Chapter 32

Hurt.

Everything hurt.

Her thoughts were lances of pain, her breaths ragged rips in the fabric of her consciousness. Her ears rang with a high-pitched whine. Her skin …

Her skin felt like it was no longer there at all. As if the surface of her body was a single, all-consuming wound, raw and agonising.

A voice was talking.

She struggled to make out the words. Alive , they were saying. Rooms , they were saying. Healer … not just blue … lucky she’s breathing …

Hands touched her body, and everything became a thousand times worse.

‘Sashka!’ someone cried.

She clung to that voice. A good voice. A voice that shouldn’t be there at all, even though she did not remember why it couldn’t be.

‘Sashka, I’m so sorry …’

The pain subsided, and she was gone again.

Sunset. Bed. Soft … soft blankets.

Sobbing.

Someone was sobbing.

Pain came and went, in pulsing, irregular flares. Like the sputtering of a dying flame. Like falling asleep but jerking awake again, over and over and …

‘Naxi,’ a voice was saying.

She knew who it belonged to. She just couldn’t remember, couldn’t make sense of him here, by her bed, in the sunset. More than anything, it seemed a voice that ought to hate her.

‘Naxi,’ it said again.

More muffled sobs. Other voices were speaking in the distance. Thysandra tried to move her head and couldn’t decide what side of her body it was on.

‘Naxi, I’ve got her. You can let go. I’ve got …’

The pain died away again.

Her mouth was dry as parched leather.

But she blinked her eyes open, and her mind was strangely, weightlessly clear – a spring morning sort of feeling, as if the dew was still sparkling on her thoughts.

She was in her own bedroom. In her own bed. Plants smiled back at her from the walls and the ceiling. She no longer hurt, and her breath was slow, her skin smooth and unharmed; all her limbs were where they ought to be, moving at her command. The damaged blue dress she’d been wearing was gone, and instead a soft white nightgown had been tucked around her body.

A glass of water stood on the nightstand. She gulped it all down in a single swig.

Better.

What next?

Swinging her legs out of bed was an experiment. The rug was incomprehensibly fluffy against her toes, as if her feet had never touched anything like it before – and then she stood, warily, tentatively, and her legs held even as she turned and twisted to test her balance. When she didn’t fall, she took her first step forward. Her knees didn’t buckle.

From the living room, voices emerged.

Naxi .

A faint memory of bitter sobs rose in her mind, and all at once, her head was no longer so blissfully quiet.

She stumbled around to find her familiar green dressing gown, with awkward, clumsy motions, as if she was moving in a tangible body for the very first time. It wasn’t Naxi’s voice coming from behind the door, she realised only moments later. Still, it took her two more staggering steps to identify the person who was speaking—

‘… told an actual god to stop fucking around?’

Emelin.

In her living room.

Sounding blissfully unconcerned, that rather puzzling question laced with barely suppressed laughter.

‘Look, someone had to do it,’ a voice she recognised as Agenor’s said, sounding wryly amused, and at once matters began making rather more sense. ‘And either way, he ended up rather agreeing with me, which solved the matter far more easily than the diplomatic approach would have done.’

Emelin’s laughter, again. ‘And this was around the end of the Conquest, yes? So you—’

Thysandra opened the door.

Their voices abruptly went quiet.

They were sitting on her couch together, father and daughter – Agenor lounging in the velvet cushions with his sleeves rolled up and a black snake curling affectionately around his shoulder, Emelin with her legs pulled to her chest, snacking on berries from a bowl she was balancing on top of her bare knees. No trace of Naxi. No trace of anyone else, either – but the collection of used glasses on the low table suggested more than just these two had entered her rooms during the however many days Thysandra had been out.

She should care about that.

The problem was there were about seventeen things she cared about more at this particular moment.

‘What …’ she began, and then she no longer knew how to continue, staring at the High Lady of the Cobalt Court and the High Lord of the Golden Court exchanging stories of divine shenanigans on her couch.

‘You’re awake!’ The sunny smile Emelin sent her seemed unnervingly genuine, the relief in her voice equally so. ‘How are you feeling?’

