Page 59 of Spring Guardians & Songbirds

With the same understanding of silence, I stood and left for Olympia.

Chapter nine

Brontide

Kilian

Larg sat across from me, enjoying his breakfast. The rest of the table was empty. Mal was nowhere to be found. Atlas, too, was busier than me these days. And Snow had left like lightning at dawn before I could even utter the word stay.

“I gather the north temple is burnt to the ground?” I asked, flipping through the identification documents Atlas had found for me, belonging to the men from the attack on Snow. My head hurt when I saw how meticulously that little charade on Snow had been planned. How intricate the web of anti-Ybris propaganda was on my land. One priest on my council, twelve more in the same congregation and thirty-two soldiers had been hanged this morning from treason and an attempt against the crown.

For three days, Snow had come at night, laid awake in her corner on the bed and then left at the first crack of dawn. Each time we said less and less, and she looked even more lost inside her head. Looking more wary of me. Almost…scared. And I blamed it on that day—I blamed it on me, for leaving her alone, for assuming I could trust my people, for using my magic when I knew what it did to invoke her fears.

Larg nodded. “Currently looking for more associated with the same clergy. We will get to the bottom of this, son.”

I was not one to show my power by fear, but this was the first time I might have actually enjoyed watching the crowd fall silent to my words and threats. “Not the bottom, Larg. I want this thing to have no bottom at all. I’ll dig it with my own hands if I must.”

Driada entered the dining chambers, chirper than usual these days. Each time Nia brought her back from Olympia her smile had grown bigger. The russet stare that Mal had inherited from her softened and she regarded me like I was an old memory she missed. Clouds of canary coloured happiness gathered around her torso. “Henrik,” she said, taking a seat next to me. She’d never, not once before called me that. “I haven’t seen you of late. Where have you been, my dear?” The more she looked at me, the more she withered back to her old self—the old self I remembered her to be when around my father. “Have I done something again?”

She thought I was my father. The man who’d died of heartbreak for another woman.

Larg half stood. “Driada, he is not—”

“Forgive me, Driada,” I said. “I’ll make sure to visit you more often.”

Her smile grew back and she nodded before turning her attention to her breakfast. It hurt my heart to see how she was slowly deteriorating exactly how my father had. First his lungs had bled for the air he breathed without the woman he’d loved and then his head had spun him maddening tales of his past until his heart had grown sick of feeling memory but never touching it. She was suffering like him. Except that she was suffering for a man who had not loved her back.

Something around her neck caught my attention, a thin silvery chain dusted with several small obsidian stones. It emitted something strange, not exactly magic, but a type of magical essence. A sort that when my shadows grazed it, it made them quiver and dissipate.

“What is the necklace you are wearing?” I asked.

She touched a hand to her neck and blinked to herself for a moment before swivelling her head to stare at me with horror. “Kilian, when did you get here?”

“Just now. Where did you get that necklace?”

“Oh, Snowlin gifted it to me. Isn’t it lovely?”

The papers in my hand crumbled from the force of my grip. How had Snow managed to step over the bargain again? Had she asked someone else to give it to Driada? “I need you to take it off.”

She frowned incredulously. “Why would I do that? And she made me swear to her that I would never take it off.”

From an unusually unstirred bottom, anger began crawling up. “Driada.”

“If she wants to kill me, so be it,” she said, her mouth quivering. “If it makes her happy, so be it. I don’t have long in this realm anyway. So do not ask me to take it off, because I won’t. And you will not say anything to her.”

“Ah, here is my little happy family,” Mal said, coming in and kissing his mother’s head before taking a seat.

Sigh. He stunk like someone had drenched him in alcohol. “Did you just get home?”

He took a piece of toast and leaned back, munching lazily. “If I say yes, will daddy discipline me?”

Driada’s head popped up from her meal. “Henrik? Where has he gone now?”

The piece of bread my brother held crushed in his grip. “Dead, ma. In his plush cosy grave filled with the stink of rot and worms. Right where he needs to be.”

My stepmother’s face twisted with anguish and pain. “What are you saying, son? Don’t speak like that about your father.”

“The only father who has raised me has been my brother, not that piece of sh—”