That was my only thought.
No.He could only be sorry if it was someone I trusted.
Someone I cared for.
A quick mental tally told me that there was only one personleft, only one loved one who wasn’t dead or on the run or currently safe within the four walls of my tavern. Only one person I hadn’t seen in several days now.
No, no, no, no.The protest echoed in my head, keeping time with my too-quick pulse. But Caelan couldn’t hear my heartbeat, nor my thoughts, and I couldn’t stop him from saying the words aloud, from speaking the terrible, soul-destroying truth into existence.
“It’s Roy.”
Chapter Twelve
Beg to Differ
At first, I didn’t think I could bear it. Any of it. Everything that had happened in the last few weeks; all that I’d lost. Tanner, and Sorcha, and in an awful way that I couldn’t bring myself to examine, I knew I had lost Roy, too. The Roy I knew, at least.
At first, it was too much.
But as I had when my parents died, when Magnus left, I found day by day that I just – carried on. Because what other choice was there?
It didn’t hurt that the Kingsmen had yet to leave.Found, apparently, was not the same thing ascaught– Roy was still out there somewhere. Still believed to be within the borders of Stormsby.
And Caelan was still charged with bringing him back to Kingsborough.
The night that Sorcha left, he’d explained to me how Roy had been caught. The whole story that had been unravelling farbeyond the quiet walls ofThe Mage and Rose. The interviews they’d conducted across Stormsby - the interviews I’d been exempt from, for reasons I could only guess at – they had been so much more extensive than I realised. Roy was not a Stormsby native, that much was common knowledge. What I did not realise was that he’d bought his farm just a year after the Serpent’s escape. That, alone, had not been enough to implicate him, but Caelan had been circling him for a while. His name just kept coming up until finally, upon Johnny McAlpine’s death, his solicitor revealed that he’d been engaged in a land dispute with his neighbour – Roy.
And of course, Roy had been seen arguing with Tanner on that fateful Yule evening that now seemed a distant nightmare.
I remembered it, too. I’d thought nothing of it; Tanner had been gambling, and Roy had been furious with him. At the time, we’d assumed it was because he knew his friend’s past troubles. Now it looked as though he’d been fearful of Tanner calling the Kingsmen’s attention when Roy was so closely entwined in his life.
It made sense, if Imademyself see it that way, but my mind fought to reject the idea. Thrashed against it in the same way my Flame would thrash beneath my skin, desperate for escape. I wanted to escape this reality.
I think Caelan could tell, too, because it was in a rare moment of transparency when it came to the hunt that he had handed me the one piece of irrefutable evidence he had. Handed it to me figuratively, at least. Roy’s letter of confession, discovered in his empty farmhouse, was highly classified and had already been sent via messenger, with an escort of soldiers, to the King. All I had were its contents, told secondhand to me by the Captain. How Roy had moved to sleepy, dreary Stormsby, and hidden here for years. How he’d killed Tanner in the heat of an argument, and it had nearly broken him. How Johnny McAlpine had caught him out in the forgery of some legal document, and threatened to turn him in. To hear Caelan tell it, his letter had sounded terrified; regretful. It made sense. Itreally did.Didn’t it?
Not to Sorcha.
In the brief moment we’d been granted to say our goodbyes in the rain, she pushed past her tears to tell me as much, speaking in an urgent whisper.
“Brennan told me everything,” she said, glancing over my shoulder to where Caelan stood a few feet away with his back turned for our privacy. Satisfied that he couldn’t hear us over the downpour, she met my eye – and I watched as hers hardened. “Don’t give me that look, Iknowyou know what I’m talking about. I know the Captain told you, too.”
There was no point lying. I was too tired to hold back, too weary. All I could do was nod, but apparently that gesture alone told Sorcha all she needed to know. Something dawned over her lovely face, something between triumph and regret. My chest gave a pang at the sight.
“You don’t believe it either. You don’t believe that Roy would do this.”
“I believe Caelan,” I said quickly, and then, ignoring the slight hitch in my voice; “We didn’t know him, Sorcha. Not like we thought.”
Sorcha’s eyes blazed hotter than a summer sky; she clearly wanted to say more, but her gaze darted over my shoulder again at the sound of Caelan’s approaching footsteps, and she suddenly yanked me into an embrace.
“Be careful,” she said in my ear. I heard the warning and the weight in the two whispered words. Then she kissed my cheek, and said no more.
Part of me wanted so desperately to believe it, a withered, wasted part that still clung to my youthful capacity for forgiveness – my capacity to believe in the best of people. To believe that Roy would be found, and all would be set to rights. He’d been framed, his letter an elaborate forgery. There was an explanation, because therehadto be.
And then there was the more cynical part of me.
The bereaved daughter. The abandoned sister of a man she’dnever imagined a coward. The thirty-year-old woman with a wasted past and no real future to speak of. That part of me was louder, and it said that Royhadbeen harmless until the Kingsmen arrived.
That if you’re going to back a Serpent into a corner, you’d best be prepared for it to strike.
