Ch. 33
The old study was thick with dust and sorrow.
It covered everything in a leaden shroud. Clogged the senses. Thickened the bile.
There was a whimper of old wood and the door opened. A phantom engulfed the doorway, pausing on the threshold. Still. Waiting. And then, a bone-deep sigh.
"Come out, girl," the phantom said, closing the door behind him. "I give you my word, I will not harm you."
Elara unfurled from where the gloom had cloaked her but did not move any closer as Roth Vi-Garran lit a candle and placed it on the desk, careful to distance it from the parchments and books stacked there.
The flickering light dragged the shadows from under his eyes, leeching them into his cheekbones and blurring into the edges of his beard so that his entire face was a darkness, an unfathomable black hole where flesh had once been. The stench of wine and ale was pervasive, although the room had stunk of it when she'd crept inside, a stagnant, moribund thing that had nauseated her. She wasn't sure how much of it was engrained in this place, and how much the butcher carried upon himself.
Leaning forward, he pressed his knuckles into the desk and stared at her, but only for so long, as if the act of looking at her pained him. "Girl, I said..."
"That you would not harm me. Yes, I heard you." Elara, feeling emboldened, stepped forward. "Only we both know your word is as worthless as you, Special Commander."
He winced, closing his eyes briefly. "I no longer go by that title."
"Whether you go by it or not is no matter," she said. "It is who you were, who you still are and who you will always be. Refusing to acknowledge the title does not make you a different man. It does not transform you into someone else. The stain of murder is eternal. You cannot escape it."
Vi-Garran nodded slow. "Hmm, yes, and it would seem you know a thing or two about that yourself. What is it now? Three noble-borns added to your death count?"
"And I would gladly make it four."
He laughed in the low light. She supposed it was mocking, but it sounded sad and hollow.
"Think I'm not capable?" she said, anger flaring.
"I think you are capable. But not here." He gestured around him. "You'll find no water to aid you and I think you need it. You're good, Elara, I'll grant you that. You caught Juda fast, and by the dead gods, he is faster than most. Perhaps the quickest of blade I have ever seen, and I have seen many come through my ranks. But your blade is not of iron or steel. Your blade is water. So, excuse me if I don't believe I will become number four. Not in this moment, anyway."
The fury ignited, spitting and snarling like a beast inside her, desperate to be free so it could claw at his throat and spill his blood all over this place where he drank so much even the dust smelt of it.
But she would not give him her rage. Not yet. Not until she heard his final confession.
"You look like her."
The way he spoke it was soft. Anguished. Elara wanted to rip his tongue from his mouth. She didn't want his softness or his pain, for both were a lie. The man before her was no gentler nor more sorrowful than she was free to be what she was. He was a mindless monster who understood only the blade and his devotion to the King.
"Don't fucking speak to me of her," she said, through gritted teeth. "You do not deserve to say my mother's name nor evoke her memory."
He shrugged, but not dismissively so. "Is that not why you have come here? To speak of her? I don't think you came here to kill me."
Elara glared at him. "Maybe I came here so you know that I can. Whenever I want. I know your places, butcher."
"Oh, so it's a warning, is it?" he said, glancing at her, but his gaze landed on the bookshelf beside her as if looking into her face was too much for him, and so it might be if she reminded him of her. "Ironic that you would think to tell me you know my places now you no longer have any of your own. And now, at this time, when time is something of which you are fast running out."
Elara flinched at that, and the bastard caught it, but if he took any satisfaction from her discomfort, he appeared not to show it. Instead, he dragged the chair underneath him and slumped back into it behind the desk, as if even that wearied him. Elara had to admit that whoever he was—whatever he was—he was markedly different to the man the waters had shown her. The Highguard in the stories of her mother had been like stone, carved from the coldest, impermeable rock. Dead eyes. Blank face. She had seen more life in the marble figurines favoured by Mica Koh-Miralus.
