Page 89 of Bloodgrove

“My parents are good people. My mother loves me, but my father despises that I love men, that I can use magic, and that my hair is silver. That I am different. He cannot deal with it. He doesn’t know how to talk to me. It broke something in our family.” Slowly, he let out his breath, feeling the freedom the words brought. He understood why Elodie did not want to remain silent. “I avoid going home, and at the same time, I miss them terribly.”

“I miss my sisters,” Elodie admitted with a smile. “But I know they are in a better place now.” Her fingers brushed over the little braids in Will’s hair. “We always braided each other’s hair.”

“You are the youngest?”

“Yes. And then Eric came into our lives and turned everything upside down.” They both smiled.

“I still do not quite understand that story,” Will pushed, at the risk of touching another wound.

“My parents came from a village in the mountains, beyond the border. Two winters that lasted too long and two summers that were too wet brought us close to starvation, until we had no choice but to try to reach Bloodgrove.” The words came easily from Eric’s lips; this was not a secret the wine had coaxed from him. Only then did he hesitate. “My magic got us across the border, and Duke Ormonde generously took us in because he saw potential in me.”

“How old were you?” Will understood enough about this city to know that crossing the border on foot was no easy thing.

“Nine.”

Will stopped the how from spilling past his lips. A nine-year-old had paid the blood toll for himself and his parents? No wonder a madman like the old Duke Ormonde had taken him in.

“Are there no pleasant secrets in this place?” Will laughed, a little desperately.

Eric bit his lip. “I love men too—and women. It was a confusing process, until I understood that, but Will, you were right. Sometimes I met Saint and his friends and watched…” He stopped, and an endearing blush crept all the way to his ears. “But I never joined them, because I know I will sacrifice my life to become the Red Hand.”

“Oh, you foolish man,” Elodie sighed.

Eric leaned toward her, his face soft as he looked up at her. “Only you or this office. That thought gives me strength for all the atrocities I have to commit for the Crown. You are my selfish wish. And if I held the office, I could save not only you but my family as well, and the only price would be me.”

Will retreated into his corner of the sofa and opened the fairytale book. He could not see the words. The letters danced like tiny fairies across the page, and even the illustration regarded him with a knowing look. It wasn’t even jealousy raging inside him anymore, but painful resignation—he had achieved what he wanted for the two of them and had forgotten that he had dreams of his own. That his heart would suffer when he gave them up.

“What is it about your hair?” Elodie asked.

It fell silver-white over his shoulders to his hips, the small braids crowning him like garlands, just as he had seen in old paintings. The more his father had wanted him to cut it, the more Will had loved and cared for it. He enjoyed the way it flowed like silk through his fingers and the way people turned to look at him in the street.

“In Bloodgrove, people say powerful mages have white hair,” Eric added, and Will’s pulse quickened as both pairs of silver eyes settled upon him.

He was about to offer some meaningless answer when words gathered on his tongue that he had never spoken before, had never even thought. “I was eleven,” he began, frowning. “My parents have a small house on the coast. My father worked for a fishing company and spent all day cutting the entrails from the catch. My mother was the bookkeeper there. That was how they met.” Will swallowed, uncertain whether he should continue—he had no idea where the story was going as the serum took control. But Eric and Elodie hung on his every word, and so he continued. “It was a long, cool summer, and I was playing alone on the beach—I must already have seemed strange to the other children back then—when I discovered a cave.”

Will had no memory of it, but now the image of black stone came together, rugged and hollowed by the sea. An opening faced the water, and spray burst inside with every wave. Small crabs lived in the pools between the rocks. “And there, I found a monster as large as a fishing boat, chained to the stone.”

He blinked against the memory, but his mind left the library, and he was back inside the cool, damp cave, his hands scraped raw from climbing through the narrow opening. Perhaps he had heard a voice. Perhaps he had only been curious. But now he stared into the silver eyes of a monster. “It was beautiful and terrible at once, part bird, part fish, part wolf. Part human.” Salt crystals clung to its wings, its claws worn down from struggling against the chains, and the fish tail raw from the rocks, but its gaze was clear, and in a strange way, it was beautiful. “The monster told me about magic and all the wonders I could perform. And nothing sounded more exciting to a lonely boy than the promise of endless possibilities. So I returned to it day after day and listened while it told me stories of the heavens and the sea.”

“You found a god,” Elodie breathed.

“He calls himself the Albatross, and as summer drew to an end, he offered me a bargain.” Will faltered when he tried to name the terms. He did not remember, and even the truth serum could not change that. “To take his magic, I had to eat him. He was trapped inside the cave, immortal, and every attempt to escape had failed—I was his final hope. And so, every evening throughout autumn, I returned and ate his cold flesh.”

Will could still taste it on his tongue, salty and firm. He bit it from the Albatross’s body and tore it free with his bare fingers. Eventually, he stole his father’s knife, the curved blade cutting through the god’s muscles like butter. He scraped the bones clean with his fingernails and sucked out the marrow while the monster praised him.

Nausea overwhelmed him, and he barely managed to seize the wine cooler before vomiting up the cookies and wine. Tears burned in his eyes, and he retched again and again, as though he might vomit the Albatross’s flesh from his entrails. He wept for the innocent child he had lost inside that cave. He wept for the trauma his mind had buried. He wept for his soul, which had fallen prey to the cunning of a monstrous god.

Warm hands moved over him, and only then did he feel the cold licking at his bones. The sea he had taken into his heart threatened to overwhelm him. But there were two people there, warm and comforting, who gathered him into their arms. Someone wiped his mouth. Someone stroked his hair.

He sank to the floor before the sofa and only vaguely felt the hard plane of Eric’s chest as the man pulled him close. Elodie joined them and nestled against his side, tears in her own eyes as she mourned her own innocent child.

“You have the magic of a god inside you,” Eric whispered, his chin brushing the crown of Will’s head. “The most powerful mages are said to receive their magic directly from the gods, but stories like yours are very rare.”

“Do you not despise me for it?”

Eric lifted Will’s chin with one bent finger, forcing him to look back over his shoulder. “How could I? I have a monster inside me too.”

Elodie smiled beside them. “I think we all do. I have drunk so much blood, had to wear that wretched mask so many times, I am surprised I have not become a monster myself.”