by Amy Bai
"Fine," Devin groaned—mostly, Kinsey suspected, because soldiers were already lifting him, and the blood drained out of his face as soon as he sat upright. He pressed his fingertips to his temples, face twisting. "Dear gods, my head hurts."
Looking up at Kyali, Kinsey suspected he wasn't the only one.
As two men bore Devin past a growing crowd of the curious, Taireasa made to rise and winced again. Kinsey got to her before the nearest of her bodyguards could and pulled her up. She wobbled, flung a hand out to stay upright, clutched at his shoulder. He tried very hard not to pay attention to her touch, remembering that she had the same Gift as Saraid, only stronger. He felt himself flush.
"Oh, my head," she murmured.
"Lady—"
"Taireasa."
Her green eyes were filmed with tears, but she wasn't going to allow them to fall, that much was clear. A line had formed between her eyebrows. She had been through rather a lot in the last few minutes. Kinsey squeezed her hand gently and let it go. "Taireasa."
"Better," Taireasa said softly. "I'm going to sit with Devin. On him, if that’s what it takes to keep him in bed, and it very well may. Ky, will you—"
She looked around, but Kyali had vanished while they were helping one another stand. Her shoulders slumped. "That shouldn't surprise me anymore," she said, mostly to herself.
"I'll find her," Kinsey promised, partially out of curiosity, mostly to see Taireasa's faint smile. "Go, Majesty. Taireasa. I hope I'll be able to see him later, when he's awake and—"
"—Driving us all mad out of boredom," Taireasa finished, sighing. "I'll send word, Kinsey, when the herb-woman is done with him."
She took the stairs in a clatter of armor, her bodyguard all around her.
Feeling eyes all over the room on him, Kinsey turned and crossed the hall, following his curiosity. He wound his way through knots of people to the corridor where the army's offices were, following a guess.
It turned out to be a correct one. The Lady Captain was in her office, not quite having managed to close the door before falling into the uncomfortable-looking chair behind her desk. Her head was in her hands. The look she gave him when he slipped carefully inside was unwelcoming, to put it mildly, and also bleary with pain.
"Highness," Kyali said, making an effort to straighten. Kinsey grimaced in sympathy.
"Don't stand, Lady Captain. I just came to make tea."
She stared, hollow-eyed. A muscle next to her right eye twitched. One hand curled into a loose fist on the plain wood of her desk. There were rolls of paper and parchment all around her, two newer-looking codices, a cabinet overflowing with maps. Several pots of ink, a pile of used quills. Ink stains on her hands. A stack of books. History of Lardan was perched on top of the cabinet. He wondered if she ever slept.
"Tea," she echoed vaguely.
"You look as if you could use some," Kinsey said. Checking to see there was water in it first, he swung the kettle out over the tiny hearth. Kyali scowled down at her fist.
"I suppose I could."
"They both have headaches, too," Kinsey remarked, ignoring the glower this earned him, and picked through a few canisters on the mantle until he found what smelled like tea leaves. "I imagine yours is worse, Lady Captain, considering. Perhaps the tea will help."
"Willowbark," she murmured, which was probably as much of a concession as he was going to get, and more than he'd expected. "Second jar."
"Excellent." The kettle was steaming; he found a pot and poured, spooned in tea leaves and a generous helping of willowbark, and set it on the desk in front of her. "I'll leave you to it, then."
Some of the tension went out of the line of her shoulders. She nodded down at the mug of tea in her hands. Kinsey raked the room with one more curious glance, thinking of the expression on her face just before she'd healed her brother, the strange play of tension between her and Taireasa, wondering what it was he was missing. She looked utterly exhausted.
"Thank you," Kyali said, barely a whisper, as he let himself out.
He didn't think she meant the tea.
CHAPTER 22
Corwynalls all had the exact same expression when they were fighting something.
Taireasa had learned this simple fact many years ago, when the boys standing before her now had come to stay at the House estate for a summer and had caused such gleeful mayhem that even the Lord General himself had been reduced seven times to shouting, and twice to helpless laughter.
