Chapter 3

Chapter Three

P eace eluded me, my mind only showing me flashes of the fever dreams I'd had while I was sick. Memories of thrashing limbs, pained moans, and a cold darkness I could not escape. No matter how I contorted my body atop the seat by the window, I could not get comfortable. I couldn't bring myself go to my bedroom.

In the kitchen, though the flickering Soulshades had finally subsided from vying for my attention, the sounds of the revelry had not waned, and they wouldn't until the sun began to lighten the sky. Once it became clear Rhyon would not be coming out for dinner, I resigned to curl up on the lounge chair in the parlor.

As hard as I'd tried to close my eyes and rest while waiting for Emyl to return, the nightmares clashing with the sound of music and laughter drifting down from Castle Auretras kept me awake. Hours passed in that fashion, with me staring at the peeling paint along the crease where the wall met the ceiling, the eerie sounds of music cutting through the red mist atop the everyday fog that clung to the cobblestones in the cool of the evening.

Resigning myself to another sleepless night, I returned to the window at the kitchen, tugging a pillow into my lap and twisting my fists in it as I stared up at the towers dripping in opulence and death.

With the tolling of the midnight bells, my thoughts strayed. Back to the words Rhyon had spit, and back to the last moments of my mother's life. They ventured down that dark and twisting path of the Death marks atop my skin, remembering my own bout with the plague and how close I had come to succumbing.

My lips had been stained crimson for weeks after, and I would never forget the taste of my own blood for as long as I lived. Even now, my body still showed signs of my battle. Beyond the obvious marks, my hearing was fading, often replaced with an intense ringing taking over all sound with no warning and lingering for hours, and it was growing worse with each passing day. Perhaps the blood plague would eventually claim me after all.

Rumors of a treatment to the plague had swirled when it first began to spread. Rumors that after his mother's death at the hands of the disease, the prince had pulled in every medic in the kingdom and sequestered them away in the castle to find a way to cure it.

None of us knew if it was true, but there had been no bodies carried out of Castle Auretras to the graveyards in months, and since those had filled, no one to the incinerators either.

If only we could get past those walls, those gilded walls, covered in iron and tipped in golden spikes. If only we could get into the castle… Our people could live, and yet the prince sat, hiding away from his own kingdom, refusing to take the throne and instead letting us die. Watching the prince die would be my only wish for the rest of my life.

Perhaps that was why I'd survived the plague, so that I could live long enough to see the prince die. One could only hope.

The front door opening and closing softly pulled me out of my silent rage, though I didn't rise to go meet my brother. Eventually, Emyl shuffled into the kitchen, his eyes red-rimmed and glassy. I bit my tongue hard to keep from saying anything about his choice to drown his sorrow in alcohol.

"I was not expecting you to still be awake," he muttered, falling into the chair across the table from me.

Still holding my tongue between my teeth, I merely turned my head back towards the window, ducking down to ensure he followed my gaze before meeting his eyes once more.

His head cocked for a moment, and then understanding washed over him as the noise finally filtered through the window. "Ah."

"There is supper, if you're hungry." Those words were safe, at least, and my tone was surprisingly even despite the churning in my soul. Their approval was all I'd ever wanted, their friendship, their affection. But I'd long ago resigned myself to the truth: they would only ever see me as a caretaker, and not their preferred one.

I turned my gaze back to the window, trying to avoid looking at his reflection in the glass over my shoulder. "Rhyon did not eat. If you would try to take him some, perhaps he'll eat for you."

A heartbeat passed, and in the window I saw his fists clench at his sides before they relaxed. He crossed his arms, huffing as he slid down into his chair. For all the anger his body language exuded, his voice was softer than I'd expected. "I am sorry for leaving like that, Odyssa. This situation…" He shook his head. "I'm just so angry ."

"And you think I'm not?" Finally, I turned back around, resting my chin on my knee as I looked at him. "I am angry every minute of every day, but Mother asked me to care for you both, to protect you both. And if that means letting Rhyon get out his anger here rather than in public, then so be it."

Emyl's shoulders slumped as he ran a hand through his unruly hair, dark like mine, but wildly curly like our mother's had been. "He does not mean it, you know. Like you say, he is angry, too, but he hasn't learned to manage his emotions yet. Not like we have."

I snorted. What a delusion. "Are we? Managing our emotions, Emyl?"

His huff of laughter was a better response than I'd hoped for.

Silence fell once more, blanketing the room until Emyl shifted his weight, frowning as he raised his chin. "What will we do now that Mother is gone? What do we do?"

The slight smile I'd managed to muster slipped from my lips along with a heavy sigh. The weight that had lessened some with my brother's laughter had returned, pressing down atop my shoulders even heavier than before. He would not like my answer—hence why I had yet to bring up the topic myself.

"Mama and I went through all the records when she fell ill, as a precaution. You know I'd been helping her already, managing the house and contributing what money I could from cleaning for others, but even I wasn't privy to all of what she did here." He straightened at that, standing and moving to the door frame, and crossed his arms again. I pressed on, the muscles of my neck tightening as the next words fell from my tongue, oily and bitter. "There won't be enough money to keep us all alive for long. You will need to find a job to help us make ends meet. Even if I begin cleaning full time, even if I could find someone willing to hire full-time help, there just be won't enough to cover the expenses for the three of us for longer than a month. Perhaps two if we truly stretched every coin."

