Exile (7 page)

She wrapped her arms around her middle where someone had hollowed her out and filled the empty space with remorse. How had things gotten this way? Helping Yiloch take his father’s throne should have been a step toward taking control of her future, but every step she took left her feeling only a little more in control and a lot more alone.

It doesn’t matter. This is my fight.

She lifted her head and set back her shoulders, unwrapping her arms from around herself. All she needed to do was finish her training and move on. As a healer, she could find a position in most any town. It might be better to move well away from Demin. After all, if no one knew her, it would be easier to keep the Order’s secrets and she wouldn’t have to make excuses to anyone any time the Order called upon her.

She passed through the gates marking the entrance to the academy grounds with ascard still extended around her. An Ascard Watchman standing outside a nearby residence tensed and glanced her direction. She felt the light touch of his ability and saw him relax with an almost imperceptible nod to her before he looked away. She bit her lip. The Watchmen might have their inner aspect tuned to recognize the signature of those who had permission to use ascard for non-healing applications, but she preferred that they not notice her at all now that she’d mastered her masking.

She stopped and pretended to look for something in her bag while turning her attention to the masking around her ascard use, testing different weaves to reinforce potential weaknesses. Once satisfied, she turned back to her walk. Her extended ability touched on a familiar ascard signature and her heart stuttered in her chest.

Jayce was a block up the street and heading her way. There were enough people in the area that he hadn’t seen her yet, but she had mere seconds to come up with some way to avoid him. She glanced around, trying to maintain her calm. Stepping into the shadows of the building next to her, she drew on more ascard and molded it, adding the illusion of more weight on her body, darkening her hair to black, and altering her features enough to throw him off.

She waited a moment, letting a few people pass by before stepping back into the street and continuing on her way. Jayce came into view, dusty brunette hair tidy as always, his handsome features lit by a boisterous smile as he talked with a man she recognized from his archery group. Her chest tightened with remembered pain, the force behind his kicks the night he had knocked her to the floor, strong enough to crack her ribs. If she hadn’t had her ascard ability to stop him with, would she even be alive now?

She shuddered.

What right did he have to be happy after all the pain he had inflicted upon her? The temptation to do something, to cause him pain or at the very least trip him up with a bit of ascard manipulation, was almost overwhelming. Her heart pounded with a toxic blend of fear and hatred.

I shouldn’t fear him. I could destroy him with a thought.

The knowledge did nothing to ease that frantic flutter in her chest urging her to run or hide.

Jayce glanced past her. His gaze snapped back for a second look as the two men continued past, his smile faltering. Then he shook his head and resumed his conversation, his smile not as easy as it had been before. He feared her too, but not enough to outweigh the resentment he harbored toward her now. She’d struck a great blow to his pride when Caplin helped her dissolve their engagement.

She maintained the illusion for the rest of her walk, discarding it with a shuddering exhale at the bottom of the staircase leading up to her rooms. Her gaze drifted up those steps to her door and she deflated. The unfortunate truth was that she hated to be alone and that craving for company undermined her purpose. How could she continue taking control of her life when doing so had brought her nothing but sorrow so far?

Perhaps she would take Edan up on the offer of supper after all. It might be amusing to see how Serivar responded to the situation and perhaps she would find a friend in the young lord if she gave him a chance. The fact that she wouldn’t have to hide the King’s Order from him was enough by itself to make befriending him worth some effort.

Tomorrow
.

Several minutes later, she stood staring into her wardrobe, uncertain as to what had compelled her to open it in the first place. After a few more seconds of staring at her assortment of clothing, she drew out the soft gray cloak Yiloch had given her the day she left Lyra. It belonged to his deceased mother who he had loved dearly. A precious gift from a man she couldn’t stop loving, no matter the miles between them. Wrapping the cloak around her shoulders, she walked out to the couch and curled up against a pillow, closing her eyes to savor the welcome memory of his touch.

•

Indigo squeezed her mother’s hand as tight as she could. Her seven-year-old heart fluttered like that of a tiny bird as twelve well-armed soldiers marched into the foyer of their home, moving around either side of the scowling guardsman at their head. All but two began to spread out through the house, searching for something. Those two remained, awaiting orders.

She glanced up, seeking comfort, but her mother was busy glaring at the guardsman, her lower lip trembling while her red-rimmed eyes filling with moisture.

“Serana Milan, you will wait here until the search is complete,” the guardsman ordered. His dark eyes were cold and wary.

What could her mother, fragile as she was, have possibly done to earn the distrust in those eyes?

“I demand to know what’s going on. This is my home.” Serana’s hand trembled in Indigo’s grasp as she shouted at the guardsman.

That cold gaze sank to Indigo and she stepped closer to her mother’s side. “Your husband, Desgard Milan, was arrested this morning for leading an attack against a slave caravan. There is evidence connecting him to numerous other such attacks. He is heretofore stripped of all lands and titles. He will stand trial for treason and face appropriate punishment for his crimes.”

A shudder passed through her mother, shaking her like an autumn leaf in the wind, clinging to its branch. Cold fear spread through the pit of Indigo’s stomach. She squeezed her mother’s hand even tighter. There was no reassurance in it. The hand wasn’t any stronger than her own.

“And what is to become of me?”

Indigo winced at the lack of inclusion in her mother’s question. It stung, though it didn’t surprise somehow.

The guard’s gaze was still on Indigo. She wanted to run from those judging eyes, but then something stirred in their depths, a glimmer of sympathy that vanished when he looked at her mother again. “You will stay here under watch until such time as your husband has been tried and sentenced. If there is no evidence found suggesting your knowledge of or involvement in his crimes, you will be free to leave this place.”

“To go where?” Her voice cracked. She yanked her hand away from Indigo and fled down the hall, sobs echoing back to them.

