Between kings, p.24
Between Kings, page 24
part #10 of The City Between Series Series
“Good thing you didn’t,” I said. “If you had, Lord Sero and the king would have, too; things would have been a lot dicier. And it wouldn’t have changed anything back then, either. Lord Sero would have killed my parents just to get his hands on me as an ally for Zero.”
“Your parents,” he said, and hesitated. “They were one of only two sets of parents that didn’t hesitate when they made the decision. I didn’t—I didn’t make them suffer, Pet.”
“Yeah?” I said, though I couldn’t seem to breathe. “Didn’t much look like it when I found them.”
“They were dead long before that process,” he said quietly. “A mere breath of time severed soul from body—everything that happened afterward was as much for show as it was for warning. My lord’s father wanted to send a message to anyone else that competing heirlings would not be borne, and it was necessary to hide the fact that there only two bodies.”
It should have been a relief that he hadn’t lied in the memory I’d seen—that my parents really hadn’t suffered. It should have been a breath of life and liberation. Instead, it was a heavy, achingly breathless feeling of uselessness.
“Got something for you,” I said, and since he hadn’t moved at all—not even his hands, although the cuffs were unlocked—it was easy for me to step forward, pulling Mum’s citrine ring out of my pocket, and push it onto his pinky. “I want you to flamin’ remember.”
“Never fear, my dear,” he said tiredly. “I’ll not forget them for a moment.”
“You should go now,” I said. I found that I couldn’t quite look at him. If I did, I might just try to kill him after all. Kill him, or forgive him outright, and I wasn’t sure which one was worse. “Palomena will be back at dinner time to fetch you: king’s orders. I wouldn’t hang around, if I were you.”
There was the faintest of impatient movements from him. “Better to have me put to death and have done with it. What will you tell your allies?”
“I’ve already spoken with Morgana and Ralph,” I said coldly. “I told you: you don’t get to just die like that. You have to live and struggle and learn how to feel sorry for what you’ve done.”
His head lifted, as if hearing a sound he understood at last. “Shall I take my orders from you, then? Reform? What shall I do first?”
“No!” I said fiercely. “You need to learn to take responsibility for your own actions! You don’t belong to anyone anymore. Make your own choices! I’m just saying that you don’t get to take the easy road out. Live and do some good in the world to try and repair some of the damage you did.”
“Some things can only be paid for in blood.”
“I’m not telling you to pay for them. I’m telling you you’re not going to pay for them, even if you want to. You couldn’t if you wanted to—you can’t give back anything in exchange for all of the people you killed. I want you to live in the world and try to repair it as if you really did die and come back as a different person.”
“So you’re giving me orders, after all?”
“Nope,” I said. “Once you’re out of here, that’s up to you. I’m just telling you how you can turn into something other than an empty husk now that you don’t have anything to live for. Who knows, you might even be able to do some good. Just…just don’t try to come back here. I won’t see you.”
I’m not sure why I said it: it wasn’t as though he would have done so anyway—wasn’t as though it was exactly true. Perhaps it was the desire to hurt him as much as possible. If it was, it was only because I knew it could hurt him. But perhaps it was because I knew how dangerous it would be for Athelas to be forgiven straight away, without even acknowledging the full extent of what he’d done wrong.
Athelas smiled, and the bitterly amused understanding of it would have been heart-breaking if my chest didn’t already feel as though it had been thoroughly carved out. “Never fear, Pet,” he said. “My lord was very clear on what would happen if I presented myself before you again. You will live long and happily, I should think.”
He said that mildly, but it sounded like a benediction—a benediction from the fae who had murdered my parents.
“Breakfast time,” I said abruptly, and left the room.
I nearly fell over JinYeong outside the door. I’d known he was there, but I’d been too much occupied with the confusion and rage and sorrow of my parents’ room that I’d all but forgotten about him.
