Chapter 12 12
Narnia's POV
Your mother is dead because my father killed her,” he uttered, his voice ragged and pained. "The curse started with him."
It was Nyrand this time and his voice came to her soft but steady. The Guild sent hunters out to find a Moonlight Guardian twenty years ago. They wanted her blood for its Anita Hill-ian power. It was your father," he canted an eye toward Elias, "who led that hunt. But when he boxed her in, she hit back. She wouldn’t be taken alive. And, with her last breath, she cursed him.”
"What kind of curse?" I was able to ask, despite the tightness in my throat.
"That his kin would be what he hunted," Nyrand said. "That his children would bear the wolf, would change under the light of the moon, would feel what she felt. The curse was even to go race by race until the debt was paid.”
Elias emitted a noise as though he had been hit. "And it passed to me."
"Yes," Nyrand confirmed. "Haydeé, you are the avenging curse of your mother. The son atoning for the father’s sins.”
My mother. Not his mother. Mine. She had once laid a curse on the man who did her to death, and that curse had come home to Elias. The man I should hate. The man I wanted to hate. The man I couldn’t hate if the wolf inside me demanded it of him.
“I’m sorry,” Elias said, and his voice cracked on the words. "Narnia, I am so sorry. I can’t un-make what my father made. I cannot bring her back. But I swear, I had no idea. Had I known, never would I..."
"Stop," I said, my voice harsher than I meant it to be. "Just stop talking."
He lapsed into a sudden silence, and the forest all around us appeared to hold its breath. Even the alarm bells from the fortresses had become but faint background noises.
My fingers tightened around the cool leather bound journal against my chest. Inside this book were my mother’s words. Her thoughts. Her memories. The only piece of her I would ever get. And I was too shaky to even open it.
The ramifications washed over me in waves. The bond of brothers–and brutal childhood experience.The bond of a mother and her dying wish.The bond between life and it’s curse spoken by a dying mother. We were not united by choice, but we were united in tragedy. By violence. From a debt that would never be paid.
And yet, with all of that, despite the rage and heartache churning in my chest, I still felt it. That inexplainable bond that had Eira reaching for me even while the voice in my head shouted to flee.
I hated it. I resented that I couldn’t hate him the way I should have.
“Narnia.” Nyrand's soft voice brought me back. He approached, concern in his dark eyes. "I must go back before I am discovered assisting you. But I want you to know something.”
He nodded to Elias, then to me, before covering his mouth with his hand. "If circumstances were different. Were you not tethered to him with this curse. If you were free to choose..."
He left the sentence unfinished, but everybody knew what he meant. I saw it in his eyes, the tenderness with which he touched my arm, the softness that crept into his gaze when he looked at me as though I were something fragile and treasured.
He cared for me. Perhaps even loved me. And in a different world, in that different life where curses did not cling to kings and blood was not demanded for debts, I might have loved him too.
But that was not this world.
"I know," I said quietly. "Thank you, Nyrand. For everything."
He nodded, sounding sad but resigned. Then he left, and vanished back into the hole in the hillside, leaving Elias and myself standing alone in the black woods.
All that was unspoken lay thick in the silence between us. Too many questions without answers. So much pain that no words could ever sooth.
I glanced up at Elias to see if it was a joke but all I saw in his face was raw pain. He was the picture of a man who had nothing left. His faith. His purpose. His identity. He had been mauled of everything he believed about himself and all that remained was truth and shame.
“Because of what they all said your people did to my father, I spent my whole f---ing life killing,” he spit out the words in bitter self-self-loathing. "I believed I was righteous. I thought I was on a holy mission. I’ve conducted raids and burned villages and killed families. I did it all willingly, the Guild told me it was right.” He gazed into mine, his golden eye filled with pain. “But my father was the monster. And I became one too."
I kind of wished that I could concur with him. Wanted to tell him that yes, he was a monster, and he deserved to suffer for what he had done. But another part of me, the part that was hooked up to Eira, knew something bone-deep.
"You couldn't have known," I replied softly. "The Guild lied to you. They trained you to be their weapon. They perverted your grief, and your rage, and made it all serve them.”
“That doesn’t make me innocent,” Elias responded at once. "I still made the choices. Every time I drew my sword; every time I commanded the charge, I chose to accept their lies, because the alternative was too horrifying. It’s me.” “I did it, Narnia. No matter what they told me."
