I burst into tears.
I cried a lot on that first day. I cried when it hit me that Magnus had returned, and when I realised he had come with Sorcha in tow. I cried when I learned we’d lostThe Mage and Rose. When I felt that cold and empty space in my chest. When they told me that Caelan had gone.
When they told me where and why.
Magnus sat at my side for hours, and when I could sit no more, he helped me out of bed and we wandered slowly down the unfamiliar hallways to find Sorcha and Roy sitting in a bright farmhouse kitchen with a golden-haired man I didn’t recognise. Silence fell between them all at my approach, but Roy was on his feet at once, rooting through the cabinets to unearth a gigantic bottle of whiskey while Sorcha drew me to the seat beside her.
And we drank.
And they talked.
Magnus, most of all. He told me of the months he’d spent trudging through the countryside, making a bid for the northernmost shores of Qyelles to find passage to our father’s old home on the Isles. But he’d never made it; a deathly flu had cut him off at the knees when he finally reached the dockland village he’d been aiming for.
“It felt like penance,” Magnus said quietly. His grieved expression didn’t sit right on the soft lines of his face. “It felt like the price I had to pay for leaving you here alone.”
“I wasn’t alone,” was all I said.
Sorcha met my eye, and smiled her sweet smile.
When I looked back to Magnus, he had his fingers entwined with the golden stranger’s and the small, intimate gesture sparked ghostly warmth in my empty chest. I didn’t have to wait long to hear the man’s part in this story. Magnus glowed as he told mehow he’d found solace at the home of a widowed fishwife and herextremely handsome son,Will.The man – Will – grinned at Magnus’s phrasing, and with his face lit up like that…
I could only wonder if he, too, held an ember of my brother’s magic.
The thought sent a searing pain through the core of me. The emptiness gnawed at my insides, and I found myself chasing it with a glass of whiskey. Another. And another.
I wouldn’t talk about Caelan until I was four whiskeys deep.
“Why?” I finally asked them, the word thick and slurred.
Nobody answered at first – it was a broad question and Magnus had already told me what he’d learned while I was healing. It had re-written so much of what I’d assumed. Caelan had not been the one to suffer the King’s dungeons and escape; that was Brigid. This much, I realised, Caelan had told me himself if I’d ever stopped to consider it.
A young man with peculiar tastes and just enough power to see them sated.
He had her thrown in a cell.
Magnus filled in the rest, mending the spots in that mental tapestry I’d stitched together too quickly. How Brigid had hidden among the royal court for years under various skins, collecting intelligence and biding her time. How Caelan had orchestrated the Kingsmen’s arrival in Stormsby so he could seek Roy’s counsel for their silent coup against the soon-to-be crowned King.
How he had met me and realised what I was – and what I was to him.
He’d lost focus then, because of me. Fischer had slipped past him, and people - Tanner and Johnny – had paid the price for our brief, stolen bliss.
“Why did he go?” I said again, louder. I knew how I sounded; petulant and selfish. But the words were clearer the faster I spoke, my simmering anger burning through the whiskey, and I could not stop. “Why couldn’t someone else take the King’s skin? Why not Roy, or - or Brigid? Why him, whymy– whyCaelan?”
My voice cracked on his name, and Sorcha shifted hesitantly closer, but did not speak. She glanced at Magnus, who could only shrug helplessly. They had been beyond the borders still, Magnus and Will having travelled for weeks after word first reached them of Stormsby’s plight, Sorcha still fighting tooth and nail against her mother’s will. The three of them turned as one to Roy, who stood apart from us all, leaning in silence against a clean wooden countertop. He regarded me with soft, sad eyes, but his voice was firm when he finally spoke.
“He swore an oath a long time ago,” he said. “An oath to protect.”
“To protectwho, Roy?”
Roy did not flinch from my blistering glare. “Everyone.”
I shook my head, throat thick and sore. “I don’t understand.”
“I do,” said Magnus quietly. To his credit he was not cowed by the scowl I flung his way. “YouknowI understand, Roz. You know why I ran. Who among us wouldn’t be better off? The late King was amonster. Hissonis –”
He shuddered.
“He grew up with those dungeons for his play yard. His father’s prisoners were his favourite toys. We’ve all heard the stories; the things he did to those poor people.”
