Chapter 27 Cracked Armor
Fiona
The sound of horns jolts me awake. For a moment, I don’t know where I am, my pulse racing in the dark. Then, the cold stone of the tower wall grounds me, and I remember I’m in Caldara.
I curl tighter under the blankets, shivering. Whoever it is arriving at this unseemly hour is an asshole. To be fair, most Alpha Kings are. I sit up, brushing hair from my face, already bracing myself.
The lock clicks, and Liora steps in, her face hard and unreadable. Her hands are clenched, her shoulders taut.
“You’re being moved,” she says without preamble, her voice clipped and stony. “A room fit for a princess on a lower level. Warmer, at least.”
I let out a slow, deliberate breath, curling my lips into the faintest of smirks. Liora’s expression is distant. She’s still irritated from our last conversation—I can see it in the way her jaw ticks, in the way she won’t quite look at me. I stand and head towards her, still wrapped in the blankets. I catch a whiff of Ronan’s scent. It’s an opening for sure.
I tilt my head, biting back a smile.
“I didn’t know you two were married,” I say casually, watching her out of the corner of my eye.
Liora’s head snaps toward me. Her eyes narrow, sharp with challenge. She sneers, the expression sitting almost proudly on her face. “You Solaran nobles really are naïve.”
“Educate me, then.”
She hisses and turns. “In Caldara, life isn’t guaranteed, not even for nobles. We don’t waste it waiting for a wedding to give us permission to live. Women here aren’t expected to stay untouched until some man claims them. We are freer than that.”
The words settle in my chest like a stone dropped in water, rippling outward. There’s a resentment in her tone I latch onto. She might say she’s liberated, but she doesn’t like it. The crack in her armor is gleaming, and I wonder how far that crack goes.
I soften my tone. “Do you want to be married?”
Her whole body goes still, and she looks away. The answer flickers in her eyes, along with hurt and resentment.
“You should worry about your own marriage prospects,” she says finally, her voice colder than before.
The descent from the tower feels longer for the silence between us. I turn over her words, trying to get a sense of the woman beneath the proud warrior Liora so clearly is. Liora walks half a pace ahead of me, torchlight glancing off her hair.
The plan that starts to bloom in the back of my mind feels at once too soft and too perfect to ignore, given the circumstances. What if I maneuvered her into marriage with one of these visiting Alpha Kings or their sons?
Would I get a better ally in her? Would Varek even go for it, but more importantly, would it stop him from trying to sell me off? Maybe just the threat of it might spur Ronan into some sort of action. The drama might be entertaining, but I reserve the plan for later, when Liora isn’t so pissed off with me.
We arrive at a door on the third floor. The guard unlocks it, and Liora pushes it open. I step inside and look around. It’s the same stone as the tower, but the chamber is sprawling, warmed by a crackling hearth, the bed draped in heavy furs and blankets. A carved table sits beneath the window, holding nothing. A rug in Caldaran colors spreads across the floor.
It’s mostly undecorated and a far cry from the luxury of Solara, but it’s probably more than luxurious by Caldaran standards. It’s also very calculated. None of this is generosity. This is a performance, a deliberate arrangement meant to make me grateful for leaving the tower.
I can almost see Varek’s hand in it, measuring how long it would take before I realized this is nothing more than a prettier cage. There’s no way he believes I’m “broken” enough to bow my head to his machinations yet. He’s had to move his plans up, but why?
A movement catches my eye. A young woman is at the far side of the chamber, nervously coming from a small room off the main chamber. She carries a length of cloth over one arm and does not meet my eyes. Her shoulders are hunched, and she radiates this sense of anxiety. I recognize her. She’s the servant from earlier I passed on the way to Tamsin’s workshop.
I glance out the window. There are no bars. This room is nowhere near the training pitch. It’s too high for me to climb down, though lower than the tower. The window offers a slightly different view of the blanketed white forest, stretching down the mountainside.
“Your bath is ready, princess,” the servant says quietly, gesturing toward the chamber she just exited.
Interesting. I am almost certain that Varek didn’t order a bath, not this early at least. She must have drawn the bath in a hurry or had a lot of help hauling hot water, though maybe it is all just melted snow instead of well water. I follow her into a bathing room, the air warm with steam from water in a large but shallow basin.
If this is what passes for a bath in Caldara, the country was in a more dire state than I thought. Hot water is a luxury, yes. But there were ways to make it more accessible. I enter the chamber. The door closes behind me, and Liora leaves.
I watch her wring her hands as she prepares towels, her face pale. Finally, I ask, “Why are you so nervous?”
She freezes. “You may not believe me, but I mean you no harm.”
“Why should I believe you do?”
She glances up at me. “I am a servant of Alpha King Varek’s.”
“And yet you have something to tell me, and it’s not a message from him. So tell me.”
She hesitates, worrying her lip. Then, after a long pause, she whispers, “You must not, under any circumstances, marry the king who has come.” She shudders. “Or his son.”
Her voice trembles. “If you do, you’ll end up dead. Like all the others.”
“I have no interest in doing so, but I am curious as to why you are so convinced.” I strip. “And there is no need to attend to me. I’m a warrior more than a princess. I can wash myself.”
There is little need for an attendant with such a shallow basin. I step into the water and find it already cooling, and sink down into the water. It barely covers my feet, washing my hair will be a struggle, so I don’t bother. I start scrubbing the days of grime, wincing at how quickly the water begins to cloud, though I haven’t even grabbed soap.
“Tell me about these others?” I say. “You know the king and his son?”
“Yes, he's the Alpha King of Hyath.”
I tut. They came to Solara once. His presence made my skin crawl, and I avoided being anywhere near him and his son for the rest of their stay in the castle. She sinks onto the stool beside the basin and offers me the bar of hard soap.
“The women they wed always die. Some say they simply die of sickness, but the climate is too warm for that. The few rumors that do make it out are all lies. They hide the truth religiously.”
I nod. I've never known the prince of Hyath to be married. I scan her face. The fear in her eyes is real. It’s terror. My stomach knots.
“Tell me how you know this.”
“I ran from Hyath,” she whispers. “I was staying in a small town that they kept under tribute. When Caldara’s forces swept through, I stayed behind, hoping the fighting would hide me. I begged for work, anything, and they put me in service here.”
Her eyes glisten, but she doesn’t stop.
“My sister… she was given to the prince. His father prefers a woman to be bred and bear a child before they marry. Our father was paid handsomely for her.” Her voice cracks. “When she died, we didn’t even get her body. They demanded another bride or my father would have to return the money. It’s in all the contracts, I believe.” She wraps her arms around herself and stares bleakly at the floor. “My father was ready to sell me. Packed me up in the same carriage he sent my sister to her death in. I ran before he could.”
She sniffles, rubbing at her eyes. “He didn’t know that my sister had been with child. That she’d given birth to a little girl.”
The ache in my chest is sharp and furious. They wanted a male heir and were slaughtering every failure. The question of how many bodies are buried beneath Hyath, ground into the mortar, or simply left to rot in some catacomb made me sick.
“How much was your father paid? Are you from Hyath?”
She nods. “Several times my sister’s weight in gold.”
I consider it. Hyath’s coffers are vast, so Varek could demand an even higher price for me. I think of his eyes burning hot with desire. Did he want me enough to forgo a heap of gold? Would he condemn me to such a fate if I told him it was a scheme? Would he even believe me?