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“I thought this was just about keeping that stone of yours safe, but it goes far and away beyond that, doesn’t it?” she demanded. “No evasions. No snappy repartee. Clear, simple answers.”
He bent to pull on his other boot before straightening slowly, spreading his hands palms up as if to show he had nothing to hide.
“Helena says you’re going to set yourself up as a decoy to lure Máelodor out,” she said.
His body tensed, a chill descending like a knife between them as he resumed dressing.
She’d pushed too far to surrender now. She’d never get a better chance. Brendan would not allow himself to be cornered again. “You said your father and Máelodor were part of the Nine. That the Amhas-draoi executed the members of the group. You never said why. What did they do, Brendan?” She swallowed. “What did you do?”
The sticking plaster had fallen off. And whatever she’d taken for vulnerability had vanished in the grim-edged contours of a face carved in stone. His mouth ringed in white, furrows in his brow. Eyes ablaze.
A man who frightened her with such a concentration of intensity, he seemed to radiate like sun off sand, yet despite everything made her feel and yearn as the Brendan she knew had always done.
“Lissa—” He spoke hoarsely, as if holding himself together by the barest of threads.
“Don’t call me that.” She drew in a shaky breath. “Tell me Helena lied and I’ll believe you, but I want the truth.”
As if she’d touched a nerve, the blaze in his eyes flared like oil thrown upon a fire.
“Shit.” He lurched away with a sickened groan. “Isn’t it obvious? The truth has been staring you in the face for weeks. Father spent his life searching for the relics, but to him they were merely artifacts. Pieces for a museum. It was me. I devised the damned plan. To use the Sh’vad Tual to break the wards shielding Arthur’s tomb. I unraveled the spell that would resurrect the king as one of the Domnuathi. And when the violence escalated and the deaths began, I didn’t care. As long as I could dig as deep as I wanted into the forbidden Unseelie magics, it didn’t matter who was hurt along the way. I turned a blind eye to all of it. Now do you see?”
She shook her head, hearing the disgust in his voice. She would deny his words. It wasn’t Brendan. No matter how many sins he’d committed, this was not the man who’d carried her home through the rain. Who’d allowed her to tag after him from the time she was old enough to escape her nurses. Who’d agreed to marry her when it would have been easier to walk away. And whose kisses seared a blast of heat straight to her dazed brain and whose touch melted her to sweet liquid ecstasy.
“You’d have done better to hold to your ignorance,” Brendan said. “Knowledge is dangerous. It can blow up in your face.”
She couldn’t fit these pieces together into any puzzle that made sense. “If your goal is the same as Máelodor’s, why didn’t you give him the stone years ago and be done with it?”
He didn’t answer.
She latched onto his silence as a brief hope within the maze of her confusion. “Could it be because you’re not the criminal they think you? It’s been seven years. People change in seven years.”
“People may change. They may wish with all their heart they could undo the things they’ve done, but the crimes remain. The stain of that legacy never leaves.”
“You spoke once of your part in the murder of your father. What did you do, Brendan? What happened to him?”
Again he did not answer.
“That’s why you came back to Dun Eyre. That’s why you’ve agreed to this insane scheme of Helena’s. To make amends.” Terror fluttered up from her stomach into her chest. “Don’t do it, Brendan. It’s too dangerous. You said yourself Máelodor wants you—”
“Alive.” His expression softened to one o
f sorrow. “And he’ll keep me that way as long as I know where the stone is. And as long as I keep scream—” A shudder of his body. “As long as I entertain him.”
She grabbed him as if she might hold him back. Keep him here with her in this room where they were warm and safe and where Other and Duinedon didn’t matter. Where evil couldn’t touch them. “Tell Helena you won’t do it. Tell her to come up with some other way.”
“There is no other way.”
“You can’t do this alone.”
He shook her off. “I like alone.”
“Then why did you marry me?”
Hand on the knob, he turned back, face graven with scorn. “Why indeed, Lissa?”
Brendan descended to the parlor. Voices rose and fell and silverware clinked from the dining room across the hall, but, thank the gods, this room was empty. He couldn’t face any witnesses to his dance so close to the razor’s edge.
He eyed the piano in the corner, deliberately turning his back on the instrument. Music wouldn’t be enough to drive the devils from his mind tonight.
