Page 23 of The Hollow King

“He deserves spoiling. I owe him centuries of it.”

“Perhaps you owe us both.” She said it lightly, but there was a truth beneath it that neither of us needed to examine further, not on a morning as fine as this one.

We walked the courtyard together after, as had become our habit, past the stables where the horses no longer flinched at my shadow crossing theirs, and out toward what remained of the garden. She had taken to it with a determination I found endlessly, quietly amusing, pulling weeds with her bare hands and declaring war on a hedge that had not been trimmed since before her grandmother's grandmother was born.

I offered to cut it back with my claws once, and she had swatted my hand away and told me some things ought to be done properly, with proper tools. I had not argued. I had simply gone and found her the shears.

The sun sat low by the time we finished, gold catching in the dust of the flower beds, and she brushed the dirt from her knees and looked up at the darkening sky with something like contentment on her face. I had seen fear on that face. I had seen resignation, and grief, and a numbness that had frightened me more than any of it. I had not, until recently, seen contentment, and I found I would do a great many things to keep seeing it.

Borin had laid the evening table by the time we returned inside, three settings out of old habit, though he ate in the kitchens now more often than not, insisting he preferred it, though I suspected he simply liked giving us the hall to ourselves. Iona teased him about it and he grew flustered and fled before she could press further.

We ate slowly. She told me of Dornovia, small things she remembered, the smell of her mother's bread, a song her nursemaid used to sing that she could recall only in fragments. I told her what I could of Morana, offering the memories carefully, the way a man offers something fragile that he fears might break again in the giving. Neither of us spoke of what still stood between us, unresolved. There would be time enough for that.

By the time the candles burned low, the moon had risen fully over the courtyard, silver and quiet, nothing like the light that had once split my mirror open and cracked my life in two. Just moonlight. Just night, settling gently over a castle that no longer felt like a tomb.

“Walk with me a while longer?” she asked.

I did not need to answer. I simply rose, and offered her my hand, and she took it.

Chapter 14

Iona

The beast had lost its bite, but as the weeks passed, I began to see who he might have been. He kept his word faithfully and was always a gentleman. Initially, I could see times where he would purse his lips to refrain from losing his temper. Or hear a roar from the other side of the castle.

Poor Borin always came to me for comfort.

Restlessness had taken hold of me so I threw myself into the kitchen or the garden with vigour.

It took me longer than I care to admit to understand what the restlessness actually was.

I had spent so many years bracing for cruelty that I had never learned what to do with its absence. Every day I waited for the man who had bruised my wrists and cracked my ribs to return in some new shape, wearing Varga's face this time instead of my husband's. Every day, he did not come. Instead there was only Varga, quietly attentive in ways I had not been taught to recognise, let alone trust.

He noticed things. Small things. That I preferred my bread torn rather than sliced, the way my mother used to serve it. That I flinched less when he entered a room from my left rather than my right, some old instinct from the husband who had always struck from that side. He never asked me why. He simply began entering from the left, every time, until I stopped flinching at either.

I learned, too, that his castle watched over me even when he did not. A serving girl I had never properly met brought fresh linens the very morning after a nightmare woke me weeping, though I had told no one of it.

Borin appeared at my door within moments whenever my temper flared at the empty hours, as though summoned. When I asked him once how he always seemed to know, he only tapped the side of his misshapen head and said, “Master's eyes are everywhere, Mistress. Master worries.”

Varga worries, I had thought, turning the words over as though they belonged to a language I was only beginning to learn.

I did not know what to do with a man who worried over me. I had spent my whole life being an inconvenience to the people meant to love me, a burden passed from a dying mother to an indifferent father to an aunt who sold me for the price of my own suffering. No one had ever kept watch over my grief before, only profited from it.

And yet here was a beast who had once broken me open with his own claws, now arranging his household around the shape of my smallest sorrows.

I told myself it meant nothing. I told myself a great many things, in those weeks, that grew harder and harder to believe.

I even tried to teach Borin how to read. That did not end well for either of us. The slightest criticism and he was back to hitting his poor head on the wall. But nothing cured the restlessness.

Not the garden, weeded down to bare soil. Not the kitchen, where the cook had begun hiding her good knives from me out of sheer self-preservation. Not even sleep, which came easily enough now that the nightmares had thinned, but left me waking each morning with the same unnamed ache beneath my ribs, waiting to be filled by something I did not yet have the courage to name.

I told myself it was only restlessness.

I was not yet ready to call it anything else.

✛ ✛ ✛

I took another deep breath, yet persisted in pacing the hallway, catching a glimpse of his new bedchamber door each time I walked the length. I talked myself into being here.