“Yeah,” Skylar agrees, and tries to swallow the lump in her throat.
Orinithia and Maya. Two women, caught in the crossfire between warring nations. Two women who died because they were in the wrong place, having met the wrong people. Who died protecting someone they loved.
“What was she like?” Axel’s voice is gentle.
“I don’t really know. I only have pieces of memories. A song she used to sing, but if I try to remember it, the words don’t even sound real. The fact that she liked to stock the house full of flowers. That she’d make all the moving around we did an adventure, every time.” She breaks off at that, thinking of the real reason. Thinking of how scared her mother must have been every day—and how she never let it show.
“I don’t remember what she looked like, not really,” Skylar continues. For a while, after her mother was killed, Skylar used to try todraw her mother’s face into focus. But with it came the terror in her eyes, as she told Skylar to run. “I don’t have anything of hers, apart from this.” She touches the pin in her hair. “So sometimes, it’s hard to remember she was a real person at all.” She feels guilty saying it—because if she doesn’t remember, who will?
Axel looks at her pin. “I’m sorry for taking it from you,” he murmurs.
“Of all the things to be sorry for.” She rolls her eyes, but doesn’t quite pull off the gesture. Because although she doesn’t like to admit it, she doesn’t feel right without her pin. It comes to her, the way memories of her mum only sometimes do—her mother sliding the pin into Skylar’s hair, a few weeks before she died. Like she knew, somehow, what would happen.
But this is yours, Mama.
And now it’s yours. And you mustn’t ever lose it, Skylar. Because without it, you’ll never find your way home.
But where is she supposed to find her way back to now?
“I need you to know,” Axel begins slowly, “I didn’t understand, why I was being asked to Read the commander’s emotions that day. I didn’t even know the king had been with someone, before Ottilie—and I had no idea they’d sent someone to kill your mother. To try to kill you,” he adds softly—and she’s somehow glad that he’s said it out loud, that he’s not trying to deny it.
Skylar nods, and when she shifts, her shoulder brushes against his. “I know.” Because he was only a kid, wasn’t he? He couldn’t have known. They might have grown up on opposite sides of the castle walls, but they were both, in their own ways, completely powerless.
And yet, he stayed. He works for these people—even after learning what they’ve done. He must sense her change of mood, because his posture stiffens slightly. “What are you thinking?” he asks—his voice just on the edge of casual. She supposes, although he’s trying not to Influence her emotions, he can’t stop Reading them. Just like she can’t stop herself from sensing the energy around her, wherever she is.
“Why did you stay? After your mother died, and all these years later… Why do you work for them?”
He is quiet for a moment, his fingers drumming against the grass. “When my mother died, my father fell apart. He worked for the king,too, but up near Sarkan’s Pass—he ran a small estate there.” Born into nobility—what must it be like, to never have to fight to survive? “I was supposed to go back there, once I’d had the best education there was to offer at the castle—a perk of my mother’s job.” Skylar nods like she understands any of this, when the entirety of her education was reading the same children’s book over and over.
“He killed himself,” Axel says flatly. “After she died, he took his own life.”
Skylar’s heart jumps and her fingers dig into the ground. He stares straight ahead. “Turns out, the estate was in a mess. He’d been hoping she would come back and fix it all—he wrote that in a letter to me,” Axel adds, bitterness coating his words.
“Fucking Vaar,” Skylar whispers. It’s not exactly eloquent, but it’s all she’s got. “I’m so sorry.” Because she is. Because he lost not one but two parents. And because she knows what it’s like to grow up feeling alone.
His chest expands with the next breath he takes. “It was a long time ago. But I’m trying to explain…” He runs a hand through his hair—and she doesn’t need to be a Reader to know he’s struggling to find the words. “When that happened, I had nothing. No family, no workable estate. And to top it all off, Zryan had to fight off the witch assassin himself—meaning my mother technically failed at her job.”
“I don’t think dying for someone constitutes a failure, personally.”
“The king and queen could have looked at it as such, if they’d wanted to. Some rulers would.” Skylar makes a sound of disgust—at the fact that some would, and at the fact that he is somehow making this into a compliment. “But they didn’t. Queen Ottilie, she offered me a place here, at the castle. A purpose. A home.”
There it is again, that word. Home.
“So you feel like you… owe her?”
“I suppose so. But it’s more than that. I’ve seen, since being here, what is happening to this country. I know how important it is to keep the Heart’s magic flowing. I know you don’t agree with the methods—and that’s okay. Maybe, when you’re queen, you’ll be able to find a better way. But believe me when I say that all I want is to minimize the suffering. Because it could be so, so much worse.”
When you’re queen.There is a lot to digest, but those three words churn around her mind.
“Skylar?” She glances at him. “I’m sorry for the way I treated you when you arrived.”
“Full of apologies tonight, aren’t you?”
He ignores her attempt to lighten the tone. “My mother died to save Zryan. She loved him—and I know she wouldn’t have been thinking of the fact that he was a prince when she tried to defend him. But ultimately, she still gave her life so he could duel. So that Vatra could win.”
“And I screwed that up, when I came along,” she says, and she’s pretty sure, this time, she keeps the bitterness at bay.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
