Outside, the horses snort to each other, unhappy with the water breaking around their hooves. I go to the tunnel entrance once more, leaning forward so that I can hear any murmur, any voice, above the rush of the surf. I throw caution to the wind and call her name, only to have it echoed back at me from wet walls.
I go out to the horses once the water has reached my middle. Whatever has happened, whether catastrophic or merely a delay, there will be no escape tonight. The cave will be entirely flooded soon, the end of the tunnel underwater.
I swing up onto my mount, gathering the reins of the other two in my fist. Our packs will keep for another day, and I hide them in the stables upon my return, giving an extra ration of grain to the mystified horses, who eat greedily at their unexpected meal.
The castle is quiet and my tongue feels like a weight in my mouth as I go to Khosa’s room. I stand outside her door for a moment, not knowing what I will see when I push through. I prepare myself for the worst—Khosa and Cathon bound and at my father’s mercy—and open the door.
What I find is almost worse—Khosa nestled against Donil by the fire.
“Vincent,” she says, coming to her feet. Donil follows her, eyes on me. I don’t know my hand is on my sword pommel until I see his movement echoing mine.
“Have a seat, brother,” Donil says, motioning to the other chair.
“Khosa, what—” I begin, but am interrupted by a terrific snore and turn to see Merryl sprawled on Khosa’s bed, mouth wide open as he dreams.
“Come Vincent, please,” Khosa says, steering me to a chair. I go, dumbfounded by the light touch of her fingertips on my elbow. Only once I am seated do I realize her hands are shaking, and that her eyes are swollen, her cheeks streaked with spent tears.
“We were betrayed,” she whispers to me, drawing her hand away. “Cathon. He led me to the dairy, and tried to—”
It’s like a rock dropping into my gut, and a fire chasing it back up. “Where is he?”
“Still in the dairy,” Donil says, his look telling me all I need to know.
“You’re all right?” My hands go to Khosa without thinking, and she jolts but lets them remain on her arms.
“Yes,” she says, patting my fingers lightly but then drawing away to sit in her own chair. “No harm was done.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Donil says. “You tore up the dairy, and a good thing too.” He turns to me. “I was going to the kitchens to see what I could scrounge, and thought for certain someone had put a bull in the dairy for a laugh, all the glass that was breaking. What I found was something quite different.”
I glance at Khosa, noting the beginning of a bruise on her cheek, and a line of scratches along her arm. While I was far away, she was misled and mishandled. Harm was done, but vengeance has already been exacted, and not by my hand.
“I’m so sorry,” I say to her. “I had no idea he would—”
She holds up her palm to quiet me. “I didn’t see it either, Vincent. The fault does not lie with you. It seems a reward for impregnating the Given was not offered only to the guards.”
The fault may not lie with me, but the guilt certainly does. I trusted a man who laid hands on her, and with my father’s blessing.
“We need to get the body, Vin,” Donil says. “Cathon may have betrayed you, but your plan he kept to himself, twisting it for his own use. No one knows what you attempted tonight, and we must keep it that way.”
Merryl mutters again in the bed, rolling onto his side.
“We can’t leave Khosa alone,” I say.
“Merryl gave me the names of men I can trust,” Khosa says, counting them off on her fingers. “Cecil, Justus, Ornon, and Rook.”
“Rook has the last watch on the east tower,” Donil says. “I sometimes meet him for a game of ridking.”
“Go,” I say. “Tell him we need him to take Merryl’s place at Khosa’s door, that his friend is in his cups. We’ll take Merryl to the guardhouse and then manage the other.”
Donil nods and disappears into the corridor, leaving me with Khosa.
The silence stretches long after his footsteps are gone. I know she will not take comfort from me as she did with Donil, and that sends another streak of anger through my body, following paths that are beginning to burrow deep. For her part, Khosa remains staring at the fire, face set implacably against all that surrounds her, including me.
When Donil returns with Rook, she pretends to be asleep in her chair, bruising cheek and swollen eyes hidden by the fall of her hair. Rook unquestioningly takes Merryl’s spot in the hall, but I see his brow furrow as Donil and I balance the burly guard between us on the way to the bunkhouse. I’m sure it goes against Merryl’s character to drink himself to stupidity while on watch, but we have no better excuse.
Donil and I don’t speak until we’re in the dairy, the light of the torch he left behind playing over a sickening mix of blood and milk.
“Tides,” I say, my nose wrinkling against the smell of curdle already at work. Cathon’s eyes are open, his mouth splayed horrifically wide by Donil’s blade. Teeth litter the floor around him, which Donil wordlessly begins to gather.
I prop the body in a corner and retrieve a bucket of wash water from the kitchen, splashing it around to thin the blood. It takes our combined strength to push the rack back against the wall, a testament to how hard Khosa struggled to defend herself.
“Him first,” Donil says, breaking the silence. “Then we’ll see what’s to be done about the mess.”
Glass crunches under our feet as we prop Cathon between us, his lifeless body heavier than Merryl’s was. Two wet trails follow us up the stairs, milk dripping down his legs from his soaked robes. We rest at the top of the stairs and share a glance.
