Gods and their Saints I can't do this. I can't watch as my brother will crumble beneath my words. I can barely make it past the sting of betrayal that shudders his eyes and pauses his swinging arm.
It too great effort, but it was well worth the spectacle.
I had hoped that I wouldn't have to tell him - that he and Kat would live out in happiness and not be tainted by the truth and corruption of our past - his past. I thought I could keep this one last secret from him forever and spare him this, because this...
They were supposed to have a large family, Willdred and his Rosette, but what good would that have brought.
Get out of my head! I shout at the flashing scenes, casting them back to the shadows of their dark cell.
I can barely live with it, and it hurts.
"Lance-"
"You shut the hell up," my brother grits to Will, laying the point of his blade at Will's throat.
"Lance..." I bring my brother's attention back to me and step out of the rain beneath the canopy. Rohana steps aside but stays close.
"Put down the blade and let me explain. Please. Please, Lance," I repeat when he still doesn't lower the blade.
"Why are you protecting him?" I flinch at the anger in his eyes. "He killed Rose - he killed our father!"
"I know."
"He was standing over her dead body!"
"I know."
"Her blood was on his hands!"
"I know!" I yell back. I hear the anger that strikes my voice and I hate the sound of it. He doesn't deserve any of this.
Such minuscule strings and yet it will cause the most suffering for the rest of your little lives.
He stares at me, eyes still blazing. More hot tears run over my cheeks as I struggle to get the next words out. I can't do it looking at him - or any of them. So I stare at the ground.
"Xaxias, when he...when he would...when he torture me and take...take my memories, sometimes I wouldn't fall unconscious with the pain. I'd-I'd stay awake, and he'd talk. He'd tell me things he thought he could erase but...I remember everything he said."
You think you're strong, but I've already torn you apart before I laid eyes on you.
I lift a shaking hand to my burning temple and look back up at him, already begging him not to hate me. "He told me about how he sent his spies to hunt mom down and torture her to death for trying to escape him, and he told them to make sure that we watched. To drive fear into our hearts. He-he knew that dad would take us back to the assassin's keep and train us, so he sent his two spies to find a way in. To get close to us so he could tear us apart and then be there to pick us up so we would find loyalty to him. When Will came to the keep and we all became friends, Visha and Morana went after him. They manipulated him to gain his trust, and when they found out about Will's fating bond to Rose, he...he used it."
A thing so highly treasured, yet it broke without much fight, Xaxias thought aloud, his fingers playing with my hair he just cut short.
Slowly, Lance lowers the knife. He of all people in the world knows when I'm lying and when I'm not, and I can see it in his face now that he knows now is not one of those times where I am. I wish I were - Saints I wish I was unconscious when Xaxias said all of this. This is a curse. One Will has been carrying for years now but could never say or do anything because what could he do with the damage already done?
I don't want to know this - I don't want to know any of this or to have to tell him or keep going or keep crying. For Saint's sake I want it all gone again. It was all so much easier when it was gone.
I rub at my forehead that aches with the amount of tears I've shed today. There so much - too much to keep trying to explain to try to make him understand, and I...I struggle to keep going, if only because simply carrying the knowledge is tearing me from the inside out.
"I...he..." I take a deep breath, holding it until some resemblance of fucking control let's me talk.
"Xaxias he...he cast a spell that would temporarily allow him to take over Morana's body, and once he did he implanted a part of himself into Will's mind by dropping a few drops of his blood into Will's drink one night. From then on out Xaxias became the voice of reason in Will's mind. He told Will to go to the bakery and see Rose, to get closer to her. All the while he kept that fating bond from ever snapping into place and...and that day that Rose asked to be taken to the keep, Xaxias snatched his opportunity and made Will do it. And when she walked into our father's office, Xaxias used his power to shift Will's fating bond to Rose, onto you. He made your senses heighten and your body react to something that felt like the bond...but it...Gods Lance I didn't know," I beg desperately. "I didn't know and I...I didn't believe him when he kept saying it was true but he kept pointing things out and - and - and I thought that nothing that powerful could ever be faked, let alone touched or...or broken."
