Chapter 28

CHAPTER 28

ROLAND

Their footsteps echoed along the stone floors of the corridors leading to the infirmary and Roland was glad of the company. While he valued Anselm's opinion, he knew he would need to debrief Finn and couldn't immediately offer the comfort the boy might need. Having his friend there would be a boon to both of them.

The healer, in her long white robes and cowl, met them outside, her expression stern.

‘You're going to have to speak to him, Grandmaster. We can't get him to cooperate in the slightest. He won't leave her side. Not even now she's sleeping.'

Finn, being stubborn. Not exactly a surprise. But this strange devotion was a worry.

Roland let the healer lead him to the small room in which the girl lay on a bed and Finn sat beside her, studying her face as if trying to commit it to memory.

‘Report, Ward,' Roland said, though he didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to.

Old instincts overtook whatever had robbed him of his senses at the Ilanthian camp. Finn was on his feet at attention before he knew what he was doing.

‘Grandmaster?' he began and then faltered. He glanced at the girl and concern ghosted over his face. Concern for her. Interesting. She slept on.

‘Your report. We can go outside so as not to disturb her, if you want.'

Finn chewed on his lower lip and swayed slightly on his feet. He looked wretched. The beating was only half of it. He looked like everything he was had been scooped out of him and only partially restored. Had the shadow-wrought manacles done something to him? But their effect tended to be on witchkind, and to Roland's knowledge Finn was nothing of the sort.

But something was different about him. Something Roland couldn't quite define, and Finn was not willing to share. Not yet.

‘Ilanthian troops led by Leander followed me from Sidonia, and ambushed me in the woods. Wren… this woman… helped me.' His voice trailed off. ‘We were captured. He was going to execute me.'

‘And the light? Was it her work?'

Finn glanced at her before he could stop himself. So it had been. Finn didn't even have to give an answer. Roland let out the breath trapped in his chest, and saw the realisation of what Finn had just given away fill his eyes with shame. His panic was evident as the words spilled out.

‘I don't think she knew what she was doing. I don't think…'

That hardly mattered. If she hadn't been properly trained in magic, training could be given. The innate ability was the thing. But Roland had never seen anyone untrained raise a beacon so bright, or make the sense of the Aurum's fire rise in his chest the way it had. Not since Elodie. This aftermath was because of the lack of training, not from any deficiency. Once she had rested and regained her strength, she would recover. ‘Where did you find her? Who is she?'

Finn just stared at him as if he was stupid. Roland frowned, which he knew was the expression most of his men dreaded seeing on his face. His ward was no different. He forced his voice to gentleness, which belied the urgency he felt now.

‘Finn? What aren't you telling me?'

Roland hadn't thought it possible to see Finn still squirm like a boy caught breaking all the rules after so long. But he did.

Meanwhile, Anselm had wandered to the bedside table where the girl's few belongings were stacked up neatly in a pile. He picked up a small leather-bound book and opened it. Leafing through the pages, he too frowned.

‘Grandmaster?' He held out the book. The leather was marked with the symbol of the Aurum. Roland took it, suddenly unsure.

‘I don't think it's her fault,' Finn blurted out. ‘I don't think she knows. I don't think she knows anything.'

The pages were blank, all of them. Some kind of notebook but one with nothing written in it. Roland studied it briefly and handed it back to Anselm to return. Curious. As he let it go he felt the tingle of an enchantment around it.

‘What else?' he asked the knight.

Anselm held out a locket dangling on a simple chain, also bearing the symbol. For a moment Roland thought that his heart might stop beating. It wasn't possible. Couldn't be…

Identical to his own.

‘Roland, please,' Finn whispered, frantic to dissuade him. ‘Don't.'

But it was too late. He didn't have to open it. He already knew what it was, what it would contain. His picture, his portrait, the one Elodie had painted, the match to one of her in his locket that he still carried with him after all these years.

How did this child have Elodie's locket?

‘Where did you find her?' he growled, closing his hand around the metal as if to crush it in his grasp.

Finn sank back onto the chair and looked at the unconscious girl again. Pity filled his face. Not for Roland, but clearly directed at the girl. ‘In the forest, near Thirbridge. Near the darkwood. There's a tower. She burned it.'

‘This girl burned it?'

The boy shook his head dumbly. ‘It was on fire when we got there. We went back later, Wren insisted. To look for her .' There was a subtle emphasis on the final word, and Roland knew that Finn believed what he suspected. That they had found her. That she'd survived that terrible night.

‘Did you?' he asked hesitantly. He hated how tentative his question sounded. ‘Find her?'

‘Wren said… she said the book told her to meet her at the Seven Sisters, near here. That she'd… that Elodie… I mean…'

Elodie.

Roland uncurled his hand and looked at the locket finally. The catch was small and delicate. The two pieces had been identical so he knew the trick to opening it. When her engagement to Evander had been announced he had bought them out of some sense of fatalism. Not the kind of thing she would normally wear. Too simple for a queen. But he wanted something to remember her by, wanted her to remember him. She had painted the miniatures.

‘ One for you. One for me. Just so we never forget. At least we had this. '

Even after all this time, Roland realised, he had clung to that.

He'd thought she was dead, prayed she wasn't. Why had she never sent word? Why had she never returned? He would have gone to her, protected her. He would have done anything. And all this time she'd been hiding in the forest, near Thirbridge.

Why had no one ever looked there?

Except Dane had. Warrants investigation, his old friend had said. But he'd never done it, had he? Roland had missed that one vital clue and now…

His finger moved almost by itself and he flicked open the locket. Finn let out something between a sigh and a groan while Anselm, unable to resist, craned in to look.

It didn't just hold one picture. His own face stared back at him from one side, as he had been twenty years ago. Or at least, as she had seen him, because he didn't remember ever being the idealised face painted there. But that didn't matter. That was how she had seen him and that was how he had been for her. And he loved her for it.

But there was another picture on the other side, another portrait.

A girl with his black hair and deep brown eyes, with his mother's nose and a jawline like his father's but softer. A girl who looked like him.

A younger version of the same girl now sleeping on the bed.

‘Oh,' Anselm said, coming to the same conclusion in an instant. ‘She's your?—'

And he shut up before he could say it out loud. Always the survivor.

Elodie had run away from Asteroth. She had never come back. Now, finally, Roland knew why.

Carefully, deliberately, he closed off every emotion that surged to the fore. Every last one. He had to.

‘Finn,' he said. ‘With me. Now.'

Roland snapped the locket shut and left the room without uttering another word. The legs of Finn's chair scraped on the tiled floor, and there was a hushed exchange with Anselm before he hurried in Roland's wake.

But what Roland was going to say to the boy when he finally managed to make himself stop walking, the Grandmaster had no idea at all.