Bewildered .

It wasn’t even true, or at least, it wasn’t the full truth. It felt like she’d skipped half a century – like she’d stepped through some mysterious portal and ended up in a world that looked like hers, smelled like hers, sounded like hers, but was nonetheless entirely and essentially different from the one she’d walked all her life.

How are you feeling?

They were looking at her like the answer mattered to them.

‘Where …’ Her voice was a dry croak. ‘Where is Naxi?’

‘She’s fine.’ Emelin put her berries aside, hopped off the couch, and made for the kitchen corner as if she’d lived in these rooms for years. ‘Creon took her down to the pavilion. She was drained to the point where she couldn’t shield herself from the emotions of the court anymore, so we figured some distance would be helpful.’

Creon.

That was Creon’s voice she’d heard in her half-dead delirium.

‘Oh,’ she stammered.

‘Take a seat,’ Agenor said, his smile faint but reassuring. It’s all under control , that smile said. No need to worry . ‘You’ve been out for five days. Before you start dashing around the place again, I suggest you at least eat something.’

Five days?

Good gods.

She dropped into the armchair, head spinning. Agenor’s snake idly slithered down over his arms, into his lap. From the kitchen came the sound of boiling water and a cloth bag opening; Emelin reappeared a moment later with a steaming mug of sharp-smelling ginger tea and two buttered sesame buns on a plate.

Tea.

Poison.

She stammered, ‘Nicanor …’

‘Has been duly disposed of,’ Agenor said wryly, lifting his snake back onto his shoulder before it could slip down onto the floor. ‘The Labyrinth burned him to an impressively charred crisp. Most of them, really.’

That flash of white.

A shiver ran through her. ‘And I—’

‘It seems to have made an attempt to spare you,’ Emelin said as she plunked herself back onto the couch and folded up her legs again. ‘It’s considerate like that. You still took some damage, though.’

‘I … yes.’ Thysandra tried a grin. ‘I noticed.’

Agenor was polite enough to chuckle at that feeble excuse for a joke.

The two of them were silent as she cautiously chewed on a sesame bun – a silence that wasn’t impatient or awkward, somehow, but just was . Five days. How much of that time had they spent by her bedside together, waiting for her to wake up?

How many others had sat here in their place, watching over her?

‘Did anyone else …’ She faltered. It felt like arrogance to even ask the question – to presume anyone had cared that much. ‘Was anyone else … here?’

‘Not the alves,’ Emelin said with a one-shouldered shrug, nodding at the door. ‘They thought you wouldn’t be too happy about it, them being able to fade into the room. Or was that not what you meant?’

It was not.

Her eyes started stinging a little all the same, though.

‘No – no, I meant …’ She had to swallow to get rid of the catch in her throat. ‘Are they alright? Silas and Inga and … and …’

Not Gadyon.

It would take a while for her to accept that failure.

Oh, Silas and Inga are quite well.’ Something about Agenor’s smile was more amused than she’d expected. ‘Silas spent the last couple of days purging the court of a few more aspiring usurpers. Speaking of which – I’m well aware you could probably do without my unsolicited advice on the matter, but from the perspective of someone who’s held the position for a while, if you are looking for a new Lord Protector …’

She glared at him over her plate.

Emelin sniggered by her father’s side.

Another comfortable silence ensued. The black snake familiar continued its attempts to be everywhere but on Agenor’s shoulders. Emelin continued her snacking. Outside, beyond the vine-framed windows, the sunlight sparkled on the azure sea, not an army or rebellious mob in sight.

Thysandra had never seen the Crimson Court quite so close to peaceful .

Or perhaps … perhaps it was not the court that was different. Perhaps it was rather that she had never watched the island with even half of the strangely serene calm stealing over her now. No alves in her rooms. No traitors in her halls. The worst had come to pass, yet somehow, somehow , those who ought to have deserted her hadn’t – Silas and his bargains, Inga and her clerks. And Naxi—

Naxi and her Labyrinth.

Would it be too mad to take off for the pavilion the moment she’d finished her breakfast and just hope her wings would handle the flight?