My body goes cold, but it's not from my wet clothes or the cold night. It's like everything I was just feeling goes suddenly mute. Quiet. It screams into the hole left inside me, because I knew - I know better. And I can see it when his eyes flicker to his right that he knows. He knows what I did, and in knowing so, the truth hits him harder than a horse running him over in a full sprint.
"It wasn't real," I whisper.
It scares me to feel the truth of it for the first time myself. To understand that Xaxias won a long time ago, we just hadn't known it yet.
"It wasn't real. He set it all up. She was never supposed to be ours."
I see when it happens. When my brother's world shatters in his eyes. No tears fall from them, because no tear could possibly hold everything he's feeling. But mine do. Mine return to running like a full waterfall, and I can't stop it.
I try to go to him and hold his hand but he steps out of my reach. His arm drops the blade completely, the steel sending shocks through the ground that end up in my own bones, creating fractures that only take one more hit to fully break. It makes my chest cave but I can't take my focus off of him.
He doesn't want comfort. He wants the rest of the story - but Gods be damned I don't want to give it.
One day the ground you so desperately hold together will crumble of your own doing.
"I..." I try to clean myself up enough to talk. The best I get is wiping my running nose, and I can't look him in the eyes anymore. Not when I feel like I'm the one twisting the knife lodged in his heart.
"Xaxias said that he wanted Will's betrayal to hurt, so he let his illusion between you and Rose continue on until you developed real feelings that were so strong, he no longer needed to make you think you were fated. You both believed it so much that you were fated that all he had to do was keep Will away. He didn't expect Will to end up finding me. He didn't expect..."
I don't bother finishing the thought when it has Will already turning away in shame and guilt, and Lance fisting his hands again.
"That night that we...Will found a way to push Xaxias out of his mind. With him having stayed with me the last few nights, Visha and Morana weren't able to give Will the dose of Xaxias's blood in order to control him. But when he found out what Will and I did, he cast a spell instead to take over Will's body. It was Will's body standing over Rose's corpse, but it wasn't Will. It was Xaxias. He killed Rose. Not Will. He possessed Will's body again to make him watch as Morana shoved the arrow into dad's chest. And again when he forced Will to torture me and...when he..."
Puppets are easier to play with when they're broken. After all, they're only held tighter by strings.
My hands shake vigorously. With anger, with fear of speaking those words - with everything. It's taking so much out of me to relive it all, only to see it through different eyes. The old pain resurfaces and becomes anew, and it hurt before but this...
"When Will would come to see me in the cell in between the...sessions, he'd let us talk. He'd let Will return to himself and let us have those few minutes only because he knew what it did to us when he would once again push Will out of his own mind and...and rape me, I...I'm the Elemental Queen of Thralia. If-If he sired my child, he'd have what he's been after for all these years. And if I hadn't driven that arrowhead into my stomach and killed his child, then he'd-"
"His what?"
Everything in me goes utterly silent.
Your brother was only the beginning, and you will fall just as low as he when I am finished.
I forgot Darius was here. Gods, he wasn't supposed to find out like this - he wasn't supposed to find out at all, but if he was, I was going to tell him when the time was right and we weren't in the middle of a war, fighting for our lives, and me telling my brother that his first love was a fucking lie. This isn't how any of it was supposed to go.
I just keep ruining everything I touch.
You are no savior. You're an executioner.
I don't look at anyone anymore. I can't. If I look then I'll end up telling them everything, and I can't tell them everything. If they knew...oh, Gods if they knew...
The weight of it all has my knees buckling. My chest feels like someone's sitting on it, my throat aching from the sobbing and the explaining, and my heart...my heart aches. It hurts so much that I think it really is breaking and making my chest heave so much that I'll start coughing up blood again. All of it. It's worse than what Xaxias did to me for two months. He took so much and inflicted so much, but that was bearable. This isn't.
