CHAPTER 37: THIRTY SEVEN

*Valka*

My feet hurt, but my heart hurts even deeper. Breakfast had been uneventful. I’m not sure what Margot expected but she seemed rather displeased when I informed her that King Lucien hardly looked at me.

Why would he? There were fifteen other women with sumptuous cleavage cooing and giggling at his every word. Sophisticated ’oohs’ and ’aahs’ were all they said, touching their food only when King Lucien ate his.

I told her I would try, but heavens help me, I lied. I wasn’t going to starve myself and pretend to gain His Royal Misery’s attention.

Plus, no one had told me the chair at the table’s head was his. There was only one chair left and I assumed it was mine. Worse yet, the stunning woman named Lilith had told me nicely that it was mine.

King Lucien hadn’t said a word to me about my ass in his place. Didn’t even acknowledge my presence when he asked that an extra seat be brought in and sat at the farthest edge of the table from me.

Coincidence? I have no idea, but I can’t bring myself to care for court etiquette, when there were more important things to worry about.

Like my mother being here.

My fingers close around the doorknob in the same second that it opens. An older man steps out, a wired frame hanging from the crook of his nose. Sterling blue eyes meet mine and lower abruptly, along with his head in a low bow. "Lady Nythorn."

I’m never getting used to that.

"I’m here for--"

"Rhea," he completes with a slow nod. "We got rid of the infection, but she is currently being monitored for changes."

"Can I..." My voice trails off as I sight her through the crack in the door behind him. Standing by the window, staring outside listlessly. The man parts from the doorway, letting me through, and my heart thuds rapidly in my chest as I halt in the center of the bare room tinged with the scent of several spices.

"Mom," I croak.

Rhea Ironfang says nothing, eyes lost in a barely there look. Her frame is thinner than I remember. Frail, bony. She’s lost an unhealthy amount of weight and I know it’s the grief. I take a step forward but her shoulders stiffen with unease.

I swallow against the thickness in my throat, tears filling my eyes. "I am so sorry. That I left without saying. That I got you dragged into this. For not being there when--"

"What did it say?"

I pause. "What?"

She turns, meeting my gaze with hollow brown ones. "The letter he wrote you. He spent his last hours hobbled over that desk of his after the physician predicted that he had only a couple of days left, give or take. He began drafting across those pages. He wouldn’t let me see them. Wouldn’t let me in. He died a couple of minutes after sealing it in his blood." Her arms seem to shake. "He wouldn’t even say goodbye to me, hell-bent on completing it."

Her eyes fall to the ground. "I cracked it, you know. The seal. But it was undecipherable. Didn’t understand the language. I thought it’d be best if I burned it. Just to spite him. But even if Eldric never loved me as much as I did him, I couldn’t bring myself to destroy it. So, tell me, was it worth it?"

My lips part. And close, guilt closing around my heart like a vise. "I... I d-didn’t read it."

I didn’t touch the parchment since Rafe gave it to me. Every time I’d looked upon it, I couldn’t handle the ache that came along with it. I’d distracted myself with training and everything else to stretch out the inevitability.

I didn’t want to say goodbye just yet. And I’d considered taking it with me to battle. Considered reading it before we rode off. But I left it behind, promising myself I’d return alive and read it. It was the least I owed my father.

For a long moment, Mother says nothing. Then, she grabs her dirty skirts and staggers back a step, so visibly weakened that I move to help.

But she snarls viciously like a cornered, wounded animal. "Don’t you dare touch me." A ragged sob slips from her. "You always were the curse on our household. He bled because of you. He grew sick, because of you, you wretched thing."

Her chest heaves, too fast, too hard. "You should have died! Do you hear me? We were better, happier when you weren’t here. You made him miserable, ruined him, just like you do everything else in your life!"

My body jerks as though she slapped me. The air leaves my lungs in one violent rush, my ribs locking around a heart that stutters, then hammers painfully. "Y-you don’t mean that." The tears roll down my cheeks and I taste them on my lips. "Mother, I--"

"I am not your mother!"

