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Right.
‘Very clever,’ I numbly said, because this seemed an inopportune moment to teach my familiar about the intricacies of human procreation, and either way, I just wanted her to stop chirping at me so shrilly. ‘Look, could you fly back to the others and let them know I’m still alive? I’ll probably be back with them within … well, soon.’
Alyra either didn’t notice the hint of defeat or didn’t care about it; she hopped up and down once more on her improvised perch, waiting patiently. I reached below my skirt, clumsily untied one of the ribbons that held my dagger in place, and handed it over.
She snatched it from my fingers and took off, soaring out of the open window with a cry of goodbye.
‘Don’t see a snake doing that anytime soon,’ Rosalind dryly said as I shut the panes.
I managed to choke out a laugh. When I turned back around, she had sat down on one side of the moss-green couch with her cup of tea in her lap, the other half of the seat conspicuously empty – as close to an invitation as one could get. It would be so very easy to sit down beside her, to curl against that lithe, frail body and find out if her scent was still familiar to me …
My legs didn’t move.
‘You didn’t tell me.’ It was easier to speak now that Alyra had reminded me how to move my tongue. The accusation in the words was unintentional, though. ‘Why didn’t you tell me the moment I walked into the White Hall? Was there some test I needed to pass before you—’
‘No!’ Her voice shot up. ‘Please, Em. None of that. I just … well …’
A small silence. She sat fidgeting with her mug, lips hesitating around three, four versions of whatever she was about to say.
‘I just wanted to be sure I could trust you,’ she finally finished, quietly.
‘Trustme?’
‘Or more specifically, that I could trust Agenor.’ A joyless laugh. ‘And since he found you first … Well, I figured I should first find out what gamehehad been playing in the past two decades.’
Because she knew as well as I did that my father was usually playingsomesort of game. It was unnerving, for this almost-stranger to understand so much of me, so much of my history; it made me feel like my mind was running twenty years behind hers.
‘You considered the possibility that he might be manipulating me?’ I said slowly.
‘I considered many things.’ She briefly closed her eyes, running a slender fingertip over her temple. ‘He— You know what, let’s start at the beginning. I suppose he gave you a rough outline of what happened, those months before you were born?’
I grimaced. ‘You stole his stuff and called him an idiot, he found out hewasan idiot, and then things escalated?’
She burst out laughing. ‘Concise yet accurate. Anything else?’
‘He told me the Mother lured him away and arrested you. And then you bargained with her and outsmarted her, and because the bargain forced her to keep you alive, she had to keep Agenor away for a while and put him in chains – is that all correct?’
‘Well, the last part is new to me,’ she said wryly, ‘but otherwise, yes.’
I stared at her.
She took a sip of tea, grimacing at the heat, and added, ‘The Mother was not so charitable, of course, as to explain to mewhyI suddenly found myself abandoned at the heart of a failed resistance effort with a child due in five weeks.’
‘You didn’t know?’ It came out hoarse. ‘Before I told you yesterday that she’d kept him captive, you didn’tknow…’
‘Well.’ A painful smile. ‘No.’
I realised a moment too late my jaw had started sagging.
‘I wasn’t even sure whether he was alive when she banished me after you were born,’ Rosalind added, staring at the whirling steam over her mug. ‘Or when I dropped myself off that ship with a large wooden shutter at night and swam to the nearest island. But by the time I arrived on Furja and found out that my father and little brothers had been killed years ago, the only news I managed to scrounge also said Agenor was back at the Crimson Court and by all accounts still obligingly serving the Mother. So …’ She looked up at me, raw hurt in her eyes. ‘I knew he wouldn’t have been able to actively betray me – that our bargain wouldn’t have allowed him to. But I did strongly consider that he might deliberately have looked away while the Mother went after me, yes.’
I staggered my way through the three steps to the dinner table, sinking into a chair with wobbly legs. ‘So that’s why you never sent word to him? Even though you were technically safe here?’
‘I was,’ she said, voice strained. ‘You weren’t.’
Something violently clenched in my throat.
‘I had no idea where you’d gone, you understand?’ The tremble was unmistakable now. ‘I didn’t even know whether you’d been smuggled out by humans or magical beings. The only reason I agreed to it was because the alternative was you staying in that hell for the rest of your life, and I couldn’t … Icouldn’t—’