Bran Corwynall, third cousin to Kyali and Devin, first cousin to Feldan, lost that fierce, determined look and sank to his knees under the force of her seeking. His gasp was echoed by his brother Bryce's, and another pair of knees struck stone. Taireasa felt the echo of that in her own knees and winced, hurting for them, hurting with them, cause and fellow-sufferer and so miserably confused she could barely keep her own feet.
She was trying to be gentle. She didn't know how.
I'm sorry, she said—but that only seemed to hurt them more. The pain echoed through her own mind, a ripping, rippling invasion that tore memories out of their heads and hearts, sifted through them, leaving nothing hidden, nothing private. Her temples throbbed. She didn't know if it was worse to feel what they felt or to know that she was the cause of such suffering.
—Fields under a sunrise, Devin running from farmer Angus's bull, mother, red-haired and laughing—
—Riding to the border, carrying a sword, feeling like a grown man for the first time in his life—
—Riding up a mountain, miserable and grieving: broken House, broken kingdom, broken world—
Both of them were wheezing, air whistling past clenched teeth, muscles trembling.
She couldn't do this much longer. The pain it caused her was nothing to the pain it was causing them. She'd never dreamed that her Gift, so undramatic next to Devin's illusions, Kyali's command of flame, could do so much harm. It struck her to the core. It wounded her in a way nothing had.
Nothing but Kyali's desertion.
Kyali was here with her now, still and staring, a perfect blank spot in the cacophony of minds, like the eye of a storm. Three soldiers held the door, blades out, ready for anything—horrified and grimly determined, and hoping Her Majesty never felt the need to do such a thing to them. Curran was next to her, thinking about one of his brothers, someone lost, a grief. Maldyn and Beagan flanked her protectively, a jumble of sorrow and shame, fear, and unwavering determination.
Feldan. Whispers in a tent. Swords meeting in the firelight.
"There," Taireasa gasped, and let go of Bran and Bryce with a relief so great it was another kind of pain. They both collapsed immediately and Taireasa bent to catch them, snarled an objection when someone's hand closed over her arm and tried to yank her away from the two suspected traitors.
"It's not them," she snapped. She put one hand on Bran's sweating forehead. "I'm sorry," she murmured, then swallowed the rest of what she wished to say, because queens didn't beg for anything, certainly not forgiveness. She tried to still the trembling in her hands, to stop thinking of Kyali held down, her fingers broken one by one, a knife parting her skin. Pain beyond comprehension. She had suffered it with Kyali by choice; she had caused something like it now, also by choice.
Oh, she wanted so badly to be a child again. What kind of world was she making if this sort of cruelty was necessary—was an acceptable answer to a threat to her safety?
She had to do better than this.
"Majesty," Bran said, and curled up in a futile attempt to hide the tears streaming down his face. He gave up and wept, one fist shoved against his mouth.
Beside him, Bryce was trying to sit up, hunched around himself like he'd taken a blow to the belly, his eyes wide and lost. "Lady queen, thank you," he managed to say. Taireasa sucked in a burning lungful of air, wanting so badly to weep it felt like her eyes were on fire.
"What could you possibly have to thank me for, Bryce Corwynall?"
He swallowed, his eyes squeezing shut.
"For giving us a chance to prove our innocence," he said, as if it were obvious, and Taireasa had to stand, had to walk to the window and look outside at the frozen world while she fought her tears.
"Majesty…" Maldyn looked like he'd aged ten years in the last day. He set a hand gently on her shoulder. "They should swear."
For a moment, Taireasa couldn't speak.
He was right. And yet it was horribly unfair, to ask men she'd just—that she'd just... dear gods, they were still unable to stand, both of them sprawled trembling and winded on the floor, and she was going to demand they swear fealty to her? They were going to have nightmares of their own now.
Her Gift had done this, was capable of this.
She had done this. Was capable of this.
