his brows at the weapon in Peter’s hands, “but purging it from our blood was something completely different.”
Peter tore his gaze from the blade to stare at his uncle. “What?”
“You heard me.”
Peter balked. “You mean we have magic? Our line?” The atrocities of his forefathers hadn’t seemed like they could get much worse. Until now, as their hypocrisy came to light.
“Through the generations, we have sought to bury it, to conceal it behind a wall of our own making in our hearts. And for the most part, we have been successful. But every few generations, a little seems to leak out. That’s why this sword has remained hidden for the last two hundred years.”
Peter looked down at the weapon again. He had magic.
He had magic.
If only Katy could hear this. Maybe she would hate herself a little less. But really, he should have known, or at least guessed something was amiss. It all made sense now, how he could always sense Katy when she was near. He’d been able to sense the olc the night Odhran had sent him to his death over the mountain, and ever since whenever he ventured near danger. It made so much sense. And yet, it was all another lie his forefathers had propagated to their own end.
The blade’s edges, lined with the nearly invisible crust of green diamonds, glistened slightly in the light of the flickering torch. “But I saw my father use this time and time again. It never showed any sign of magic with him.”
“I gave this to your father when he took you to Downing to raise you in secret. Since he was crown prince before you, he knew about the blade’s purpose and history. And when the monster in the forest killed your mother and sister, I did a desperate thing and gave it to him to protect you. It seemed the only way.” He sighed. “And now I’m giving it to you, Peter, so that you have every chance possible to make this quest successful.” A look of pain crossed his lined face. “I only hope it serves you better than it did your father.”
Peter held the weapon in a practice stance, then parried once with it. Nothing happened. Not even a hint of magic. Not that Peter knew what the sword’s magic would feel like, but it felt nothing like Katy’s power did when he was around her.
The Autumn Fairy (The Autumn Fairy Trilogy Book 1) Page 23