But as she put down her plate, as she opened her mouth to announce it was time for her to put on some decent clothes and leave, Agenor unexpectedly cleared his throat and said, ‘One more thing, Thys.’

He suddenly sounded more serious – almost grave .

Coming from most other people, that would hardly have been a cause for alarm. Agenor, on the other hand, had never in her lifetime turned grave unless the situation truly called for it, and her heart thudded accordingly as she fell back into her armchair. ‘What is it?’

He hesitated.

‘It’s about your father,’ Emelin said in his stead.

The world stood still for a moment.

She expected the hounds to howl – was already bracing for them to begin their ceaseless baying in the pits of her mind. Instead … there was silence. Not a single snapping bone reverberating through her thoughts. Not a single whisper of his breaking voice – Thysandra!

As if all these years, he had only been shouting, begging , for her to open her eyes and finally see the truth.

Traitor’s daughter.

She understood it now.

It had never been an insult in the first place.

‘Did you …’ She drew in a shaky breath. ‘Did you find anything?’

‘It’s not entirely pleasant,’ Agenor said tightly, which from his lips she knew to be code for you might lie awake for months because of this. ‘I just wanted to let you know that we found some answers, so you can tell us when you feel strong enough to—’

‘What did you find?’ Her voice had sharpened. ‘Tell me what you found.’

He closed his eyes.

Emelin dryly said, ‘Told you.’

Agenor’s muffled curse suggested that she had indeed, and likely more than once. Rubbing his face, he tensely said, ‘Thys, you spent the past five days on the brink of death. Even if you feel much better, you—’

With an eyeroll, Emelin leaned over him, nudged a hissing snake aside, and grabbed a leather folder off the floor by his feet.

‘Ignore him,’ she said with an oddly understanding nod as she handed it to Thysandra. ‘He doesn’t know what missing fathers are like.’

Agenor’s next curse suggested that argument had come up before, too.

‘Right,’ Thysandra weakly said. ‘Thank you. ’

‘Thought Creon was the ruthless one,’ Agenor muttered under his breath as his daughter moved back into her seat, and she elbowed him in the wing hard enough that he winced a little.

The folder wasn’t heavy. When Thysandra untied the strings and opened it, she found only a handful of documents inside, the faded ink revealing their age. One of them had been torn in two; it was only when she held the pieces together that she realised what it was.

A birth certificate.

Cythera of Cyrigon’s house .

‘Your mother’s.’ Agenor’s voice seemed strangely distant. ‘That is the state I found it in among the administrative documents we took from the court.’

‘Why …’ The torn edges shook in her hand. ‘Why in the world would the Mother have this in her personal files? Why not just keep it with the other certificates in the archives?’

He sighed. ‘Read on.’

The next piece of parchment – she had to blink and blink again to be sure she wasn’t going mad – was an academy report. Odder still, one her academy reports. Name scribbled at the top, in a meticulous teacher’s hand: Thysandra of Echion’s house, Spring 2836 .

She’d been twelve years old.

This had to be her very first quarter at the academy.

Her grades had been excellent. Ridiculously excellent. Straight 5’s all the way down, and for magic – the last on the list – a teacher had jokingly put down a 6, accompanied by a quick note on extraordinary talent. Of course it had been presented to the Mother. Promising students were always brought to her attention.

It had been a while since Thysandra had seen a report this excellent, though. Excellent enough that it seemed it had to belong to someone else.

‘I— I don’t understand—’

‘Read on,’ Agenor quietly said.

The last piece of parchment was a letter. She opened it as if a deadly scorpion might fall out from between the folds of the yellowed sheet.

Your Majesty , it started.

It is a hallmark of my high esteem for you that I can even find it in myself to reply to your proposal with more than a simple “no”.

Some, I presume, might have felt grateful for earning the honour of your royal preference. I am regrettably not one of them. The notion that I would abandon the love of my life, the mother of my child, to serve as a stud horse for the propagation of your bloodline is little short of an insult. I understand the offer was not made to be refused, but even so, I do.

