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Del
My steps echoed down the shadowed corridor like the dreadful ticking of a clock. I was in no mood to sit and speak with Mother, to bear witness to her accelerated deterioration. But it had to be done.
We were closer than ever before, she and I, thanks to the weekly empathic check-ins that forced near-absolute honesty between us—it had taken all my effort and focus to conceal the truth about Liam’s paternity—and it seemed a cruel twist of fate that she would be taken from me soon. Now, when I had finally come to know her, to trust her, to seek her council. How unfair that the same circumstances that had breathed life back into our relationship were also killing her.
I paused at the door to Mother’s private chambers. A guard stood on either side of the doorway, their gazes weighing a thousand pounds each. I slowly drew air into my lungs, reinforcing my resolve to enter her rooms.
After blowing out the deep breath, I nodded to Saira, the dark-skinned, bright-eyed guard on the right. She was from a long line of royal guards, like Garath, and she was absolutely devoted not only to the kingdom but to our family. She stepped toward the doorway and pushed the door open, entering the dark sitting room ahead of me. The waning flames in the fireplace cast flickering shadows across the dark wood furnishings. I wrinkled my nose. Even out here, the scent of sickness tainted the air.
“Thank you, Saira,” I murmured.
She bowed her head and retreated out to the corridor. The door clicked shut behind me as I rounded the back of the sofa and crossed the sitting room, and I glanced over my shoulder to make sure I was alone.
When I reached the doorway to Mother’s bedroom, I paused on the threshold, my heart lodged in my throat.
Mother lay in her bed, flat on her back, still as death. Her long white hair had been wound into a thin braid that disappeared under the covers, but her arms were on top of the blankets, her frail hands folded over her middle, her veins clearly visible through her transparent, crepe paper skin.
I stared at her chest in the dim illumination from the lamp on her nightstand, waiting for it to rise, too long uncertain if it moved at all. The golden tint to the lamplight told me either Donis or Clover was the electric Elemental on duty tonight, powering the castle’s electricity.
Mother’s eyelashes fluttered suddenly, and her eyes drifted open. A terrible weight lifted off my chest.
“Del?” Mother said, her voice raspy where it had once been resonant. Her rheumy stare searched the room before latching onto me in the doorway. She squinted, then smiled. “Itisyou.”
Groaning, she rolled part of the way onto her side and stretched her arm toward the bedside table, her fingers reaching for her eyeglasses but falling short.
I rushed forward, retrieving her glasses off the nightstand and handing them to her, then helped her lean forward so I could add a couple of pillows behind her back to prop her comfortably in a sitting position. The physical contact between us sent images flitting through my mind, too fleeting and indistinct to understand. But her emotions were clear enough—sorrow, longing, regret.
And above all else, fear. Fear for herself and what she might soon find in the hereafter, and fear for the kingdom she would leave behind.
“I thought you were coming tomorrow,” Mother said, watching me as I turned away to fetch the chair in the corner and move it closer to the side of the bed. “Or are you worried I won’t make it that long?”
I set the chair down and stared at her hard. “That’s not funny,” I said, rounding the chair to sit.
She chuckled, but the laughter quickly transformed into a deep, rattling cough.
I waited until she had regained her breath and handed her the glass of water from the nightstand. “The cough is worse again?”
She nodded, raising the cup with one shaking hand. The hand tremors were one of the first telltale signs of the wasting sickness. She closed the fingers of her other hand tightly around the silver raven pendant she had worn for as long as I could remember. She looked so unsteady that I reached out to help her lift the water to her lips. When she finished drinking, I set the glass back down on the table.
“A small dose of the elixir would eradicate the pneumonia,” I reminded her. And it would knock back the progression of the wasting sickness a little.
Mother sighed, and even that rattled the fluid in her lungs. “Perhaps, but then what? In another week, it will be some other ailment.” This was how it always was in the end stage of the wasting sickness. The body was so weakened that every cold became a deadly illness. “No,” she went on. “We need to continue rationing doses to those with less severe cases, and we will reserve the rest for the labs. It would be wasted on me.”
I sat back in my chair and crossed my arms over my chest, huffing out my displeasure. “How long do you have, then?”
“A few days,” she said. “Perhaps a week.”
I clenched my jaw, my focus shifting past her to a painting of two women walking through a grain field hanging on the far wall. I had memorized the description on the bronze placard attached to the bottom of the frame long ago:Zoe Annabell Cartwright, Patron of the Empaths, and Rebecca Marie Vaughn, Patron of the Oracles. It was a common enough image in the iconography of the Temple of the Seven Kingdoms, but this was an unusually lifelike and vivid depiction of the two women.
Zoe’s dark hair, fair complexion, and keen aquamarine stare reminded me so much of how Mother had looked a decade ago, before the wasting sickness reclaimed her stolen youth and beauty, that I wondered if there might just be some truth to her claims that the Corvo line was descended from Zoe herself. I had my father’s darker coloring, so it was harder to make the comparison to myself directly.
I released a silent, bitter laugh. What did it matter? The Temple of the Seven Kingdoms was a sham. The Patrons weren’t gods. They had just been ordinary people trying to survive during extraordinary circumstances. They had lived through the Turn, and their momentous actions during the viral outbreak that transformed the world inevitably shaped the Seven Kingdoms into what it was. Only history and the Temple’s ever-evolving scriptures had warped them into something godlike.
“You’re in a sour mood,” Mother noted, still clutching her pendant. She had been doing that more and more frequently, as if it were a holy object, linking her to the Patrons themselves. “Alastor must be on his way back.”
My lip curled at the thought of my husband, but I said, “It’s not that.” My arms relaxed as the next breath left my body, and I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees and scrubbing my hands over my weary face. “It’s Liam,” I confessed.
Mother’s stare sharpened, and it was as though she had shed years right before my eyes. “What exactly is troubling you about my grandson?”