"I have places. If I didn't, I would have been found already," she said, indignant, although it fell flat like the barest of lies.
Vi-Garran shook his head. "The temple? You have not been there. Juda looked for you."
Juda. Fucking Juda. She'd known he'd go searching for her in the catacombs and she had hated that she couldn't seek the familiar sanctuary of the one place she could call her own. She'd hated him for it. For his intrusion. His unwanted presence in the sacred home of her foremothers.
But she despised herself more for trusting him. For taking him with her to the Ellisder.
Perhaps that was it. Perhaps that was the reason for all of this. Elara had insulted her foremothers by taking a land-dweller into the sanctity of the Naiad's most private chamber and she'd done that willingly. Maybe she deserved to be driven from there, as much as she deserved to be driven from Grimefell.
"Yet another thing you have taken from me, it seems," she said. "Part of your plan, I suppose?"
Vi-Garran's brow fell. "There was no plan. None that involved you anyhow. Whatever you believe about me..."
"...what I know about you."
"Whatever you think you know about me, you must know that what you believe about Juda is false," he insisted. His hands now gripped the arms of the chair, his face determined. It was the first time he'd looked directly at her for more than a moment. "He told me nothing of you, I swear it. Just as he knew nothing of your mother or my part in her death."
Fury bubbled under the surface again, a maelstrom she was struggling to keep under control. "So, you admit it then?"
"What I admit to or not is of no matter, girl, but what you believe of Juda..."
"No matter? No matter?" Elara stepped closer; her hands fisted tight. "She was my mother! I think you will find it matters very much to me that you killed her, and you want to talk to me of him?"
He leant forward then, faster than she had expected—a hint maybe of the monster he really was—and slammed his palm against the edge of the desk. "Yes, I do. I do. I will tell you it all. I will admit to my part in it. I will tell you every detail if hearing every detail matters to you, but I will speak to you of him, because he matters to me, and I do not know how much time the Juda who matters to me has left—the same man who matters to you. And do not think to stand there and tell me he does not, because I saw it, girl. I saw the way you looked at him. I heard what you said to him."
You had me, Juda, You had me.
"You cannot feel betrayed by someone if they do not hold some place in your heart." Vi-Garran smiled then, but not at her. It was too wistful. Too fond. "Juda's mother once looked at me, much like you did at him."
Elara looked for Juda then in Vi-Garran's face, confused. "But Juda said you are not his...?"
"His father? No, girl, I am not." He raked his thick fingers through his hair, as he slumped back in the chair once more. "Sometimes I wonder if he would be a different man if I was. But then again...maybe not. Maybe he would be worse." His mouth twisted into a grimace. "We were friends, Aleina and me. And there was love, so much love, but not a love we could allow to become something more than what it was. She was from Grimefell. She worked the laundry in my family home, and I was noble-born. But we did love. The tide upon which I told her I was to be indoctrinated into The Order, like my father before me, she looked at me just as you looked at Juda."
"And that surprised you?" Elara scoffed at him. "The Order are despised in Grimefell."
Vi-Garran gave her a strange look, mournful almost. "No, not surprised. Saddened, for I knew what I would lose. But Juda stands to lose far more. He is to undertake the King's Trial of Sin-Sabre."
Elara sniffed, tasting the bitterness of it on her tongue. "Then good for Juda. It seems he has reached his goal, or at least the fake one he told me of."
"Not fake, girl. And not good. Far from it," Vi-Garran replied. Reaching for a large tome close to him, he found the page marked by the ribbon bind and opened it, rotating the book and sliding it across the desk towards her. He pressed his fingertip against a paragraph. "There. The Trial of Sin-Sabre. An ancient custom still practiced when I was but a child and my father was Special Commander of the King's Elite Guard, a barbaric out-dated test of endurance and devotion ceased until now. If Juda is to reach within grasp of the throne, he must first succeed the trial, and even if he triumphs, I confess, I do not know what will be left of the Juda I know."