I cross the room and seize her trembling hands before she can wrench them away. I drag them up, press them to my cheeks, refusing the distance she is trying to force between us. "Look at me." Her eyes are dark and crazed as they meet mine. "You may not have birthed me, but you are all I know. You raised me. You loved me. You cared for me. And I know you are angry right now. About father. About everything. But we are all that is left of House Ironfang. Do not abandon me now, Ma. I have no one else."

I search her eyes and for one desperate heartbeat, I think I see something flash there. Recognition, hesitation, something soft.

My lips tremble into a smile, blurred with tears. I believe--fool that I am--I believe I have reached her.

Then her fingers curl. Knuckles snap tight against my skin. And pain blooms. A line of fire tears down my cheek. Another rakes my throat. The third--gods, the third makes me understand.

She is clawing my face open.

A cry bursts from me, ragged and strangled. I stumble back, but there is strength in her thin frame, a feral, inhuman strength that makes mockery of her wasted body. She lunges after me like a starving beast, swinging again, teeth bared in a sound that isn’t quite a scream and isn’t quite a sob.

I wrench myself free and collapse against the wall, out of reach. But she does not stop. Her hands seize the nearest thing. A flower vase. It shatters against the arm I raise to shield myself. Then bottles, one after another, crashing around me, antidotes wasted on the floor in sticky puddles. The chair goes next. Then the mirror. Splinters explode into the air, a thousand broken shards raining down.

She is screaming. "Accursed monster! You should never have been born! You killed him! You killed them all! My sons, Eldric, you took everything from me!"

Over and over again, like clockwork, she shrieks. And I stand there, frozen, body trembling with a confusion too violent, I almost retch.

When does the line get drawn on what becomes too much for a person to handle? When does a person finally break? The woman in front of me, hellbent on killing me has fed me with her hands and tended my wounds herself. We weren’t the closest and I absolutely hated every time she treated me like misfit and acted like she’d do anything to get me off her hands.

But it didn’t mean she didn’t care for me. It didn’t make her worry and hovering over me when I came down with a fever any less.

Staring at her now, eyes rolling white, spittle flecking her lips, grief and rage tangled until nothing sane remains, I realise I am staring at a stranger.

And a more cruel thought follows. I cannot remember. I cannot remember what my childhood with her looked like. I canny remember what the years had been like before I woke up in the barn, sweating all over the hay. Or what I was doing there that eve.

Confused.

Something itches in the back of my mind and when I reach for it, pain lances through my skull, hard enough to make me scream and clutch my head. It feels like talons are scraping along the walls of my mind, shredding it to ribbons.

I cover my ears as Rhea hurls another vase at me. "Stop."

My voice is a whisper lost in the noise. In the wreckage.

She keeps calling me a monster. Keeps accusing me. I didn’t understand how a mother could hate her child so much.

A memory flashes somewhere behind my eyes. The months father had been away at the war. Entering the shed and accidentally getting locked in when a fire began. Choking as my fist slammed over and over into the door of the shed, calling for her. Rhea. Mother.

The harder I try to hold on to the memory, the deeper those talons in my mind claws and I don’t notice the silence or the foreign presence in the room, until a warm hand closes around my fist.

My eyes snap open and I find myself gazing into piercing eyes of violet. In my peripheral, I notice the guard holding Rhea down, Leander among them. He looks at me with pity and horror. I can’t stand it.

That voice appeals to me again as I spiral down in the dark. "Breathe," King Lucien says, voice hard, and it isn’t until then that I realize I can’t get my breaths into my lungs. My vision darkens. I hold my chest with bloodied, torn hands that have already begun to heal.

"C-can’t--" I choke, hyperventilating.

His lips peel back in a frustrated snarl as he takes in my appearance, like it affects him somehow, and he murmurs what might have been an apology under his breath--but I know I’ve begun hallucinating because Lucien apologizes to no one--before he grabs the bones of the corset cinched around my waist and shreds it in two.