It's why I locked myself in the tent. Because all of it - every death, every moment in my life where I lost more people than I could save, every truth Xaxias righted in the lies of my past - came rushing back. It hit me like a tsunami and I couldn't fight it. Not as my feet were swept clean off of the solid ground and I was thrown around, cut, and slammed into a thousand things without reaching the surface for air. I couldn't hear past the noise of them - couldn't see straight without a hundred images both happy and mournful - blinded me. All I had was my power, and I shot it out blindly to keep everything and everyone away because what I was feeling was too much. All of it is too much, and I want it gone. I don't want my memories if this is how they feel. I don't want to remember my mother, or my father, or Rose, or the truth, or any of them if it hurts this much to do so. I don't want them anymore. I want them gone. I want it all gone again.
I want what I had when I came out of that cell. A new life, a second chance, and no memory of whose blood forged me into who I was.
I can't take it. I can't...I can't...
Two hands lay on my shoulders as I kneel on the ground. I look up to find Garrison kneeling before me.
"I'm sorry," I whisper, not really knowing what the apology is for. "I'm sorry."
His face is calm, just as it's always been, and his voice is steady as he says, "It's okay."
More tears well up in my eyes, and I catch movement over his shoulder to find my brother backing away from me. I reach again but he's already too far away, "Lance, please. Let me explain..."
He turns away and walks off into the rain before I can say anything more.
"He got you pregnant?" Darius's dead voice rings like a bell tolling the announcement of death.
I fall. I just fall, only kept from the ground by Garrison's arms as they catch me and hold me tight. I cry against the warmth peeking through his leathery under armor.
I want it gone.
I shove Garrison aside and search the tent through blurry eyes. My chest rises and falls in rapid motions when I still can't find her, but then I do, and I practically spring right for her. Tanith is already shaking her head, but I take her wrists in a grip I know is too tight but can't bring myself to care for, and set her hands to my temples.
"Take them back," I beg her. "I don't want them."
"Mater-"
"I want them gone, Tanith. Please, they hurt - it all - it all hurts. Make it go away - take them all back. Take my memory. Take it, please."
Again, she shakes her head, her own eyes filling as fast as mine the more I plea. She whispers my name, but I don't hear it.
"Take them!"
My hands let her go before she gives her answer, already giving up the small hope that I clung to when I see the pity and the sorrow drowning her face. "I can't."
I slam my hands to my head and do the thing I told myself I wouldn't do. I beg for Xaxias to take me.
Take it back. Take it back. Take it back. "Take it back. Take it back."
The sobs return, and I try willing all the memories to vanish once more, but it doesn't work.
"Pater-"
I feel his feet spin on his heels as he whirls toward Rohana. "You knew?"
"Roseia was the one who figured it out in Visha's riddle. She told everyone after you and I left to get drunk in the Moonrise Tower. I found out through Willa."
"You all knew?" The pain of betrayal stings his words, but they shouldn't be going to anyone but me, and that just makes it all worse. "And none of you thought to tell me? You just kept it a secret? For what reason?"
"We thought it would die on its own," Rohana continues. "The baby's life was connected to Xaxias and we thought that if we kept her away from him long enough, it'd die. Her symptoms were minor and slowly vanishing. We assumed it was working."
"Assumed?"
Rohana doesn't answer, no one else going to do so either. I can feel his anger rising. It just adds to the guilt and pain already overtaking my body, but I...I have to tell him. He won't listen to anyone else. Not after they've all admitted to keeping something from him - the only people he thought he could trust. Saints, he can't even trust me anymore.
"It's my fault." My voice is nothing more than a flake of a whisper, but he can hear it, I know he can. He looks just as angry as Lance did, and if he walks off too, I don't know what will become of me.