“To the library,” I say. “There are tunnels there that lead to a safe haven for the royals; I was going—”
Donil holds up a hand to stop me. “Khosa explained, brother.”
His use of the word adds guilt on top of an already heavy weight in my gut. “I couldn’t share it with you,” I say. “Even if I’d wanted to—”
“But you didn’t want. And I know the reason. Truly, Vincent, you’re the only brother a boy with my blood could have, and I won’t let a woman come between us, even if she is worth it.”
The torch in his hand sputters, and I drop my eyes, the guilt taking on a new facet—shame. “I have not treated you well, brother.”
Donil nods, the apology accepted, then shifts Cathon back onto his shoulder. “We’ll put him in the tunnels then?”
“He should have gone there in the first place,” I say, taking my share of the weight as we struggle down the hall.
“If he’d done so, I never would have found them,” Donil says.
“Going to the kitchens to see what you could scrounge?” I ask, repeating his reason for being near the dairy at so late an hour. “Certainly not going to see if Daisy was still awake?”
“A man can eat bread and talk to a woman at the same time,” Donil says, but I hear his smile in the dark.
“What of Khosa, then?” I ask him, willing my voice to remain neutral, though the spike of anger still pricks at my gut.
Donil sighs. “She is the Given. I cannot deny that I have feelings for her, but neither will I seal her fate by getting her with child. I ask the same—what of Khosa? I know you have been spending nights with her.”
The hurt in his voice overwhelms any false victory I might have felt otherwise. “There is nothing between us,” I confess. “Merely a ruse to keep her safe from my father. One that failed as certainly as we did tonight.”
I push aside the library tapestry that hides a loose rock, pressing in the right place for it to roll away.
“We’ll have to take him far enough so that he won’t be smelled,” Donil says.
“I’ll do it,” I say. “Get back to
the dairy and do what you can before Daisy awakes. What passed tonight must be as if it never were.”
Donil nods once and is gone, leaving me the torch. I drag Cathon with one hand, lighting my way with the other. Despite Donil’s advice, I don’t take the body far, trusting the stone that shuts behind me as I leave to keep our secret for the time being.
I head for my father’s room.
CHAPTER 60
Vincent
THE GUARDS AT FATHER’S DOOR STEP ASIDE AT MY GLANCE, and I find him abed, eyes bleary from sleep.
“Vincent?” he asks, for once no trace of guile on his face. “What has happened?”
“How can you not guess, Father, with so many in these walls vying for the right to Khosa’s maidenhood?”
He actually brightens, and my fists clench. “Is it done, then?”
“It is not,” I spit. “And a man lies dead because of you.”
He doesn’t ask who, merely gets to his feet to stir what remains of the coals in the fireplace, his robe billowing around him as he moves. “Because of me or you?”
“It was Donil who struck the blow while protecting her.”
He tosses fresh wood into the fire and smiles as the first of the flames licks to life, a thread of heat reaching toward me from across the room. “You mistake my meaning, Vincent. I know you killed no man, as I knew you never bedded the Given.”
“You know no such thing,” I say, willing my voice to remain calm.
“But I do,” he sighs as if disappointed, and rests the poker against the stones, its curled tip leaving a black line of soot in its wake. “You said yourself men compete for Khosa’s maidenhood. I’d call the competition off if there were no prize, wouldn’t I?”
My blood heats more quickly than the fire, and I feel my lip curl. Yet he only laughs.
“More than your words gives you away, son,” he continues. “A boy with a willing girl of her qualities finds himself interested in nothing else. Yet I’ve seen you walking the halls, even leaning over old books with your supposed lover in the library, when if you were lovers, in truth, all your spare time would be spent between sheets.”
“We are not animals,” I say through gritted teeth.
His composure slips, and the first flare of the fabled temper I’ve inherited breaks through. “You are, boy. We all are. Every one of us exists to eat and breed, and that is all. Some of us do it in finery, some of us wallow in the mud, but we all follow the desires of our stomachs and our loins, and you, even with your mother’s lofty ideals, are not above taking your fill.”
I think of Khosa, how her teeth nibble at her own lips as she writes, the little gasps that escape her upon some new discovery. There is some truth to his words, as I have more than once thought of those lips beneath mine, her gasps brought on by my hands and more. Those visions have power, one that pulls at me even now, but the image of her by the fire, a bruise blooming on a cheek tracked with tears, is stronger.
“Yet somehow I have not taken anything, despite desires willing me to do so,” I say.
“Then you are a fool,” my father says. “You could have any girl you want, with or without her blessing, and never know retribution. This one that you’ve attached yourself to will find a lover in the sea, one that will tumble the flesh right off her bones before it’s done with her.”
He has always seen more of Mother than himself in me, so when I lunge for him, he’s unprepared. Bone strikes bone as my knuckles crack against his nose and he goes over, hands dragging for purchase across the mantel to break his fall. He hangs there for a second, bright blood dripping from his nose. Our eyes meet, and he laughs.