He uncrossed his ankles and pushed away from the wall. “That will cause trouble, I think,” he said, his eyes flicking briefly toward the door.
“Yeah,” I said. I still half regretted what I’d done. Because of me, Morgana and Ralph wouldn’t get the justice they deserved for their parents, nor would any of the other people that Athelas had killed. “But I can’t help feeling like it’s the right thing to do.”
Athelas’ world was already dust and ashes—it had been since the start, or very nearly, I suspected. In a very dim way, I understood that he’d done the best he could with what he had, and he’d had so very little. If there was a chance for him to change and grow, I wanted him to have it. He couldn’t have it here with us—not yet, at any rate.
My eyes felt hot again. I said unsteadily, “I don’t really want to talk about it right now. I’m pretty sure it was the right thing to do, but it also feels wrong, and if I think about it for too long, I might go mad.”
“There is no need to talk,” JinYeong said, slipping his arms around me, warm and comforting. “This is nice, too.”
I let myself laugh shakily into his chest and didn’t pull away. A very small part of me tried to warn me that it wasn’t clever to get used to being comforted by someone else—a small part of me that was a bit too much like Zero—and I wrapped my one good arm around JinYeong’s waist, ignoring it.
“We better not stand here too long,” I said, though I didn’t much feel like moving. “Don’t wanna undo all the good work I just did.”
“You mean the old man can’t leave until we go? He can wait.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I reckon if I give him too long to think, he’ll just decide to stay out of sheer stubbornness. C’mon, I’ll make you some of the really good coffee for breakfast.”
There seemed to be a conspiracy in the house these days. For the last two mornings, I hadn’t been allowed into the kitchen—Tuatu had cooked very badly the first morning and Morgana had cooked quite well, the next—and this morning was no exception.
“I can still cook with only one arm!” I yelled at Daniel that morning as JinYeong led me down into the living room, grinning.
“Never said you couldn’t!” he yelled back, politely refraining from pointing out the fact that I probably actually couldn’t cook with one arm. “Sit down and shut up! I’m cooking today!”
“No one invited you, either,” I called back. He was spikier than usual, but he’d had to bury three of his pack this week, and I knew him well enough to know that he wanted the distraction. I would have. “Dunno why the lot of you can’t go home.”
JinYeong, still grinning, said, “Ah, sit down, Ruth. Let them do this; we will have steak for breakfast, and I will bite you—”
“I’m starting to think you only appreciate me as a blood bag,” I told him, even though I knew exactly why he was suggesting it.
I’d been having some trouble healing properly from my brush with the old king—Morgana seemed to think that the knife he’d used either hadn’t been clean or had been deliberately poisoned—and a gentle dose of vampire spit each day had been pushing back the infection that tried to creep in through my blood.
That, and the fact that after a bite I was more inclined to settle with JinYeong on the couch for the next few hours while the bite did its work. For somebody who bit as a sign of affection, JinYeong was also surprisingly dependent on soft, slow hugs and shared warmth. Catlike, he would happily sit beside me in an elegant sort of sprawl until I was ready to get up again, then rearrange himself to be even more elegant to entice me back again.
This morning he sniffed my neck gently and said, “Johah, johah. It is getting better. I will bite you anyway.”
Morgana came past from the bathroom on her way to the kitchen, a spiked collar around the neck, and said, “You smell better this morning.”
“That’s what my mosquito says,” I said, as JinYeong’s lips closed around my shoulder, and I felt a faint, piercing pain. “You got a new necklace?”
“The pack gave it to me,” she said, touching a finger to one of the silver spikes there. “They think it’s funny that I like to wear collars.”
“It’s not a collar,” said Daniel, from the kitchen. “It’s a necklace.”
“Try and tell them that,” Morgana retorted.
“You look taller these days,” I said, a bit hazily, leaning back against JinYeong as the vampire spit started to take effect.
“That’s my shoes,” she said. “They’re a bit harder to wear than I thought: it was easier when I didn’t have to think about how I’m supposed to walk in them.”
