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‘I know.’ A mirthless smile spread over his face. ‘You would have spared a lot of people a lot of trouble if you had, frankly.’
She lurched forward.
Lyn cried out. Naxi shrieked. Tared and I jumped at the same time, each of us catching another muscular shoulder; still, it took all of our combined strength to drag her away from Creon, backto her chair, as she swore and spat threats at him. Only as we hauled her into her seat did she give up on struggling. Her curses blurred into gasps as she folded over, then into sobs – quiet, heart-rending whimpers that once again almost made me forget about the fragile glass of that binding shattering on the rocks.
A traitor’s daughter.
How many years had she slaved to free herself from that blemish?
‘Perhaps,’ Naxi said, innocently fluttering her eyelashes at us as she finally jumped up, ‘this would be a good moment for me to have a word with Thysandra?’
Only then did it hit me.
Zera have mercy –thiswas what she’d been planning to happen, wasn’t it?
But you had been very explicitly abandoned, I'd said to Creon mere days ago, just before handing Naxi the keys to cell 104. She must have come to the same conclusion since, over the course of whatever conversations had taken place. She must have realised she wasn’t getting anywhere as long as Thysandra believed the Mother was impatiently waiting for her, expecting the return of a loyal servant. And so, with characteristic ruthlessness …
She’d staged the abandonment she needed. Using us as her unwitting accomplices, hiding her true intentions to make us play our roles with full authenticity.
Had Creon realised what she was aiming for, the moment she first made the suggestion of that bargain? Was that why he’d looked like a male bracing himself for the world to end – past hurt creeping back up on him?
‘Good gods,’ Lyn said with a shivery laugh, apparently coming to the same realisation. ‘If you think it will do any good at this point, have any conversation you like – but for the love of the gods,don’t—’
‘Oh, don't worry,’ Naxi purred, hooking her arm through Tared’s without waiting for further questions. ‘She's not going anywhere.’
The next moment, the three of them were gone, back to the Underground – taking the sound of Thysandra’s sobbing with them, and Naxi’s devilish smiles, too.
The day passed in a haze, yet seemed to last an eternity; by noon, I could have sworn I’d been awake for a full twenty-four hours already.
Yesterday, I hadn't stopped working because I didn't want to feel the fear. Today, I couldn't have stopped working even if I’d wanted to. There was no end to the list of people who, for some unimaginable reason, wished to have a word with me: humans begging me to save their loved ones, envoys from magical rulers who once again wanted my reassurance that it was possible for me to best the Mother, and most baffling of all, several handfuls of Underground alves who wanted to know if I had named my sword yet. I didn't have the heart to tell them that sword names were about the last problem on my list right now, but by the time number eleven showed up with the same question, my patience was wearing very, very thin.
I told him I was considering naming the blade Silence, after my greatest wish of the day. That seemed to get the message across.
Just after noon, the first magical armies started arriving, and that prompted a whole new wave of panicked questions. I spent an hour running around with Rosalind, trying to convince our human army that no vampire would be sneaking into theircamp for a midnight snack; then I wasted equally as much time calming down two vampire males who had been accosted by a number of stake-wielding humans. It was almost a relief when five hundred nymphs were faded onto the field next, giggly and sparkly and scantily dressed. Admittedly, the looks going back and forth between their division and some human men spelled trouble of an entirely different sort … but then again, it wasn’t my concern who would be sleeping in what tent tonight, and at least it seemed unlikely people would be complaining about this.
I was willing to overlook the most egregious violations of army discipline by that point, as long as no one bothered me about it.
While I was running myself ragged, Agenor, Lyn, and Tared spent most of their time in the big command tent, shuffling wooden figures across maps and appeasing the allied rulers stamping in with questions. Delwin was handing out weapons and armour whenever I came across him. Finn made herself useful with the horses, and Creon …
I wasn’t fully sure what Creon was doing.
The few times I caught a glimpse of him, he was talking to Agenor’s fae, an attentive look on their faces that suggested he was explaining something of urgent interest. But as far as I knew, there wasn't that much to explain, and most of the time he was nowhere to be found - not that unexpected, I tried to convince myself, for the male who had spent decades working entirely on his own and still struggled to cooperate with anyone.
Yet his absence became more and more striking as the hours went by. Because he may have had trouble working with others, but he’d never had trouble working withme. And he had to know there was plenty to do – so why wasn’t he here so we could do it together?
I spotted him again later that afternoon, talking with one of the newly arrived vampires on this occasion. But by the time I’d wrestled my way towards them through the throng, only thevampire was left where the two of them had been a moment before, and she couldn’t tell me where Creon had gone except that he had suddenly remembered he had something urgent to do.
Somethingurgent?
I stood dazed and confused on the trampled grass as the vampire female excused herself and strode off – but he hadn’t looked hurried at all, had he, when I’d caught sight of him a minute or two ago? And it was not at all like Creon to forget about anything urgent, not unless hewantedto spontaneously recall something at a convenient moment.
So if he had unexpectedly vanished just as I was approaching him …
Was heavoidingme?
That did not make sense in the slightest – not after the way he’d followed me into the forest that morning, ready to fight me if need be. But then there was that strange darkness on his face when Naxi had suggested her bargain, and the way he’d slipped off before I could ask him what was bothering him. What if the conversation with Thysandra had prodded more than unhappy memories of the day the Mother had revealed her true nature to his dying ears?
It didn’t sound logical at all. Then again, I couldn’t come up with any more logical explanations, either.