He was right. And yet I knew better than many what it was like to live at the mercy of people who defined your whole reality. It had been years since I discovered my uncle’s lies. Thought I was cursed, unwelcome and deserved his cruelty. I had been taking the abuse because I didn’t realize that I could contest it.
We were victims of the very people who are supposed to protect us. Both manufactured by lies and manipulation. Both suffering for the sins of others.
“We can’t go back in time,” I said, speaking slowly, but with feeling. “But at least we can survive the present. That's all we can control right now."
Elias turned to me then, and for the first time since we’d run from that chapel, I saw a little something like hope spark in his eyes. "You would travel with me? After everything you just learned?"
"I don't have a whole lot of options," I replied, not daring to be dishonest. "You were right earlier. If I don’t, the Guild will murder me. If I try to move alone, there is no way that I can live. My wolf is still weak. I have no pack, no home, there’s nobody who wants me.”
“You could try your uncle,” said Elias, but he sounded anything except hopeful. "To Alpha Corvin. He is your family."
I laughed, but it was a bitter and hollow laugh. My uncle left me to rot in your dungeon for the better part of three weeks. He knew from the start that I wasn’t Lysandra and here he trotted me out. He's always hated me, blamed me for my father's betrayal. He does not want me. He never did."
Elias's expression darkened with anger. “Then he’s a moron who doesn’t deserve you.
The words were elementary, but they hit somewhere low in my chest. No one had ever said anything like that to me until then. Nobody had ever told me that I deserved more than what was doled out to me.
I turned my gaze to the journal on my lap, the one in my hands, anywhere but inside of me where I couldn’t make sense of what was happening. "We should go. The hunters are gonna show up in the morning, and I don't want to be here when they do."
Elias nodded and pointed east, to where that wood thickened and darkened. "Three days to the Whispering Woods. Can you walk that far?"
“I’ll be fine,” I said, but really didn’t know if my body could take it. I was tired, frail, still healing from weeks of torture and starvation. But only an idiot would be prepared to admit defeat. I, for one, would run myself into the ground before conceding defeat.
We started walking, further into the wood, seeking distance both from the fortress, and all that we had ever known. The dappled moonlight trickled through the trees, leaving a trail of silver web across the forest floor. The air was redolent of moss and earth and burgeoning life. It was supposed to be calm, but the tension hung heavy between us like a physical thing.
We didn’t say anything for a long time. I concentrated on taking step after step, breathing steadily and not dwelling on everything that Nyrand had told me.
But the silence couldn’t be permanent.
"Narnia," Elias said quietly. I realize that this doesn’t make anything different. My apology means nothing compared to what was stolen from you. But you have to know that I would undo it all if I could. Every raid. Every death. I'm here for all that suffering I made your people endure. If I could exchange my own life to bring your mother back, I would do so without a second’s thought.
I ceased my stride and stared at him. He looked softer, had a younger more vulnerable look about him that seemed intensified in the moonlight. The light caught his golden eye and it shone like a fire.
“Your life would not be a fair exchange,” I replied. “My mother was worth a lot more than that.”
He started and winced as if I had hit him; but I was not to be beaten.
“ ‘But you can’t do anything about it,’ I went on. "None of us can. Your father is dead. My mother is dead. And we're here, trapped in a curse neither of us desired and hunted by men who would either use or kill us.” I let out a breath and steeled myself. "So we survive. That is all we can do."
Elias eyed me, like he was looking for something. Forgiveness, perhaps. Or absolution. But I had neither to give. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
Before we could say anything further, there was a noise in the forest. Distant but unmistakable.
Howls.
But they were wrong. Distorted. Not the natural howls of wolves, but something twisted and inhuman. The noise raised the hair on every inch of my body and sent chills down my spine.
Elias stiffened, head tilted listening as his hearing receptors focused in on the noise. His expression turned grim.
"What is that?" I whispered.
"Guild hunters," he said quietly. “They’re trained to track wolves. And they are using hounds bent by evil magic to track our scent.”
I strained to listen harder, and then amid the howls, I heard something else. Words, barely audible but cast on the wind like a death sentence.
Find the cursed king. Find the Guardian's daughter. The Archon demands their blood.
My stomach dropped. They were not only looking for us. They were hunting us. And they wouldn’t let up until we were captured or dead.
Elias took my hand, with a grip more urgent now, and I felt that spark again. It was that connection that I could feel with Eira coming alive within me, the sensation of being awake and prepared.
“We run,” he said sharply, an edge of resolve in his voice. "Now."
And so we ran into the dark, death howling in our wake.