“At least someone’s getting out of the house, even if it’s only to grab their clothes,” I said.
I hadn’t gotten out of the house, but that was mostly from a combination of frustration that Athelas hadn’t gotten away yet and concern from JinYeong and Zero about the way I wasn’t recovering as quickly as I should.
Nobody else seemed to want to leave and go home either, and I couldn’t really blame them. It was hard to settle to anything, hard to sit down and rest, especially when we were all waiting for the knock on the linen closet door that would mean Palomena was here to escort Zero and Athelas to the new king.
Especially when we were all waiting to see how the entirety of Hobart Between and Behind were going to take the overturning of the old king and the reign of the new—not to mention the rest of Australia and the world beyond that.
At least life seemed quiet on the outside lately, according to what Tuatu had told us yesterday. No more sudden murders in the streets, or kids dancing off the tops of buildings.
“No more brownies outside either,” I said in realisation, tilting my head up a bit to gaze at JinYeong. “Or are they just hidden better than I thought?”
“They are gone,” he said, idly playing with the tail of my braid. I saw the instinctive, almost imperceptible little biting motion he made before he said, “Hyeong and I went to…talk to them.”
“Yeah?” I gazed at the ceiling for a while, feeling almost content and sleepy with his warmth at my side and the fizz of vampire magic wafting through my blood. “They still alive?”
“Yes,” he said regretfully.
“Don’t worry, someone will probably attack us by the end of the week,” I said comfortingly, patting his chest. “You can get some fresh blood then—or whatever it is they’re running on. We can go out and get you more sap if you want?”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “No sap.”
I snickered contentedly into his ribs and settled down to enjoy the pleasantness of having my person next to me and no one trying to kill me. Even the little tickle that was a constant wondering if Athelas was getting away, or had already gotten away, confined itself to the back of my mind, and by the time I heard the sound of someone knocking, I was almost half-asleep.
I jerked forward but knew in the same instant that it came from the front door and not the linen closet, and relaxed again. I heard claws tapping along the kitchen floor, then the soft padding of paws along the hall and scratching at the door.
“You’ll need hands to open it!” I called out, turning a little on the couch.
Tuatu’s voice said impatiently from outside, “All right, all right, just move out of the way; I’ll open it myself.”
North was with him when he did open the door, of course, dancing lightly down the hall and into the living room to settle in Athelas’ chair with a waft of fabric and the faint scent of meadow flowers in the sun. Tuatu strolled into the kitchen with a brief nod in my direction, to help himself to a cup of tea around the three assembled lycanthropes, who sat up and panted at him.
“They better not be salivating for my blood,” he said to Daniel.
“They’re just messing with you,” Daniel said. “Or they want you to throw a ball out in the back yard. Could be either.”
“Don’t throw balls in my house,” I said mildly, curling my feet up onto the couch with me and watching Tuatu migrate to the living room with a cup of tea for himself and one for North.
“How’s the blood?” he asked. “Is the vampire spit killing off the bugs?”
“Seems to be,” I said. “I’m feeling better today, anyway.”
“Pity it hasn’t fixed your face,” said one of the lycanthropes in passing, more flesh than fur and in the middle of his change.
I roused myself enough to kick the back of his knee and sent him tumbling over backward with a face-full of tea, much to the amusement of Daniel, who skirted around him and sat down next to Morgana.
“Told you,” I said to JinYeong, while the lycanthrope was still spluttering on tea. “You should have gone for a beautiful fae or something while you could—now you’re stuck with a one-armed feral human who kicks people.”
“I do not wish to be with a beautiful fae,” said JinYeong. “I do not wish to be with a beautiful human, either.”
Daniel and Tuatu exchanged unimpressed looks, while North said coldly, “You should think your girlfriend is beautiful.”
“He doesn’t mean that I’m ugly,” I said to North, sleepily amused.