Stone would have been more expressive than Emyl in that moment. His jaw clenched and unclenched, as if he were chewing on the words he was about to speak but he never did. I could feel his anger building, pulsing out from his body as though it were a separate being. It was in the flush across his cheeks and the way the vein running down the side of his temple throbbed.

"I am sorry, Emyl," I whispered. His anger was about to explode, ready to rip through the walls of the house and tear into flesh. It was palpable, but if we wanted to stay in this house, to keep food in our bellies, I needed him to take some responsibility and help me provide for our family.

"What about our inheritances? I know Father left money for Rhyon and me before he left us." His voice was deceptively steady, the calm before the storm. It was only a matter of time before his walls broke down. He had never been good about containing the anger—had never had to be. Twenty years old and he had never been forced to work a day in his life, while I'd been working myself to the bone in one way or another since I'd turned eight and he was born. His nostrils flared. "Can that not sustain us longer while you work more to replenish it?"

I wasn't sure whether the feeling bubbling up in my chest was a laugh or a sob, but I swallowed it down regardless. My own walls were trembling under the weight of my anger and fear, but if we wanted to live, I needed to be honest. We would weather the storm after. "It might keep us alive for a few months more if we manage it carefully, but it isn't as much as we were led to believe."

"We? That money is Rhyon's and my own. You have no claim to it, Odyssa."

My own anger spilled out before I could stop it, the first time it had truly been directed at my brother. "So, I am to work myself to the bone and then come home and cook and clean for you, while you sit here and drink yourself into oblivion off the coin of some man who did not even care enough about either of you to stay?"

"I do not need a job, Odyssa." His voice was like ice. "You do. And you can leave the house to find one, seeing as you have already survived the plague."

"If you are willing to risk your life, Rhyon's life, so you can go out and drink, you can surely risk it to go work so we can feed and clothe him." I took a deep breath. It scraped against my throat and burned my lungs. "That money will only last you two three months at best. What will you do after?"

"Get a better job, Odyssa, and do not worry about what Rhyon and I do with our money," he said, narrowing his eyes. "I have better things to spend that money on than giving you charity. Be glad I am letting you stay in the house at all."

My anger was building in my chest, spreading like fire through my veins. The Death marks along my neck throbbed in time with my heartbeat. "I was born in this house, Emyl. Long before you. I have as much a claim to the house itself as you. Even if you wanted to, you could not evict me from it."

He stared at me, and the venom in his eyes communicated plenty what he thought of my words.

"You would truly let your family suffer and starve, just to avoid putting in an honest day's work? What were you expecting to do for the rest of your life?" The tendrils of fury were escaping the cage of my body, and I feared it would erupt if this continued a moment longer. My Death marks throbbed against my skin to the beat of my thundering heart.

"I guess we'll never know now, will we?" He made his way back to the front door, pulling on his coat once more. "Either find a better job or be looking for a second one, Odyssa. It really is the least you could do after letting our mother die. Don't bother waiting up—I don't know when I'll return."

It was a small mercy that he did not slam the door this time either.

I stood, fingers wrapping around the vase that sat in the middle of the kitchen table, and flung it across the room with a shout, letting all my anger fly with the ceramic that then shattered against the wall and fell to the floor.

Both of them believed I'd killed our mother. And perhaps I had. Perhaps she had caught the blood plague from delivering food to the last family, and it did spread by touch. Perhaps I had been the one to send my mother to her deathbed by asking her to take it instead of me, for begging off the work due to another bout of fever-induced vertigo. We would never know for sure, but just like every other family in Veressia, we had no choice but to move on, to keep living for those left behind.

But I knew, without a shadow of doubt in my soul, that if my mother were still alive, that if she had been the one to ask Emyl to help us with money and told him to get a job, that he would not have refused her.

But I also knew she would never have asked him in the first place. She would have looked to me to help her make ends meet, whatever the cost to our own souls.

Was I weaker than my mother, that I could not make ends meet without asking my siblings to assist?

My mother had loved us all dearly, in her own way, but perhaps she'd done us all a disservice by shielding them from the world. And perhaps I'd continued it by shielding my brothers alongside her.

Breathing hard, I pushed my hands through my hair. My brother would truly rather drink himself stupid than help us survive, and there was nothing I could do to convince him otherwise. Not now. We'd failed him, failed to impose any sense of responsibility in him, any sense of family. He'd always been able to do what he wished, and I feared there was nothing I could do now to fix that. I could only hope Rhyon would not fall victim to Emyl's selfishness.

My hands balled into fists, blood singing with bottled fury. I itched to hit something, to feel something else break, to destroy. But instead, I fell to the ground and buried my face in my hands. And I cried for the first time in years.

Not even a full day had passed since I'd wrapped my mother's corpse, and I was already failing her. My chest felt tight, like a vise had wrapped around my ribs and squeezed. Tears dripped down my cheeks, running over my lips and filling my mouth with salt.

There was nothing I could do now except hope that Emyl would somehow come around on his own.

I let myself cry a moment longer, and then I dried my own tears and picked myself up.

Alone in a world that was quickly dying and alone in a home that felt like a tomb, I knew no one would help me any longer—I needed to do it myself.