Chapter 275: Impossible

Amval

I unfasten a buckle, working quietly alongside Mesut. He doesn’t even look at me, but I know now that he notices. I should have realized all along.

“Sash?” Ingrid yells.

I jerk back.

“Your girl?” Mesut asks with a sly smile.

I shake my head, praying he didn’t recognize her voice. That no one recognizes her at all. I burst out of the stall and find her standing in the middle of the aisle.

“What are you doing here?” I hiss as I approach.

“We need to talk.” This close, I can see her eyes are wide, her chest heaving. “Now.”

My stomach drops. The monster struck again. Another one of my siblings is dead, and I let it happen.

“Outside.” I drag her into the yard, where at least there’s some chance half the stable won’t realize I’ve been sneaking out to see Princess Ingrid at all hours.

She’s shaky and slow. Like a bolt of lightning, I realize another possibility, one I didn’t even see coming—there was an attempt on Ingrid’s life, and she barely escaped. Protective rage surges through me. I’ve been letting my mate put herself at risk while I take shelter outside.

No matter what she has to tell me, one thing is certain–that ends today. Something massive has changed, and I am tired of hiding and waiting. The slow gathering of evidence is only letting the bodies pile up.

As soon as we’re anything approaching out of earshot, I spin up a breeze to disguise our words and nod for her to speak.

“I know who’s behind everything,” she says.

I sway, almost collapse. “No one else is dead? You are safe?”

She nods, barely seeming to hear me. “Yes, and I don’t think anyone else is going to die, as long as we’re careful.”

Relief hits like a shot of Ozkan’s worst liquor, dizzying in its potency. “Thank the Goddess. Who is it? Lord Faruk? Yaqup?”

“No.” She swallows. “It’s Kaloni.”

I laugh, still feeling delirious. “All right, I understand, I don’t have a good enough sense of humor. What did you actually find?”

She stares at me as if she was trying to press a thought into my brain. “That’s what I found. Kaloni is behind your attempted murder and your parents’ ‘accident.’”

I want to laugh again, but my mouth feels like it’s full of sand. I can’t even tell Ingrid how horribly wrong she is. My sister would never do this to me.

“I know how it sounds. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you until I was sure.” She glances over her shoulder. A paranoid gesture for someone who burst into my hiding place and all but called me by my real name.

My anger over someone hurting Ingrid starts to burn into something else, something low and simmering I can’t quite name.

Ingrid plunges onward. “There’s a new rumor in the palace that the deaths were murders, perpetrated by another kingdom, but the kingdoms people are saying don’t make any sense, so I thought that was the perfect cover for someone who thought they might get caught soon. Deflecting blame, you know?”

Somehow, I find myself nodding. This has nothing to do with Kaloni. She wouldn’t resort to petty rumormongering to get her way.

“So I followed the rumor all the way back to the source—and that source is Corwyn Hajni!”

“The lord?” I say blankly. “Isn’t he dead?”

“Escaped.” Ingrid scowls. “And Finn and Xandra decided not to tell anyone this, but Corwyn started the civil war with the help of a group named Astralis. We… don’t know exactly what they wanted, just that Corwyn and Lord Denidor were promised positions of power and that Astralis has significant resources.”

I am dreaming. That is the only possible explanation for why Ingrid would come to me so recklessly with such an impossible accusation and then explain so little. My head aches, and I wonder if I can just lie down in my cot to end this all.

“Amval!” she snaps, and I realize I was looking away. “Are you even listening to me?”

My mouth is too full of sand to explain my thoughts. She’s only a dream, anyway.

Though I did hear whispers that Lords Corwyn and Denidor were implicated in the civil war. Both apparently died in the conflict, so they never amounted to much, but I heard them all the same.

No. If this is not a dream, then Ingrid has somehow lived with my sister for a month and a half and still come to the conclusion she could do this.

“Sorry. I know this is overwhelming.” She shakes her head. “Corwyn is going by a fake name, so it’s obviously bad that he’s here, so I followed him. He went to a secret meeting—with Kaloni!”

“What did they discuss?” I manage.

She looks away. “I didn’t stay long enough to find out. But it was clear they knew each other!”

“Lord Corwyn was discussed as a potential marriage alliance for Kaloni, if she didn’t mate quickly,” I say. “We all met him many times.”

