“You’re different now,” Sigurd said quietly. Maude looked up to find his piercing eyes focused on her.
“Well, I stopped rubbing charcoal into my hair. The disguise I lived in for ten years is gone,” she offered, brushing off his gaze.
“It’s more than that,” he continued. “You carry yourself differently. It’s like you’ve grown into who you were always supposed to be. Some barrier has been crossed.”
“How very wise of you, old friend,” Maude said as she tried to laugh him off. Sigurd had no idea how right he really was.
"You remind me of someone I used to know when I was growing up," he said quietly, ignoring her jest. "I think of her often, wondering if she is well. The haziness of youth has erased her features from my memories, but I remember she was kind. Stubborn, but fiery."
"She sounds like quite a woman," Maude mumbled as her fingers skated across the worn spine of her mother's journal.
Silence lapsed for only a moment before Sigurd gave her a knowing smile. “So Bryn is your sister and the former Lieutenant General of Flame. Explain that.”
Maude held her tongue. It was dangerous to reveal her identity to Sigurd, but then again, he had walked the fine line between safety and danger all on his own the moment he decided to help the oppressedvitkiof Logi.
“Who are you, Maude?” Sigurd asked, but she knew what he was really asking.
The darkness of the living space seemed to swell around them, the shadows growing more opaque in a protective circle around them. Maude realized belatedly that she was the one controlling them. She had created a pocket of safety in anticipation of speaking her truth.
She took a deep breath, the action feeling tight.
“For a long time, my name was Maude Helvig,” she whispered into the darkness, her focus on the candle’s flame and not on the reactions Sigurd was surely playing out on his face. “I was the recognized Heir of Flame.”
Sigurd’s shocked silence screamed more than any words could. She had been living as a lowbornvitkifor a decade and had fooled everyone. This was why she had never formed any close friendships. The target on her back was too big, too dangerous, for her to have gotten close to anyone.
But Sigurdhadcome too close, she'd realized. He had helped her survive and, in that process, had become her friend. It was evident in his eyes that the truth settled uncomfortably with him. She was the titled daughter of his enemy.
Maude didn’t even bother explaining that the King of Flame wasn’t her birth father but rather the man who raised her, thinking she was his blood. She still hadn’t been able to decipher her true feelings on the matter. It didn’t change that Maude had grown up with a monster and had been molded by him. Helvig was the only father she knew, and Maude had spent her entire life as a Helvig.
Barriers she didn’t know had weakened over time turned to ash in her fingers as she sat in front of the first person to show her kindness in her life. Her storypoured out of her; every detail that she had shared only with Herrick flooded into the shadowed space that protected them.
Sigurd listened to every word, saying nothing. Finally, Maude reached the end of her tale as she told him about how she left Herrick in Dagsbrun to kill Helvig.
“It feels like all of the blame lies with me,” she continued, her voice strained and hoarse from speaking for so long. “I tried to kill him, and I failed. It’s my fault that he has become more powerful; I played into his tricks like a rage-fueled idiot.”
Sigurd sat across from her at the table, his eyes wary. He didn’t walk away from her, though. He had stayed and listened to her confession.
“I’m going to fix this, but I need Herrick to be out of his grasp first,” Maude finished, her throat thickening again. “He doesn’t deserve to be a prisoner. That is not his fate.”
“We’ll free him,” Sigurd said, his hand tentatively reaching out to pat her arm.
The act was kind but foreign to Maude, so she tried not to flinch. The shadows surrounding them thinned and finally receded as she calmed her racing heart. The candle lit up the rest of the room once more.
“I need to head down to the pits; we’re running out of time,” Sigurd reminded her, his words pulling her back to the task ahead of her."You should rest for a while, you'll need your strength."
Lying in a bed while her mind continued to race over all the possible failures that could arrive with the sunrise was the last thing Maude wanted to do.
“I’ll come with you,” she offered, standing and grabbing the journals from the table. She packed them into the bags that Sigurd would store on the longship that would bring them back to Nida before wrapping a long strip of fabric intended for first aid around her waist and fashioning it into a hood that she pulled over her head. “I could use a fight right now.”
Sigurd chuckled as he pulled the bookcase open, which led to the underground corridor connecting the house to the fighting pits.
“That’s the Maude I know,” he said as she breezed past him into the tunnel.
9
Adrenaline rushed through Herrick’s veins as the morning hours passed, bringing him closer and closer to his execution. The chains that kept the iron band around his throat burned into his skin, the icy heat from thegaldersuppressing metal working itself into his very bones.
The small dagger was strapped to the inside of his forearm with a flimsy strip of fabric he had torn from the blanket, the metal cooler than he would have thought possible in the dungeons below the Palace of Wind and Embers. The person responsible for Herrick owning a weapon had left little instructions beyond the runegebodrawn onto their last note.
