Page 7 of Season Warriors & Wolves

“Hearts and a couple livers. Why, you got them?” I leaned forward, fluttering my lashes at him. “We could bargain.”

“Silas!” Melanthe bellowed.

I nailed the butter knife on the table, the rose wood cracking under the force, making her flinch. “Hush. He is doing it for you. Come on, papa,” I pouted. “A little one.”

My fingers were blood red and numb, enough to not feel the sharpness of thorns dig into them while I stood in front of my mother’s grave, holding her favourite white rose. Wolves howled relentlessly further in the city and the forest around the castle walls, their call was stranger than usual, desperate. The wind too. No longer blowing north. Only haphazardly all around. Uncontrollably.

“I’m glad you’re not here,” I said, hoping that she would reply to me again. “It must be lonely.” The two graves around her were empty. She’d always been alone. This is why she had stuck to me for so long. “Is she with you, ma? Tell me that she is.”

Quiet.

She didn’t reply.

“Can you hear me?”

She couldn’t, could she?

No one did.

Except you.

Demir was waiting at the exit of the winter gardens, just as angry as Melanthe with what deal I’d struck with my father for silence. “Why only one rose? You only took one rose when you went in there.”

Maybe he had felt the air in Adriata. Maybe he had always doubted something. Whatever it was, I didn’t need him lurking close to them. “Have you ever lost someone you cared about, Vas?” I asked, breaking a rose stem, feeling the trickle of blood stream down my sleeve when more thorns dug on my skin.

He didn’t answer for a while. “Yes.”

The white petals stained red when I cupped the flower to bring to my face to smell the nothingness it offered. “Family?”

He suddenly looked so human. “Yes, family.”

“Good.” I threw the rose to him and laughed; my eyes gleaming when he dropped it almost as if it had burned. “Very good. Was it painful? Did they die in agony? Tell me. Did they beg? Did they suffer?”

He was still looking at the rose on the ground. “A human death. Old age.”

“Mmm, much, much better. The cruellest death of all. Aren’t you glad to have escaped it?”

His eyes lifted to mine, flashing in that unnatural green they turned sometimes. “Very.”

“You and her,” I said, trailing a finger over the rose bushes. “You were locked together. Seems so unlike any other punishment issued for your tomfoolery. So unlike Fader.”

“You call love tomfoolery as if you did not bargain to have your soul attached to another’s.”

“How much you know. How little you are actually allowed to partake in. Did it sadden you? To never know what it feels to tie your soul to another?”

“Aurora and I were one in more ways than your gods dictate.”

Men always thought their cocks were some sort of magical wands, so I was not surprised he believed that. “Aurora,” I said, plucking another rose. “What did she promise you?”

His eyes dropped to the petals I was picking one by one. “Nothing.”

“Oh, it must have been something. You know how I know that?” I asked, tying my hands behind me, the thorny stem digging on my palm. “Because she was not the first divine thing you have come across, Vas. Interestingly, you’ve come across much. Bargained favours with them—so many. Even sailed the Sea of the Dark in hopes of meeting Golgotha—attempted—because it was there you met Esmeray who could not reach Golgotha either. Sweet Esmeray, the traveller who knew everything and the woman Aurora had a close bond here in Numen. So much so that she dedicated a whole diary to her.”

He glared at me, his mouth ticking a little. “A diary?”

“Of course. You helped her write it, didn’t you? Isn’t that why you approached something you loathed by nature?” Aurora had been a little test pet for those two.

He cocked his head back. “Intentions change. Feelings change. And I never made such a deal with Esmeray.”