I trust I need not elaborate further on the matter, though I am quite capable of doing so should the need arise.

Otherwise ever your faithful servant,

Echion

She stared at it.

She stared at it for so long the letters bled together on the parchment.

‘In hindsight,’ Agenor said, so softly, so gently that she barely recognised his voice, ‘I should have been able to put the pieces of the puzzle together long before finding this particular piece of correspondence.’

Pieces.

Her grades.

Stud horse.

She couldn’t breathe.

‘You did cause somewhat of a ripple during your first months at the academy. I’m not sure if I ever told you that.’ He hesitated. ‘The War of the Gods had ended only a few decades before you were born. There was this sense of excitement at the court, the notion of faekind being stronger than even the gods themselves, and then there was you – daughter of two extraordinarily powerful mages, the most powerful child born in quite a while. In a way, I suppose people saw you as a symbol of that new era of fae supremacy.’

Vaguely, Thysandra was aware of the disgusted sound emerging from Emelin’s direction.

If she’d been able to speak, she might have agreed .

‘So, looking back …’ Agenor slowly drew in a breath. ‘I suppose your existence may have given Achlys and Melino? the idea to have children of their own again. New world, new power, new players on the stage. They were the most powerful creature in the world at the time. A loyal lineage would have cemented that power.’

‘And … and so …’

‘Well, Echion had already shown he was capable of begetting exceptionally talented offspring.’ A bitter chuckle. ‘Why mess with a proven formula?’

I did something entirely ill-advised, her father had told Silas. It may well be the end of me, and I won’t regret it for a moment.

Her hands were shaking.

‘And so she killed him,’ she breathed.

Agenor was silent.

‘But … but she couldn’t tell the world he’d rejected her. Of course.’ A manic laugh rose from her throat. ‘So she branded him a traitor instead?’

‘To their mind, he might have been,’ Agenor muttered – and she was standing on that walkway by the training fields again, wounded, hurting, and surer of herself than she’d been in her entire life.

A traitor to you, maybe.

But not …

‘But not to his heart,’ she whispered, staring at the letter in her hands.

Neither of them replied. When she looked up, finally, she found them still sitting side by side on her couch, watching her with eerily similar expressions – resignation, quiet anger, sympathy . Weakness, she would have thought once, to be sympathised with. Now all she could do was sink into it – let it wrap around her like the comforting softness of clean, warm, downy blankets.

‘And my mother?’ she said numbly.

Agenor looked at Emelin.

Emelin cocked her head. ‘You still don’t remember?’

Didn’ t she?

The hounds kept quiet. Her father’s screams did not return. But even without them, there was no penetrating that blank hole in her memory – that hollow that should not be hollow at all.

She swallowed. ‘I … I can’t.’

‘Alright.’ Suddenly the girl opposite her no longer looked so young – barely two decades of life behind her, but she planted her feet onto the floor and leaned forward with the air of a scholar presenting centuries of painstaking research. ‘What Naxi told Tared – to pass on to me – is that your attempts to remember your mother’s fate felt a damn lot like my darling father’s attempts to remember what had happened around the day of Korok’s death. In that case, it turned out to be a binding-locked memory. We suspect the same might be true for you.’

Thysandra blinked. Then blinked again, at Agenor this time, and feebly said, ‘She locked your memories?’

‘Oh, yes.’ A mirthless smile. ‘Of that time I tried to kill them.’

Her jaw sagged open.

‘He surpasses all expectations, doesn’t he?’ Emelin cheerfully said.

‘You …’ She shook her head, as if that would make the facts suddenly fall into place. ‘ You tried to kill her?’

‘After they blew up Korok to win the War of the Gods and sent most of the continent with him to hell. Yes.’ It turned out the smile on Agenor’s face could turn even bleaker. ‘Didn’t succeed, of course. They took away both my memory of the attempt and my memory of the events that had driven me to try in the first place, and I spent the next couple of hundred years having no fucking clue.’

Gods have mercy.

‘But she didn’t throw you to the hounds,’ she said weakly.

He grimaced. ‘No. Apparently rejection is a significantly more severe crime than the occasional murder attempt.’