Ingrid blinks. “There are other things. The palace runs like an army now. Maids have to hide to take their free time.”

“Do they have to hide, or do they prefer their privacy?” My voice returns more and more with every word, powered by that simmering in my gut.

“I—” She scowls. “Have you heard about the conscriptions? I wasn’t aware Lightning Cape’s army was weak.”

“There is strong and there is strong enough to conquer wildlands abandoned to rogues,” I reply sharply. Perhaps I wondered something similar, but Ingrid certainly lacks the knowledge to understand why my sister makes her decisions. The very fact that she would accuse her is proof.

Ingrid crosses her arms. “Her coronation speech sounded like something my father would have given, and she’s been keeping—”

“Stop.” I hold up a hand to silence her. “Kaloni has her flaws. She is overly conciliatory and tends to play peacemaker rather than asking for what she wants. But in a hundred lifetimes, no one would compare her to King Gavin. He was a monster.”

“And what do you call someone who murders their parents and brother for the throne?”

“Falsely accused.” I take a step back from Ingrid. The simmering infuses my bones, my muscles, and I ache to hit something. To destroy it. There is no other way to vent this feeling.

Her mouth falls open. “I just fucking proved it.”

“You have a pile of ideas. Implications. Things anyone who actually knows my sister would dismiss in a heartbeat.” I clench and unclench my fists. “I told you it could not be one of my siblings. That is impossible.”

“That’s why it’s such a good plan!” She throws her arms up in frustration.

“For a monster,” I reply. “And I am sorry that you were raised in a family of monsters, but haven’t I earned enough of your trust that you can believe me when I say my family isn’t like that?”

Something sharp flickers across her face, and I know I’ve crossed some line in the sand. Before, I would have seen that line from a mile away and stayed well clear. Mother and Father taught me to. But they’re not here anymore, and I need to find the person responsible, not waste time defending those hurt by them.

“How did you earn it?” she demands. “When you lied to me, or when I caught you lying?”

“When I was perfectly honest and patient with you every second after that,” I exclaim. “But I suppose you wouldn’t have noticed patience. I doubt you even know what it looks like.”

She splutters. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you have jumped from plan to theory to plan to theory like each one was burning down around you when we were barely finished with any of them,” I reply. “And that’s what you’re doing now. You saw a shred of something that could imply, in the wrong hands, that Kaloni had some role in what happened to my parents, and you’re ready to accuse her.”

“I waited!” She throws a glare at me, and I meet it with one of my own. “I’ve suspected her since her Goddess-damned coronation, and I waited until I thought you would believe me. If we want to talk about who should be trusting who, maybe we should talk about that.”

Abruptly, I can see everything clearly. Ingrid, the shape of the weeks we’ve spent together, even that first meeting—they all come down to one thing.

I take another step back and say quietly, “This is because you don’t want the throne.”

“What?”

“You told me yourself. You don’t want to inherit. If you distance me from my family, I’m far less likely to want to stay here, even if you end up being wrong.”

She gestures at my veil and uniform. “Are you honestly accusing me of being the one putting the most distance between you and your family?”

“I’m doing what I had to.” The simmering grows cold, intractable. “You could have left at any time. Your family has been begging you to, haven’t they?”

She stares at me for a long moment, open-mouthed. “I wanted the truth. I wanted justice.”

“And when you discovered my secret?” That was when everything changed. Before then, she had no throne to run away from, scared of all the responsibilities it carried.

“I wanted to fucking work alone!” she yells. “This was your idea, remember? You dragged me into your orbit, kicking and screaming.”

Her yelling doesn’t impress me anymore. I’ve seen worse from her.

“If you don’t want to hear what I have to say, then I’m very happy to go do exactly what I wanted from the beginning,” she snaps.

My mark sears, screaming for me to tell her to stay. Maybe she has a reason that will make this all make sense, and then I can prove to her why she’s wrong. If we can just stop yelling, there must be some common ground left between us.

Passion flames in her blue eyes—but I’ve learned well enough how much and how deeply she cares for all her interests. It’s one of the things I loved about her.

Love about her.

Will love about her again, someday, when I can stop feeling like there is a knife wedged in my throat.

“I do not want to hear it,” I say, turning back to my work and letting the winds surrounding us die.