Indigo watched her go, one of the remaining soldiers giving chase at a nod from his captain. She tried to feel abandoned, but couldn’t generate the sense of loss. How many days of her life had her mother wasted crying and fretting while Indigo’s Lyran tutor educated and cared for her daughter? Her mother cried for her father not to go whenever he left them, sometimes for months at a time, and wept harder still when he returned and took his frustrations out on her. Indigo resented them both in that moment, but her mother most of all. Perhaps, if her mother weren’t so weak, her father wouldn’t stay away so long or be so angry when he was home.

Never, she promised herself then, she would never be like her mother.

A hand opened next to her in offering. Indigo took it, the rough calloused surface so different from her mother’s, and the soldier led her to an adjacent sitting room to wait.

•

Indigo woke to the sound of a horse nickering as it passed in the street below. She sat up, keeping the cloak wrapped tight around her shoulders. Judging by the light, not much time had passed since she lay down. She brushed her cheek with one hand and felt tears there. The dream came back to her then, not so much a dream as a memory banished to the vulnerable realm of sleep.

Her father did come home eventually, about a week after a court inquisitor came to question her mother. He arrived in a wooden box that she remembered thinking was a bit too short for him, along with an escort of ten soldiers. A soldier had come to the door a few hours after dawn that day. Her mother took her along when she answered it, perhaps seeking whatever comfort Indigo’s presence provided.

“It is my duty to inform you that Desgard Milan was tried and found guilty of numerous counts of treason and sentenced to immediate execution,” the soldier had informed them, his professional tone offering no sympathy.

Serana had said nothing. She took Indigo’s hand and led her out into the courtyard of the estate. There was something terrible and ominous about the wagon waiting there, so much so that Indigo folded her arms about herself even now, remembering it. Such a common thing, made cold and foreboding amidst an escort of soldiers who sat their mounts in irritable silence. This traitor had paid the price for his crimes and they were ready to be done with him. Even at seven, Indigo had recognized that sense of annoyance in the air and lifted her chin in defiance of it, taking pride in the fact that her father had defied them for so long. For all that he’d been an infrequent father and a terrible husband, he had been brave enough to stand against the slave trade and free many of its victims, giving them the time and effort he couldn’t seem to give to his own family.

When they approached the wooden box, two men removed the lid. The man beside it, garbed in healer’s robes, had regarded her with pity, an expression that undermined her courage and slowed her step so that her mother had to tug her the last few feet to the back of the wagon. The healer was there to preserve the body until it was properly set into the ground.

Her mother had taken a deep breath, a sound like a wailing wind in Indigo’s ears at the time, and looked into the box. Indigo looked as well. Within the box a man lay, his head tucked in under one arm like a satchel. She remembered staring at his face, familiar in animation, familiar in life, made foreign by this unnatural stillness. When she tried to move away, her mother’s hand tightened on hers again, forcing her to stay. Her gaze drifted away from his face, moving up to the bloody stump where his head belonged. Perhaps she remembered it worse than it was, but the stump had seemed so ragged. Not as clean a cut as they had made when her Lyran tutor, Hadris, was executed for illegal ascard use several months earlier. It was almost as though the headsman had used a dull sword to do the deed, hacking away as one might at a tree.

Her mother spoke with the soldiers then, though Indigo remembered almost nothing of what they said. Her father had left them for the last time. That reality had been stark. Painfully real. The quiet of his flesh and the blood that soaked his clothing burned into her mind.

Silent tears ran down her cheeks now, as they had then.

Then something a guard said had drawn her attention. “You have two days to gather your personal items. This property now belongs to King Jerrin.”

This is the beginning of the end
, she remembered thinking, and so it had been in a way. It was the end of that life and the opening of a door that would start a new life for her.

She would remember the soldier’s words forever for the sad irony in them. Two days was more than they would need, as it turned out. Her mother told her not to pack that evening. They would do it tomorrow. The next morning, Indigo wandered out to the garden where her mother often sat to watch the sunrise in the summer months, waiting for her husband’s next return. The sun was rising. The gentle light of dawn greeted her, falling with a surreal glow upon the broken figure twisted over the stone bench in the garden. Her mother lay there, her back bent in the wrong direction over the bench, her neck twisted at an awkward angle so that her cheek pressed against the flagstone walk. Deep blue eyes, so like Indigo’s own, stared blankly at a red begonia, the first to bloom that year.

Serana Milan had thrown herself from the highest peak of the manor, apparently unwilling to live without her abusive husband. What did it matter that she left behind a seven-year-old daughter? Indigo still felt icy resentment at the memory. She had cried, sobbing inconsolably for days over the death of Hadris. She wept a slow stream of silent tears even now, years later, for her father. Not once had she cried for her mother. The passionate adoration Yiloch had for his mother, which had driven him to do such hideous things in his search for her killer, was unfathomable to Indigo.

And what of the Lyran slave trade that her father had died to try and stop? When she first met Yiloch, though she hadn’t known at the time who he really was, she’d agreed to help him partly in the hopes that doing so would further her father’s dream. She had assumed, given his pride in his country, that Yiloch would want to end the trade, to end the enslavement of his people, but she had never asked. Now that he was Emperor of Lyra, would he try to end that practice? Could she still love him if he didn’t?

What does it matter if I love him or not when we can’t be together?

A clicking sound drew her attention. It was several seconds before she realized she was picking at her fingernails again. She stopped herself, but not before remembering the way Yiloch had placed his hands over hers to quiet that nervous habit the first time they spoke. They barely knew each other then and yet that touch had moved her so deeply. An instant of gentle contact was all it took to show her just how wrong her relationship with Jayce had gone.

Curling back down on the couch, she lay quiet with her memories and brushed another tear from her cheek.