She hated how much sense that made.

‘Anyway,’ Emelin interjected, with a pointedness that suggested she knew damn well that some members of the company might object to the words she was about to speak, ‘we did find your binding in the halls of the Cobalt Court. I brought it with me, just in case.’

Agenor closed his eyes .

‘You have it here ?’ Thysandra stammered, gaze shooting to the linen bag by the girl’s feet. It didn’t look like it contained any fragile crystal orbs. ‘How did you—’

The object Emelin retrieved from her bag was not a fragile crystal orb.

A small, cubic piece of stone. A pebble, almost. It took a moment to make sense of it – yellow for change , and if the bindings had once been changed from humble pens into those glittering orbs that had been stored in the Cobalt Court, there was no magical law that said they could not be changed back into something sturdier again.

‘For full transparency’s sake,’ Emelin said as she cautiously placed the stone cube between the glasses on the table, ‘I believe I’m supposed to tell you it’s bloody unpleasant, getting hours of memories planted back into your mind in a matter of seconds, and also, that the memories themselves are likely not the most uplifting of—’

‘Give them to me,’ Thysandra hoarsely interrupted. ‘Please.’

Agenor let out a small, exasperated whimper.

Emelin, on the other hand, didn’t bat an eye. ‘Would you mind giving me an iridescent surface of some kind? I can’t change textures anymore.’

Something to do with godsworn magic – Thysandra was too numb to ask. With a single flicker of yellow from her dark green robe, the table surface turned into shimmering mother-of-pearl; in contrast, the little stone binding looked even darker, even more foreboding.

Emelin’s fingertips touched the tabletop.

Her right hand made a small, sweeping motion – as if to usher something out of the way that only she could see .

And—

It’s dark. It’s quiet. It’s far past her usual bedtime, and she’s never seen the island so still before, no lights burning anywhere around the court.

‘We need to be very quiet,’ her favourite voice in the world says.

Mother has said that five times already tonight.

Thysandra doesn’t understand. Mother has been crying. She pretends she hasn’t, but she has. Father isn’t here at all. He left after dinner, but first he held Mother longer than Thysandra ever saw him do before.

It’s a surprise, they’ve said. It’s a secret. It’ll all be fine, promise.

So she doesn’t ask as they fly, faster than she’s ever flown.

There’s only sea beneath them. So much water, all of it dark in the moonlight. There are no birds. No breeze. Just Mother and the stars, and they fly and fly and fly.

Then she hears them.

Shouts behind her.

Mother whirls around. ‘No,’ she gasps, and something in her voice doesn’t sound like it’ll all be fine at all. It sounds like nothing will ever be fine again.

Thysandra wants to look, but Mother has already grabbed her by the arm. And now she’s being pulled along, faster and faster through the dark, voices shouting behind them. She wants to cry, but she can barely breathe, so fast are they flying. Someone is shouting Mother’s name.

‘Fly on,’ Mother says, and she lets go of Thysandra’s wrist. ‘Fly as hard as you can. Straight ahead, no looking back, all the way to Ilithia. Uncle Silas will be waiting for you.’

Thysandra has flown to Ilithia before, but never on her own. She says, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t need to understand. Fly, Thys. Fly! ’

Mother is crying.

Thysandra doesn’t understand. But she flies.

The ocean is so very large beneath her, and she’s so very small. Her wings are so very tired. She doesn’t look back, but she can see the reflection of colours on the waves beneath her – red, so much red. Red isn’t good. Master Hyras said she has to be very careful with it, and the people behind her are not being careful at all.

Something falls into the sea. She hears the splash.

Still, she flies.

‘The girl!’ a voice yells behind her. Ophion’s voice. Father never says it, but he doesn’t like Ophion at all. ‘The Mother wants the girl! ’

There’s even more red.

Mother’s voice shouts, ‘Not my daughter! Not my—’

And then there’s a sound Thysandra has never heard before. It’s a gurgle. It’s a sob. It isn’t loud, and yet she hears it as if it’s coming from right behind her, as if for a single terrible moment, the entire night is full of it.