“Now you find some nerve, boy? Now?”
The door that connects his room to my mother’s flies open, and she rushes in, fumbling her dressing gown closed. Her hair hangs around her shoulders, the silver threaded through the dark strands more obvious now that it’s loose. She glances between us, me cradling a bruised hand to my chest, Father’s blood spraying into the fire as he shakes his head to clear it.
“Vincent, what have you done?” she says.
“Fulfilled my desires,” I say, eyes still on my father, who laughs again.
“It seems he’s not entirely your son,” he says to Mother, fingers gingerly tracing the bulbous swelling of his nose. “Although even when he strikes in anger, it’s in protection of another.”
Mother turns to me, a question in her eyes.
“He set a man upon the Given,” I tell her. “A man who died trying to gain what was promised to him in return. What was it, Father?”
“There were plenty who would do the deed for the pleasure of it alone,” Father says.
I think of Cathon’s face, the calculation in his eyes and the quickness of his mind. “Not this man,” I say. “Cathon would have wanted more than flesh as reward.”
“Ah, the Scribe.” Father sits in the fireside chair and crosses his legs as if we are having a leisurely chat about the crop yield. “He had some demands, the position of Curator among them.”
“But the Curator can be replaced only upon the death of the current . . .”
Father watches my face as my words trail off, the depth of how far he’s willing to go apparent. Mother’s hands have gone to her face, palms covering her mouth.
“How many men would you kill to see it done?” I ask.
“As many as necessary,” he replies. “Even if the bodies rise as high as the outside walls, it is nothing in comparison to those that would float in the sea if she does not do her duty.”
“You don’t know that!” I shriek, the willful ignorance of his belief drawing out my anger. “Old stories are not fact, and tradition nothing more than a playact if you are wrong, one littered with the bodies of women damned because you blindly do as those before you have always done.”
“Vincent,” Mother says quietly, “mind your words. Tradition holds strong.” She crosses to Father, her shaking hands going to his injuries, his blood slicking her hands. He pulls away from her touch, irritation flickering across his face.
“Tradition?” I ask. “Or habit? Just as you simper over a man who has never loved you, not questioning if there is another way.”
“There is no other way, Vincent,” he says. “Tradition. Habit. Name it what you will, but the Given is called for by not only the sea, but the people. If I deny them, they will rise, even if a wave does not. I may be king, but I am only one man.”
“And Khosa only one girl,” I say. “Yet I’ll take the chance.”
He shakes his head and comes to his feet, a bitter smile spreading. “If this Given were an ugly thing, she would pass to the water unnoticed by you. Are you so weak to be turned by a pretty face?”
It’s my turn to laugh, and I don’t need to speak my thoughts for him to follow.
“Yes, I’ve taken girls to my bed,” he says, ignoring the choked sob from my mother. “Many and more, a long line of pretty faces. But I care for none, and endangered nothing by doing so.”
“Must you be so callous?” Mother says, pulling herself into a chair. “Who is this man who speaks openly in front of his wife about other women?”
“Who am I?” Father turns on her. “I’m your husband. The one you chose above all others, knowing full well my nature.”
“Yes, my husband,” Mother spits. “A mockery of my womanhood, this marriage. A disgrace to my blood, that choice.”
“Call your maids, woman,” Father says, taking in her blotched, reddened face. “They’ll have extra work to make you presentable today. Little wonder that I have a roving eye when you take so little care for yourself and willingly place nicely bodied tarts like the Indiri girl in my path.”
“You bastard,” Mother says, her rage a thing so long throttled that it shakes within her throat. “If you forced her—”
“Forced her?” My father laughs. “I??
?ve not had to. That girl desires only one thing, her children in a position of power, and I am the only one who can give it to her.”
“She wouldn’t,” Mother says, but I feel a dark pit open in my stomach at the thought of Dara in my father’s bed—and the possibility that it could be truth.
“No, she wouldn’t,” he agrees, turning his back to her to smile at me. “At least, not yet.”
He doesn’t see Mother change, the slide from heated emotion to cold calculation. He doesn’t see her hand go to the poker or the slight trace of smoke it leaves behind as it arcs toward his head. His eyes are on mine, words of degradation on his lips.
And I hold them.
I keep my father’s gaze locked on mine as my mother bashes his skull in.
The first swing garners a look of stunned surprise, an attack from behind unlooked for from a foe long considered vanquished. He goes down on one knee, and Mother’s second swing shatters bone, the sound as incongruous as an egg breaking, the finality of the act belied by the quiet of the moment.
Mother’s breath catches in her throat as the poker falls from her hand. “Vincent,” she gasps. “I’m . . . I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I say, as blood pools around our feet.
CHAPTER 61
Dara
DARA KNOWS BETTER THAN MOST WHEN SHE IS BEING watched, can feel eyes on her much the way she imagines Khosa feels the sea—a constant weight. A lifetime of harsh scrutiny has taught her to filter the sensation while in the castle walls, but now, deep inside the Forest of Drennen, she is grateful for the warning that courses through her body, even if she can’t name the source.