“You trusted me for years. You trusted me with more important missions than training a mortal, and I never—” She heard where that sentence was going and stopped it. “I’ve earned my place.”
There it was. Still her arrogance. More important than training a mortal when that mortal—when Lightbringer—was more important than any one of us. And most of all, that mortal was mine.
“You hurt her. She flinches away from you. She deserves to be safe and at home in Bismyth.” And at my side.
“You’re never going to move past one mistake.”
I looked at her. “Is it one mistake? Or is it who you are?”
She absorbed that. Her anger was visible. “She doesn’t know what you did. Does she? All of it. From the beginning.”
Her threat was clear.
“I’ve unwrapped my secrets for her, Maura. She knows I plotted for her sake.”
“You mean you told her enough to satisfy her.” The words landed with a quality I didn’t like. “You found her because she was dragon-marked. You’d been looking for her for years before you found her. You weren’t drawn to her. You were drawn to how she could serve your plots.”
“It began one way. It has become something else altogether.” I didn’t like to expose how I felt for Cara, not like this.
“Has it?” she demanded, her brows arched. “Do you truly love her? Or have you made yourself love her, because it keeps her close?”
“Don’t speak to me of what you cannot understand.” My voice was cool, but still calm. “You cannot fathom what I feel for Cara.”
She would find a way to imply just that to Cara: that I loved her for what she could be, not for what she was. Corbyn had not helped. I had seen the wound open up under Cara’s tough skin when he called her Lightbringer, the fool.
Before that, she had looked at me so tenderly when she admitted no one had ever chosen her as I had.
“No, but I can fathom what she feels for you.” Her words were hot, filled with bile. “You’re not going to tell her about the past, because if you do, you might lose her, and if you lose her, you lose everything that truly matters. You’re waiting, aren’t you, until you can offer her so much you’re sure she won’t walk away? Until you’re sure she won’t abandon you as you were by everyone who sees the cruel, manipulative truth behind all your charms.”
I’d known this cruelty was within her. It still cut. She was right in the way partially true things were right, seeded with just enough truth to make the rest land.
I let the silence hold. “Are you done?”
Emotions chased each other across her face. I’d given her nothing; she’d known I would give her nothing, and now she reckoned with being right about that too. “Allow me inside again, Fear. I’ll keep your nasty little secrets. She’ll forgive me.”
“She’ll try. But I won’t.”
She nodded once. The movement of someone confirming something they had already suspected and were done disputing. “And would she flinch away from you if she knew you gifted her those nightmares? If she knew you were the reason she felt as if she were burning alive before the recruits’ Trial? You inflicted more pain than I ever did.”
My anger—and underneath it, the impossible desire to remake the past—that she had provoked would have been invisible to most people.
But a knowing, satisfied smile ghosted over her lips, reminding me it was not invisible to Maura. She had spent years learning to read me, and I had spent years letting her.
“I caused her suffering, but no damage. You almost killed her with your arrogance.” I reminded us both.
“Don’t sell yourself short, Fear. There’s still plenty of time for you to kill her with your arrogance. We all know she can’t yet fly. Until she does, Bismyth can’t leave the Trials. You are stranded here by her weakness.”
“Do you think threatening me will bring you back into our family?” I chose the words carefully, cruelly. “Go back to Obsidian.”
“I’m not wanted in Obsidian. Not truly. I’ve been abandoned by them and by you…. Though I have always been loyal to you, you are not loyal.”
If she fancied herself abandoned, she had told herself a story I was not going to successfully wrench away from her. There is no point in arguing with someone who had devoted hours to lovingly constructing their justifications into castle walls and spires, sealing themselves inside.
Her gaze fell from my face to my feet, and I realized at the same time she had that I had moved away, creating distance between us on every level. Her gaze flickered back up, and in her shadowed eyes were both pain and the promise of pain.
“Maura.” Command in my tone; whatever other emotions were beneath it, I did not want to examine.
“I’m going.” She stood unhurried, though the tension was still etched in the line of her neck, the strain of her jaw. She added, with the gentleness of someone extending an undeserved courtesy, “She deserves to know who she is to you. And that ifyou’d wanted her to hear it from you, you’d have told her by now, Fear.”
