“It wasn’t my nanny who saved me. It was the soldier that my father gave me to. He took me away. He brought me to those people.”
“Why did they tell you that it was a nanny?”
“I don’t know. It must’ve been to protect him. It must’ve been. He must not have been able to kill a child. My father was too much of a coward to do it. He should’ve done it. He should have raised his sword and struck me down the way he did my mother.”
“I still can’t understand. Where is your father?”
“I don’t know. For all I know they might have killed him anyway, but he tried to get out of his own death in the most cowardly way possible. He betrayed us. He betrayed the country. He would see his own son killed.”
“Oh…”
He put his hand on his forehead. Because then there were more memories. More and more.
His mother. Reading to him. It wasn’t a nanny in his memory, telling him about Freya.
There is another way to be a warrior. One who leads with love.
“My mother,” he said, his voice rough. “She was my best friend. She was the most important person in my life., I… My father, he was my hero. I saw him as a man who was strong. The kind of king that I wanted to be when I grew up.
“But my mother… She was the one who cared for me. She read to me every night. I felt so safe. I always felt so safe. The palace was my home, the seaside escape was a dream and I trusted them both.”
“Of course you can’t trust now. Of course everything feels like manipulation. Of course it all feels like a lie.”
He looked at Fern, who looked devastated. Her green eyes were filled with tears, her complexion pale.
He had nothing to say to comfort her. Not when he felt entirely undone by the realization.
“It wasn’t real. None of it. My father didn’t love us. We were never the family that we appeared to be. Not if one day he could decide to raise his own hand against his wife.” He pressed his hand to his stomach. “I had no memories. I had filled those blank spaces with an idea, with an ideal. And none of it is true. My father was complicit in what happened to this country, to our family. He saved his own skin. But at the cost of everyone else. Everyone else. My mother, me, the citizens of Asland. Then he burned it so that no one would know he survived. I am… I am shot through with tainted blood.”
“No,” she said. “Don’t say that. You aren’t. You are brave. You are a man who has spent your entire life fighting against what happened to you. Because maybe you did tell yourself a new story. And maybe you didn’t remember, but I believe that your body knew. And has known all this time. You are a good man. You brought yourself up from nothing to save this country, and your father never would’ve done that. He would’ve laid down and died in the dirt. A man so cowardly that he would kill hisown wife, and give his son over to be killed… He would never do what you did.”
“I don’t know that,” he said.
He felt like an imposter. Suddenly it all felt like a lie. He had been meant to come back and rule this country. And yes, he had known that he would be a different sort of ruler to his father, but in many ways he had felt like he was restoring the rightful bloodline, but his father had sold it away. He had sold them.
He had betrayed them, and left them. He had sacrificed everything for his own gain.
Yes, he had lost the throne, but he had… What he was out there living?
The very idea made him feel sick. That his own father was out there watching all of this, watching the return of his son, watching him discover that he had not succeeded. From the comfort of…whatever new existence he had fashioned for himself.
“I will find him,” Ragnar said. “And I will have him killed.”
“Ragnar. I understand that you want revenge. But the work that you’re doing here in this country is so important. And revenge…”
She stopped.
“What? What is it that you have to say to me?”
“Nothing. You saw your father kill your mother. I’m not going to tell you to take the high road. I can’t say what would benefit your soul, not today. Not knowing that he did that. Not knowing that he passed you off to a soldier to be killed.”
She was still sitting with him, on the floor, as she had been that morning that she joined him after they’d first made love.
“Of course you don’t like to be too comfortable. The only time you ever were it all turned out to be a lie.”
She was stroking his face, and he couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t bear any tenderness with the vile memory still echoing in his head.
“Leave me,” he said.
