“That’s not even all of it,” he says, rubbing his face. “There’s someone else I need to speak to, but now I’m wondering…” He looks up at me, and the strain on his features sends a spike of fear through me. “Perhaps she should get it from you. It’s better, I think, to hear this kind of thing from a close friend.”
“What is it?” I ask. My voice jumps up a few octaves, climbing with my anxiety. “Is this about Tira?”
He gives me the saddest look—and I know the answer is yes.
“We asked Wadestaff’s smugglers to keep an ear to the ground about Otscold. If we’d been able to get word sooner…but there wasn’t any warning. I’m so sorry, Morgana.”
Alastor usually calls me Your Highness, so his use of my name only makes my heart thud harder.
“The Temple went back. They executed everyone who they believed had helped kill the clerics in the purge. Tira’s family is dead.”
When I was growing up, I had two mothers. Neither of them was the lofty queen who lived in her palace many miles away. One was a dryad who tended to my needs and poured poison down my throat.
The other was a peasant woman with golden skin and colorful clothes.
She was hired to do no more than cook and serve my food, but it wasn’t in her nature to let a lonely little girl go unmothered. She worried when I was unwell, brewing steaming broths to help my colds. She made me feel special on my birthdays, baking teetering cakes I couldn’t possibly eat all on my own. And she gave me my best friend, Tira.
The same girl I now hold in my arms, weeping. Because Una Holms is dead.
I should be weeping too, except I don’t have any tears left to shed. They all poured out after Alastor gave me the news. What’s left behind is a stiff, brittle state, as if I’m one touch away from crumbling inward.
Tira isn’t just a mirror for my pain. She amplifies it. Every deep, wrenching wail reverberates through me, every sob that racks her shoulders I feel in my bones. I absorb it as best I can, rocking her from side to side where we sit together on the bed. The despair comes in waves. When it ebbs, we sit in silence until the next flood hits us all over again.
It occurs to me that when I learned my parents died, I didn’t cry like this. It’s true, I didn’t know them like Tira and her family, but there’s grief in the fact that I’ll nevergetto know them. Not grief like this, though. It’s a quieter, duller pain, like a deep ache you don’t notice until you call attention to it.
“I shouldn’t have left,” Tira says eventually, her voice a broken croak. “I should never have gone.”
I knew this was coming—the blame she was sure to want to place on herself—and I’m quick to shut it down.
“No Tira, if you’d stayed you would be dead too.”
“Maybe that would be better,” she says, so sincerely it hurts my heart. “At least then I’d be with them.”
I put my hands on her shoulders, forcing her to look at me.
“Do you think they’d want that? Don’t you think it’s some consolation to them, even in the Eternal Realm, to know you’re safe and alive and here with me? Your family loved you too much for you to wish that.”
Her face crumples again, acknowledging the truth of my words.
“I just don’t think I can believe it. It doesn’t feel like it can be true—that they’re gone.” Something in her face shifts, hardening into anger. “Not gone, taken from me.”
She straightens, her hands gripping the edge of the mattress. “Whoever is responsible for this, may they rot in the Gloamlands forever.”
The venom in her voice calls to me. I also have that rage. There’s so much of it within me, waiting to be felt. Surely that won’t hurt as much as sitting with this pain.
“It was Oclanna,” I say. “She started all this. She sent the Temple to Otscold. Even if she didn’t personally make sure that bearer, Sophos, escaped to tell the Temple everything, all this death is on her hands.”
My conversation with Leon after the library attack comes back to me. What a fool I was to think I was out of her reach here. I was deliberately blind, not wanting to face the reality because it would mean I would have to take a stand. It would mean accepting that I can’t run away and hide from my problems in Gullert.
Not until I get justice.
“She murdered your family and mine,” Tira says, as if she can hear my thoughts. “And after all that, she thinks she can sit on the throne, ruleyourkingdom? That evil, loathsome bitch.”
I don’t know if I really think of it asmykingdom—the people of Trova wouldn’t think of me astheirqueen, not if they knew the truth—but I don’t disagree with Tira.
“She can’t inherit the crown until I’m dead,” I say. “So she’ll keep on murdering until she has what she wants. She’ll keep coming after me and the few people left in the world that I love.”
I meet Tira’s eyes, and see she knows she’s right at the top of that list.
