“Alright, then,” Cadmus said. “But if you don’t return, I will have Trevelyan’s head in exchange.You depart at the end of the week.”
Cadmus dismissed the captains, and Evander left without so much as a parting nod.
Chapter forty-three
Valenna
As she climbed the steps to her room, a worm of doubt wriggled into Valenna’s exhausted mind.
Evander was alive. She was going to see him again soon. She could hold him, kiss him, meld into him. But her childhood thoughts returned like a cruel imp perched on her shoulder.
You don’t deserve to have him back. Yes, he’s alive, but he’ll never love you the same after what you’ve done.
Valenna pushed her door open and stepped over a clump of red-capped mushrooms clustered on the threshold. Evander would forgive her. He would understand.
And yet he’d looked at her so coldly in the council room. But of course, he had; he was being cautious. Why else would he be here, if not to find her? He loved her; he was going to save her. Wasn’t he? But Hera was also here, and he couldn’t lose Hera. Perhaps he had come because of the hydra.
Your magic is what broke him, and your magic dealt the death blow. You saved him from your own hand, and he would be a fool to have you back.
Was Evander playing a part, or was he angry at her? Did he come out here to rescue her or to punish her? Surely he had some wild plan to escape Sennalaith before the invasion. He’d told her he’d rather die than go back to war, so hemust have a plan to escape.
But did she want to escape?If she left, her father would remain unpunished, her wrath unspent.
Lost in a perplexity of fear and hope, Valenna sank onto her bed and ran her fingers over the silky petals of a white bindweed flower twining her bedpost. She recognized the yawning chasm between Valenna Trevelyan and Valeria, the daughter of Cadmus. One was a woman with dignity and self-worth, the other a child, picking the scab off a wound, refusing to let it heal.
She’d been holding that child’s hand for years now, dragging her to Largotia and Silvanlight and into the Whyspenware, when she should have let her go the day she met Evander. She couldn’t have both him and vengeance. She had to choose between them.
Valenna pictured her younger self in her memory, and the memory was so real she could almost touch the little girl’s dark, tangled hair, feel her hot breath. The specter crouched on the floor, not weeping, but glaring at the locked door as poison ivy twined up her arms.
“I think I have to leave you behind, Valeria,” Valenna said.
The child scowled.
“You haven’t served me the way I thought you would,” Valenna continued. “I meant to ruin my father, but I nearly ruined Evander instead. And if not for the caladrius bird, he would be dead. Because of us. This magic, it takes and it takes. It cannot make anything beautiful. Even if I did kill my father, I doubt anything good would come of it.”
The figment’s mouth fell open. “Look what Papa did to us!” it said, its voice trembling. “He locked us up in here, made us forget how to cry. We don’t know anything but anger, and anger is our power. Anger is how we destroy that evil man.”
“But before I destroyed an evil man, I destroyed a good man, and a whole village of innocent people.” Valenna knelt on the floor. Valeria shrank from her, her chapped lips crooked withdisgust. “It is too wayward. It will consume me and everything good in me and around me before it touches Cadmus. I have discovered that I cannot hold both love and anger in my heart. The one bleeds into the other. I must choose.”
“He will die,” Valeria said, her voice throbbing with disdain. “And we will not be able to prevent it.”
At first, Valenna thought the child was talking about Cadmus, but then, with a shiver, she realized that the specter meant Evander.
Valenna shook her head. “No. He will not. I’ll make sure ...”
“He will,” Valeria sneered. “We know he will. Because we aren’t good enough for him, and so he cannot belong to us. We are a bad, selfish woman, and we don’t get a happy ending.”
“And you think holding onto this caustic rage will change that? We are not our father, Valeria. We are not responsible for his actions. We will not burn for his sins.”
“How many people have we killed in his name? We may scrub and scrub and scrub, but we will never wash the blood from our hands.”
“I will not wash it away,” Valenna said, standing and turning to the window. “But I will cover it over with soil from my own garden, in some peaceful place, and I will never go to war again.”
Behind her, the figment child began to sing.“Your blood adorns the willow, and your breath is nearly spent. So hear me in the wailing of the sunbird’s last lament.”
“GET OUT!” Valenna shouted, whirling around. But the child had vanished.
Valenna’s knees buckled, and she sank to the floor. She drew up her legs and hugged them. No, she didn’t want to kill her father; she wanted to go home—except her home was a man who must despise her, and her inheritance a battlefield waste.