She looks back.

The darkness is full of wings, their movements blurs of grey in the moonlight. Beneath them, a single winged shape is falling. Falling. Falling. Like a broken butterfly, wings not even moving – wide and golden, the most beautiful wings Thysandra has ever seen.

There’s a splash, and then she’s gone.

Thysandra doesn’t fly anymore.

They take her easily, and she doesn’t even care.

‘Thys.’

A hand nudged her cheek. A voice pulled at her consciousness like a thread tugging at a seam.

‘Thys, come back.’

With a gasp, her eyes flew open.

Plants. Couch. Wall. Her own rooms, yet it took her a moment to recall who she even was – some creature ages away from that night, that moon, that deadly dark. The smell of fresh tea hadn’t been there, that night. The brush of linen and silk on her skin. All signs of here, of now , and yet each of them felt more like a figment of her imagination than that pair of wings still falling in her mind’s eye.

Tumbling and tumbling. A plummet that had lasted four hundred years already.

‘Thys?’

‘Bowl,’ she choked, and then she was vomiting, barely noticing the zinc bowl that was slipped into her lap with suspicious speed. There was little left inside her to throw up at all. Bits and pieces of two sesame buns, and then all that followed was sour bile and that sensation of mind-numbing terror – of a fear she’d forgotten but still felt, soaked into places of her that were more than memory alone.

‘You’ll be glad to know I did the exact same thing,’ Agenor said wryly, his hand holding her shoulder steady as she retched and retched again. ‘We came prepared.’

The girl.

The Mother wants the girl.

‘Please tell me …’ She gagged, gasped in a breath. ‘Please tell me Ophion suffered terribly as he died?’

‘Oh, he did,’ Emelin grimly said.

‘Good,’ she heaved, and then she threw up again.

It seemed to take ages until her stomach finally calmed, until the images finally settled into the hollows in her memory. Hands pulled the vomit-filled bowl from under her. Someone carefully wiped her face with a warm, damp towel. She collapsed into the cushions of the armchair, eyes closed, body drained to the last drop, her mind feeling like the blood-soaked soil of Faewood.

Like a graveyard.

‘Just breathe,’ Agenor said, letting go of her shoulder.

That seemed like a decent suggestion. She decided to follow it.

Footsteps padded around her. A tap turned on and off again. Someone poured another mug of tea and pressed it into her hands, and she lifted it to her lips mechanically, the hot drink rinsing away the lingering taste of bile in her mouth.

Fly, Thys!

And she had never known.

Was that why the Mother had taken that memory but left her father’s execution as a warning to remember? No way of twisting their desperate flight into an act of treason. No way to turn her mother’s sacrifice into the act of a self-serving coward. The Mother wants the girl , Ophion had shouted – a simple but all-revealing truth, no reason for all that cruelty except for vicious, petty jealousy.

And the Mother had gotten her girl.

An almost-daughter of her own, the second-best thing to fill the time as she continued her quest for the true prize of her heart – only to discard that first hard-won child as soon as her coveted blood-born son arrived.

Traitor’s daughter.

Fuck, and she was glad of it.

‘Did she know?’ The words emerged in a croak. ‘Did she know I talked before she died?’

‘She told us to spare her if we ever wanted to see the bindings broken,’ Emelin said immediately, no questions or hesitation, as if these were perfectly normal things to ask. ‘It didn’t seem to occur to her that she wasn’t the only one who could share the information, and she found out she was wrong before I slit her throat.’

It didn’t make anything better.

It did make everything just a little less bad, though.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘Thank you so much. I … I’d like to be alone, now.’

A glass thudded onto a tabletop.

A snake hissed as it was picked up from the floor.

When she opened her eyes, an eternity later, they were both gone, having closed the door quietly behind them. Only their glasses were left on the mother-of-pearl table. Agenor’s leather folder lay on the floor beside her feet. Where Emelin had been sitting, the little stone binding lay discarded on the couch, stripped of all its vicious power.

By the window, the plate-sized begonias pulsed gently in the sunlight.

Thysandra’s mind was entirely her own.