“I do not like beautiful people,” JinYeong said, matching the coldness of North’s tone. “Beautiful people are sneaky and bothersome.”
I caught his eyes, and said before he could say anything else, “You’re the one who said it, not me!”
“Yes, but I am beautiful,” he said. “It can be forgiven.”
“Yeah? Depends on what it is.”
Tuatu said stubbornly, “All boyfriends find their girlfriends attractive—and they certainly don’t go telling them they’re not beautiful!”
JinYeong’s eyes began to glitter dangerously. “If you wished to say attractive, you should have said it. Attractive and beautiful are not the same.”
“Told you,” I said, trying not to grin. Unlike North, I had no trouble understanding the subtext of JinYeong, nor was I in any danger of feeling as though he didn’t find me attractive enough.
After all, JinYeong was beautiful, but it wasn’t his beauty that had attracted me to him—what had attracted me was the part of him that had once murmured times-tables in my ear to help me sleep after being killed in my sleep. The part of him that deliberately made himself warm for me when I needed comfort, and still caught his breath when I kissed him. The least I could do was believe he felt the same way about me.
“You understand,” JinYeong said, turning his gaze down on me. “Your face is warm and changing. I love warmth and change because I am cold and motionless beauty. Why would I want more of it?”
“I understand,” I said, uncurling myself so that I could sit up and swing my legs over JinYeong’s to give the tea-soaked lycanthrope space to sit down too. I slipped my left arm around JinYeong and said directly to North, “Would you rather have a marble statue of Tuatu with all the imperfections smoothed out, or the real thing?”
“Marble statues are no use to me,” she said. “And they don’t breathe, either.”
“Yeah, but the marble statue would be more beautiful,” I said. “If you just want beauty.”
“All right, all right,” said Tuatu. “I give up. Has Zero given him the ‘hurt my kid and I’ll hurt you’ talk yet?”
JinYeong sent a long-suffering look down at me, and I glared at everyone across the coffee table. “What is this? An intervention? Since when is everyone so interested in my love life?”
“Since you’re dating a vampire,” Morgana said. “Especially when the vampire is him.”
“You must have been listening to Zero,” I said. “What, are you gunna threaten him too, now?”
“I just want him to know that I’m happy eating vampire brains,” Morgana said, with a dark smile. “In case he forgets you’ve got friends.”
“And I,” said JinYeong in outrage, “am verrry happy to drink zombie blood.”
“You’re both flamin’ liars,” I muttered. “You were complaining about sap! And you had to eat brains without looking at them first! Why is everyone being so flamin’ protective today?”
“Because someone came back from the fight without an arm,” Daniel said. He didn’t say that three someones hadn’t come back at all, but it was there in the shadow of his eyes. “We’ve had enough of people dying and losing limbs.”
I couldn’t help glancing over at the lone wolf-form lycanthrope in the room: Kevin was back in his wolf form. I assumed, rather than knew, that it was because the death of his brother hurt less as a wolf than it did as a boy—I’d seen him change back to human to heal the last of his injuries, so at least we didn’t have to worry about losing him, too.
I’d watched the lycanthropes leaving the house the other night to do what Morgana later told me was a “howling”; a time to go back to the scene of their packmates’ deaths and howl over it—something like a lycanthrope funeral. Since then, the others had been human as much as they’d been wolf, as if the howling had torn something painful and sharp-edged from them and given them some sort of peace. Kevin hadn’t done the same, but that was understandable. His brother was gone and wouldn’t be back; even the rough and tumble attentions of Darren and Dylan hadn’t done more than waken him temporarily from his sadness.
That would come in time. In the meantime, there was nothing I could do but make sure there were always good steaks in the fridge and let the living lycanthropes be as noisy and boisterous as they wanted to be.
“Fair enough,” I said. “But no drinking zombie blood or eating vampire brain. The house is messy enough as it is.”