"They didn't account for me using my power to protect it." His eyes burn holes in me when they snap to mine. "I didn't realize I was doing it," I desperately explain, standing back on my feet. "I didn't know what I carried or what it meant until today. When I saw my mother's ring around your neck, my memories came rushing back and everything - everything Xaxias took came back - and it scared me. Remembering it all scared me - it's still scaring me. I saw your face and I remembered that day after my father died and you tried making me smile - all day. I saw all of you," I turn to the Bhaltayr "-and I remembered the day we all raced our horses through the King's Garden. I remember each and every one of your smiles and your laughs and the sound of your voices - I...I remember the day I gave you your name. The Bhaltayr. I remember smiling when Ethan and Gabe would steal lustful glances at each other when no one was looking. Or when Alister would try and mimic Vlad and Garrison's stoic posture and serious faces and end up looking like a fucking idiot. I remember Benny and Amel's identical silent smiles, and Alex's weird faces he'd make with the orphans. I remember how Ozzie and Mal would always play rock, paper, scissors for who would get the twin blades during training, and that Winston he..." a soft laugh breaks through the tears. "He has the best ass out of all of you."
Several protests quietly echo at my claim. It brings a sad smile to my face as I stare out at them, and them back at me with somber expressions.
Brothers. I called them brothers once. When I felt like I was losing all the family I had, they gave me another one full of ridiculously stupid men that made me smile and forget the shadows that lurked in our future.
"I remember the Elysian Ball." Tears fall again, though they're lighter and not so furious. "I remember you all begging me not to save you, but I couldn't...I couldn't live in a world without knowing that you all weren't alive yourselves, and happy. I needed you to be happy, because if you died...if you died, I..." A sob chokes off my words.
I try swallowing it down so I can finish my sentence, but I just won't go away and I bury my face in my hands. Alex walks to me before I can and lifts me off the ground, arms squeezing me so hard around my waist that breathing becomes harder. I pull my arms out from where they're tucked between us and wrap them around his neck and bury my face in his neck. He smells like sweat and shit, but I miss him too much to care.
"You know you made my life ten times harder when you came into that palace three months ago." I laugh against his skin. "But I wouldn't trade anything for it."
Another pair of arms wrap around both of us. I raise my head to find Alister there. He kisses my head as the others come over and join in until there are twelve sweaty men stacked one on top of the other in a group hug.
Gods I missed them so much. So much that the pain in my chest roots from it, not the unearthly grips.
"Some would say this is sweet," Rohana comments from outside our circle, watching on with boredom. "But I say you all look absolutely ridiculous."
Henry detaches himself from the group and turns on her, arms still wide open. "Awwww. I think Rohana needs a group hug."
"Touch me, and you'll lose your manhood."
"I'll take my chances." I smile as I watch her back up a step for every one that he takes toward her. Those two have no idea what's in store for them.
Behind her, Serephina creeps up and pins Ro's arms to her side in a bear hug of her own. "No!"
Henry ignores her warning and wraps both women in his arms. Ethan and Gabe run over with those stupid goofy smiles next, then the rest of them follow until it's just me and Alex again. He sets me back on my feet gently, for once not paying attention to his friends.
"Go ahead," I tell him. He smiles and kisses me on the cheek before joining the rest of the Ginerva as they happily leave their posts to join in. All except Nilsa who eats some crackers, and Garrison who stays behind me.
Rohana's face is murderous, completely at odds with everyone else's. "I'm going to kill all of you in your sleep."
I'd believe her if I didn't know she was lying. She's could've easily used her power to make an easy getaway, yet there she stands, rolling her eyes at their sweet comments.
They slowly start to peel away layer by layer. Serephina keeps her arms around Rohana so she can't attack anyone until they're all a safe distance away. The Lady One looks like she's debating her odds against all of them.
"I didn't mean to hurt you - any of you." I take a deep breath and turn around to face Darius. "Especially not you."
He doesn't say anything, that blank stare from earlier tonight back to keep me from reading him. I hate that he feels the need to do it. He used to never do it - not with me. He never had to with me, and when I finally realized that I didn't have to with him either, I let him see that.
But he's gone now. I did this to him. I broke him, and I don't know how to fix it. I don't know how to get back to how we were. To the teenage assassin with a locked and fortified heart, and the Prince with one that he wore on his sleeve and offered
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