CHAPTERFORTY-NINE
Callum was quiet as he walked alongside his training partner. He hadn’t seen her since the morning in the infirmary.
After Aaron, he had been crazed with bloodlust. He had to find the creatures responsible. He begged Theo to allow him into the eastlands, to meet them head-on, alone. Theo wouldn’t allow it. He refused to lose a member of his Troika to some rageful suicide mission.
Callum had cursed him out until his throat was hoarse. In the end, he obeyed. Despite every fiber of his being telling him to kill and maim and torture, he had obeyed.
They went as far as the border, for weeks on end searching back and forth. They returned with absolutely nothing to show for it.
“What did you do to him?” Callum inquired as their boots crunched on the crisp grass. It was getting colder; the merciless winters of Ash Cliff would be here soon.
She looked up at him in alarm. “Why? What did he say?”
Oh yes, something had happened between the princess and his captain. For as long as he’d known him, Theo had been a brooding bear. For their monthlong journey he was downright intolerable. That little interaction back there showed him why.
“He didn’t say a word, so I thought I’d ask you.”
“It’s nothing. He just... hates me.” Her steps grew more hurried.
“Hm, if you say so.”
“What? He’s been completely horrible. Under the guise that he is trying to motivate me somehow. He could be nice. Instead he’s...that.”
“I’m sure many were ‘nice’ to you before we found you. Kindness didn’t make you stronger. It wasn’t kindness that pulled you from despair. Was it?”
She glanced down at the ground, trying to keep in stride as the elevation changed.
“You don’t have to answer. I know I’m right. Kindness only works for some, not for those like you and me.”
Some needed warmth and affection to bring them back to life. Helaina wasn’t like that. She needed someone hard as stone to not let her waste away, to shove her headfirst out of that misery. She had needed someone like Theo.
“He has been here a very long time. His intuition is rarely wrong in these instances. His actions have great intention.”
He heard her breathing getting a tad strained. “Was he always this way?”
Callum pulled his lips in tight. He wasn’t sure this was his place, but there was something in Theo when he regarded the girl, some sort of longing anguish he had never seen before. Callum needed her to understand him.
“Since I’ve been here, yes. It’s what is required of him. No one would pass a trial without him. He works on all of us to the point of breaking. He was one of the earliest descendants—when the gods walked among mortals, he was here. He was raised by parents that were not his own, but he loved them all the same. He never knew his birth mother and father; only the ancestral connection to Valhoor was made clear.”
“How? If Valhoor was banished, how did he create an offspring here?” Helaina asked.
“I’m not sure. Theo has never spoken of his birth mother, if he knew her, only the mother who raised him. But the marks on his back are a clear sign. There aren’t many paintings of Valhoor’s likeness, but the ones that still exist show the Death God possessing the same tattoo.”
Callum noticed a change in the girl’s breathing. “He said he came here alone to build Elkron. What about his family?”
“Murdered. He didn’t have anyone after that, until us.”
From the look on Helaina’s face, he could tell her heart broke as soon as the words left his mouth.
“What did he do?”
“He went to Brahm begging for a chance to go back and save them. Asked if the God of Creation could simply bring them back, create them again. Brahm refused. Instead, he offered Theo a cause, a chance to save others. He gave him the bone dagger, with the condition he would use it to defend the innocent when the gods returned to their own realms. Theo accepted. He sees his being here as a kind of restitution. To save those he can, to make up for the lives he couldn’t.”
Beads of sweat were building on her forehead as she fell deep into thought. He had to applaud her—there was no sign of the fragile creature he had threatened in that tent. “That’s why all this started in the first place? A way to make amends for his family?”
Callum nodded. “Some of you have the audacity to waste our efforts, waste the very life he lives to protect. Gambling, whoring, murder...” He gave her a side-eyed glance. “...forfeiting your own life.”
Her brows knit together.