Elara edged closer to the desk, retrieving the book, and retreating a few steps so she could read while also being wary of Vi-Garran's intentions. She scanned the few passages he had indicated, her eyes widening, stomach churning. Nausea crept into her chest and throat, and she swallowed hard, but that only seemed to make the sick feeling swell stronger.
"You cannot mean to let him do this?" she demanded of him, flipping the book shut and throwing it onto the desk. Dust drifted up and settled lazily, but there was nothing settled about Elara or how this made her feel inside. This plan was a madness. A desperate, foolish, dangerous madness.
"If we are to get close to the King, this is the only way. He has come so far already. To be chosen for the King's Elite Guard is a great honour..."
"An honour?" she spat. "Is it an honour to kill innocent women and children? An honour to crush those who have nothing? There is nothing honourable about these acts, butcher!"
Vi-Garran stood abruptly, the chair shrieking against the floor as he pushed it back behind him. He placed his palm over his broad chest, his eyes glistening. "No honour in that, Elara. None that I ever found anyway. But there is honour in killing he who sits at the very centre of it all, and if we do not find honour there, we will at least find vengeance and justice, but this will be our only chance. We are the only ones who have the means to do it: by the very same blade used to drain the Naiad of their blood. Your mother told me that and bid me hide it until the time was right. It is the only weapon that can kill him now. Especially if he gets his hands on you first, which is why he will have the entire citadel scouring every possible hiding place for you."
He cast his gaze over her, resting on her face, shaking his head as if in disbelief.
"You really do look like her. It's remarkable," he murmured. "If you end up in his clutches, you will not be the last of your kind, Elara, for I know what his plans were for your mother, and for the children she would go on to have. The children he would sire himself. And those plans, he will intend for you in her place, for only the blood of the Naiad will keep his reign over this black rock eternal."
Whatever last remnants of hope Elara kept inside her seemed to shrivel and fade, sucked into the shadows at her back.
"He means to grant the water to Grimefell, in return for the last water witch. There will be no places left for you, girl. No refuge. No sanctuary. They will turn on you as they turned on your mother, and your foremothers. But I will not, and neither will Juda, because our enemy is the same."
Vi-Garran moved around the desk, hands held out by his sides, palms facing outwards. Elara watched him stop at the corner. He was no phantom, this man. More a wraith wrapped inside a huge bulk of bone and muscle. Whatever he had once been—and he had been that monster once—what she saw in his eyes now was everything she had hoped not to see. She'd wanted the monster, the butcher. It would have made everything so much easier.
"What I did in the name of King Ban-Keren will haunt me into the grave and beyond. You were right, girl," he said. "You were right. The stain of murder is eternal, and you cannot escape it and I do not seek to for it is what I truly deserve. What I seek is to finish the task of which your mother entrusted to me. For she did trust me. At the end, she did. And I believed in her, just as Juda now believes in you. As I believe in you."
Elara laughed then, shallow, and cold. "Am I a thing to be believed now? A creature of fairy tale and nightmares?"
"No," Vi-Garran said, firmly, his eyes flashing with life for the first time since he'd walked in. "For you are not a myth, you are a story that was fated to be told. The King will seek to keep you alive for his own gains, but Dageor will not, for he knows your story and he believes in it too. Help Juda. Please, I beg of you. Help him to believe in you. Or your story will end up just another one the King will throw onto his fire."
Fools. They were fucking fools, the both of them. And Juda was the most foolish of the two. To expose himself to such barbarity of this trial, and for what? A story? Faith? Belief?
"And just how am I meant to help your Juda?" she said.
Vi-Garran tilted his head to one side and for a moment, the fondness she saw there was for her, or maybe for the one that had looked like her. The one he claimed had put her trust in him.
"Let me get word to him," he said. "Let me tell him that you wait for him. He will need something to guide him in the black sea of Sin-Sabre. For only then will he find his way out of the darkness that will seek to claim him for its own. For it will, Elara. It will."