But anything short of that honesty would be even more dishonorable than the crimes I needed to confess.
“I do not know what fae magic you thought you saw,” I said, grateful for the drekkan’s twisted contortion of my voice, “but it was not your mother’s.”
Her head tipped at me, and she waited for more.
I swallowed. “She…your mother… I met her that day, thirteen years ago, when she came into Hemlit. We argued. I… I worried that she had something to do with my parents’ death a year before that, and I… I tricked her into touching a talisman that absorbed all the magic in her body.”
Callista gasped. Her jaw fell. She knew.
And as I saw her realization dawn, my chest hurt. I wanted to disappear, to have the ground itself swallow me, and let me blink out of existence.
But the ground did not comply.
And I was left to stare at Callista’s undeserved pain. Perhaps if she understood better, it would hurt less. “I didn’t think it would really hurt her,” I explained. “I thought her magic would replenish itselfafter a few hours…”
Callista shook her head and jumped to her feet. “You killed her.” Tears filled her eyes, but she kept talking. “Her magic was tied up in her heart. If she didn’t have magic, her heart would have stopped. Taking it means you killed her, as surely as if you’d put a knife in her chest!”
“I didn’t know,” I rasped. Curse the drekkan and its horrible masking of my voice. It made me sound apathetic. But I wasn’t apathetic. I hurt as much as she did. “I did not mean to even injure her. Truly. I was trying to protect—”
Callista waved an arm to interrupt and then clutched her hands to her chest. “You talk of protection and honor, but they mean nothing without kindness. You fear what you do not understand, and you let that fear rule you.”
Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper as she gestured to my body. “This drekkan is no monster compared to the beast that lives in your heart. I… I cannot stand to even look at you.”
And then she spun and walked away.
Chapter 12: Aedan
Isat in the pool while she stormed away, stunned into my own thoughts. Her words invaded my mind, attacking my deepest insecurities.
You talk of protection and honor, but they mean nothing without kindness.
Not true. Protection and honor were everything. Kindness had to come second to them. Didn’t it?
You fear what you do not understand, and you let that fear rule you.
That, perhaps, was true. I hated to admit it, but I was terrified of what I could not control, what I could not protect from. That fear led to every regret I had… but not every sorrow. And if I had not fought to protect my people, they would suffer even more.
The drekkan is no monster compared to the beast that lives in your heart.
And that was my shame. I could not even argue it. Radira’s dying words had cursed me to suffer “the effects of my own monsters.” Was it a surprise that her daughter made the same accusation thirteen years later?
Her daughter. Callista had touched me in ways I never expected. She might not want to ever see my face again, but perhaps I could try to lessen her pain.
No, her pain would never lessen. My parents had been dead longer, and it still made me angry.
But her pain was my fault. Icouldbe kind to her. I could make her life comfortable in the fortress. I could—
My eyes flew to the path she’d marched down at least ten minutes ago. A frozen, ice-covered path into a forest full of monsters.
I jumped out of the pool and crashed through the same path, breaking crystals and smashing plants that blocked my monster-sized body. The bond hadn’t warned me of her fear, so she should be safe, but I still worried. There were too many—
My thoughts broke away abruptly when I saw her. She had found a dry, not frozen, patch of ground surrounded by part of a massive, ancient, gnarled tree that had grown around a large crevice, providing shelter from the winter wind.
I stopped a hundred feet away from her. “I know you don’t want to see me, but I don’t want you to freeze to death. Or get eaten. Can I take you back to the fortress?”
She folded her arms and leaned against the tree. “I thought my entire purpose here was so you could kill me. Does it really matter if another animal gets to me first? My brother wouldn’t know.”
The tree’s empty branches shook, as if threatening me if Ianswered wrong.