Bran was speaking from where he lay, still curled like a worm in the sun, still leaking tears and so out of breath it was hard to make out the words. She knew what he was saying because part of her was still threaded around his heart. The oath of fealty to a sovereign. Bryce began it, too, and Taireasa drove her nails into the palms of her hands until she could feel them break the skin, hating herself, hating the awful weight of responsibility that had left her no option but this.
She turned, because nobody should have to make this kind of oath to someone's back. She couldn't make herself smile, but she knelt again, taking their hands.
"I will never do this to you again," she said, instead of the ritual acceptance of fealty. "Hear me. I will never harm you this way again. Nor will I doubt you. What faith you've given to me, I give back to you."
There was a faint shimmer to the air at the edge of her vision. Maldyn made a sound that might have been protest. It was far more than any king or queen before her had ever sworn, she was sure. The whole room had gone silent, astonished.
"My lady," Bryce said, hushed and very moved. The thin thread of his heart still tangled with hers bloomed into something broader, fixed and full of certainty. She didn't deserve it. He bowed over her hands, a clumsy motion that put everyone in the room on edge and had Kyali up on her toes next to them, hands hovering over her daggers. Taireasa cast a look up at the captain of her guard, ready to snap out an impatient rebuke—renunciation of House notwithstanding, these were her own cousins—but the haunted look hiding at the back of Kyali's eyes strangled the words in her throat.
For a second she stared, as she had rarely let herself do, directly into her old friend's face, set the terrible weight of guilt aside and just took in everything. There were great shadowed hollows under Kyali's eyes, little color to her skin, strain wound tightly into every one of her muscles. She looked like she was braced against an invisible wind, fighting just to stay upright. She looked like she was at the last of her strength.
"It's all right," Taireasa said, holding that bleak, fractured gaze, refusing to flinch. She wasn't completely sure what she was talking about. She was painfully aware that it wasn't all right, though: that it hadn't been all right for some time, and she bit her lip. Presenting the world with the truth she wanted instead of the truth that was.
"It will be all right," she amended.
Kyali's mouth made a flat, unhappy line and she looked away. Kyali had, she supposed, no reason to believe that.
"You ought to see the herb-woman," Taireasa said to Bran and Bryce.
"I'd rather a glass of wine and my bed, Your Majesty," Bran said, trying to smile, not quite managing it. He pushed himself off the floor with a grunt of effort and Taireasa let Curran help her to her feet as the two brothers pulled one another up.
"So would I," Taireasa said wearily as they stumbled out.
"It was… effective?" Maldyn asked, when it was only him and herself, Curran, and Kyali left in the room. Taireasa thought she had never needed sleep so badly in her life. But she leaned against the windowsill, studying her trembling hands, and tried to muster the wit for yet another discussion of tactics.
"Yes," she said.
"Perhaps Your Majesty should consider applying the same—that is, consider speaking so to all of us on the inner council," her chancellor said. His gaze flicked over Kyali, then Curran.
Applying the same method of interrogation, he'd been about to say. A shudder twisted queasily through her.
"No," Taireasa said. "Never again."
Maldyn shifted, chafing at his hands, which were blue with cold. "My lady, your safety is paramount. If it would uncover this person…"
"Not at such cost to Her Majesty, surely," Curran murmured. He took her arm gently.
"Your thoughts, Lady Captain?" Maldyn said, and Taireasa bit her tongue, hardly daring to look at Kyali right now. Maldyn must be desperate indeed to look for support there: Kyali unsettled him deeply. Not many of the nobles and house staff of his age knew what to do with a woman in armor. For that matter, not many of the others did, either.
"I think you should sleep," Kyali said, not acknowledging Maldyn's question.
Taireasa hissed out a bitter little laugh. "I will if you will, Kyali Corwynall," she retorted, and left the room before she had to see what sort of non-expression that backhanded challenge put on Kyali's face.
* * *
Devin set the harp down gently, shaking the tingle from his fingers. Around him, birds bled out of the air and the Sainey grew faded and then blew apart. After a moment, so too did the weathered oak and stone, the horn-paned windows and broad-boarded porch, the iron-barred doors and light-filled rooms of House Corwynall.
Kinsey sat among shelves and tables and the drifting remnants of a dream of childhood, his gray eyes round and delighted. He was still as stone, and Devin let him be that way for another moment. He seriously doubted he was going to be able to get any words past the aching lump in his throat anyway.
The library actually looked like a library now. He pulled the Book closer, almost afraid to touch its fragile parchment pages, the heavy cracked cover, leather cord lacing that looked very close to coming to bits. The ink was barely visible. He pictured Kinsey bent over it in lantern-light, squinting, all elbows and weariness and fierce concentration.
"So… the Síog were real. Were here, in this fortress. And we drove them here a thousand years ago? I confess I'm having a hard time with this."
Kinsey pulled in a huge breath, still wide-eyed and startled-looking. "That was amazing," he said. "I don't understand why you were afraid to do this indoors before, though."
Devin hummed the first few bars of “Pass the Cup” and grinned when Kinsey's tea mug jolted sideways several feet. Kinsey let out a yelp and snatched up a messy sheaf of notes before the tea could slosh over them, then shot him an accusing look.
"I broke every window on the lower floor of the house the first time I picked up a fiddle," Devin admitted.
Kinsey might be clutching the notes a bit now.
"This doesn't surprise any of us who know you, Lord Corwynall," Annan said, appearing in the library door. Kinsey uttered another yelp, muffled this time, and twisted to glare at the Cassdall captain.
"Spies," he sighed, and Annan flashed half a grin, one that vanished almost before Devin could see it.
Devin flipped a page delicately. The feeling of it was almost like the feeling of the harp in his hands: a weight beyond the object itself, a faint, hidden spark flaring through the fingertips. Distant pulling in the belly.
"You honestly believe they were real?" he asked, though he knew the answer. Kinsey could jest, was actually quite funny when he wanted to be—but he wouldn't ever jest about research.
"I know they were," Kinsey said simply. "You do too, if you think about it. There are tales of them in every province of Lardan, of Cassdall, of Allaida and Madrassia and every other kingdom nearby. If you haven't read them, I assure you, I have. And the old histories always spoke of a people before us. It just never occurred to me the faery tales and the histories were talking about the same thing."
"I can see why," Devin grumbled.
"I'm sure it's a little unsettling, learning you've the blood of faeries
in your veins," Kinsey said with false sympathy, a hint of wicked humor hiding in his gaze. He yawned, rubbing an eye, and then ran a hand through his hair. It always looked like a barley field after a hard wind: now it looked like a barley field after a hard wind had knocked a few trees onto it. Devin coughed to hide a laugh and saw, out of the corner of his eye, Annan cast a long-suffering look up at the ceiling.
"Oh, it's not such a surprise," Devin sighed. "I grew up with Kyali, remember. Fire-haired, spark-eyed, even-tempered as a bear in spring, always batting at things with that damned sword. You should have seen her when she was ten. She looked like a faery. Just not the nice kind."
Annan and Kinsey had the strangest expressions on their faces, like they were trying to picture Captain Corwynall of the Exile's Army as a knobby-kneed ten-year-old carrying a grown man's sword, and finding it impossible. It almost made him smile. It also put the lump back in his throat.
Getting shot with an arrow had made him stupidly sentimental.
It had also, apparently, knocked some disturbing new magic loose in him. There was a constant sense of darkness hovering at the edges of everything now, a feeling like walls pressing around him—cold, high walls that hid something important, something he both needed and dreaded. He had dreamed of them every night for five days, dreamed of following the smooth icy shape of them blindly with his hands, of searching for a door he was certain existed but that he never found. Ever since he'd woken in his own bed with a blurred memory of pain and gold light, and Taireasa sitting beside him.
It meant something, he just didn't know what. And it made for very poor sleep.
"What brings you to the library?" Kinsey asked, eyeing his captain. "You didn't come here just to scare the daylights out of me and mock Devin."
"Either one would have been worth the trip, my lord," Annan said smoothly, and Kinsey hurled a crumpled knot of paper at him, grinning. "I came to find the Lord Corwynall, however. Your cousins are no longer under suspicion, my lord."