Page 89 of The Musician and the Monster

Chapter 40

Drystan

“Ceridwen!” Drystan lunged from the bed, racing across the room as the bowl fell from her grip to clatter upon the floor. Fear seized him over some injury he’d missed, throbbing worse than his aching ribs.

Ceridwen whirled, eyes wide. Color had leeched from her face. Her hands shook.

He reached for her. “What—”

“You!” she sputtered. “Three years ago. Where were you?”

“The capital,” he replied, bewildered.

“Whereexactly.” She drew the second word out, her voice as hard as he’d ever heard it. Fury flashed in her blue eyes.

Drystan glanced past her to the items spread on the table, ones gathering dust from how long they’d sat untouched. There, he spied the ornaments of his fall, the symbols of the king’s dragons, which he’d left out just in case Malik should venture into his tower when he still believed him an enemy.

Oh, holy Goddess…The blood drained from his face. “You can’t think—”

“I certainly can!” Ceridwen grabbed the iron brooch and shoved it toward him. “A dragon, Drystan! And the mask.” She gestured to it. “Why else would Mother mutter such nonsense before she died, unless—” Her words cut off in a sob, tears leaking from her face.

Before another tear could fall, Drystan wrapped her in his arms and pulled her close, uncaring of the way his body protested its aches. Ceridwen fought and squirmed, all but stabbing him with the pin on the brooch and likely adding to his bruises. And easy price to pay.

“Let go!”

“I didn’t kill your mother,” he replied, keeping his voice calm and even as he suffered the wrath of the thrashing beauty in his arms.

“Why should I believe that?” She slammed a fist into his chest, knocking some of the breath from his lungs and sending a wave of fresh pain down his form. “You said you blacked out. She had scratches, like from the beast!”

“It wasn’t me.” He cradled her head as gently as he could despite her efforts to pull away. “It couldn’t have been me.” Of this, he was certain.

“How!” she demanded, jerking her head back to skewer him with her stare. “How can you be sure?”

“It was spring,” he reminded her. “The prince—I—had been executed that winter.”

“So? That hasn’t stopped the monster.”

The verbal jab slipped between his ribs as vicious as a dagger. No, it hadn’t. But he wasn’t the only monster roaming the capital, and he hadn’t been in the streets then at all. “I was all but imprisoned then,” he confessed. “Kept near the king and out of sight, sometimes even…chained.”

The king had kept him like a sick and twisted pet. Alive, ready to serve, but never free. Many nights he would order him chained by the wrist in his assigned room—the dark place no larger than a closet, just in case his beast should rise and he should think to leave. It was almost a year before he’d been given any measure of freedom, before he saw anything outside the castle walls.

“Chained,” she echoed, suddenly still.

He nodded, the ghostly weight of the shackle on his wrist weighing on him even now. “I could not have been in the streets that spring. It was not me, Ceridwen.”

“But the deep cuts on Mother, the dragon mask…”

He wiped at the tear streaks on her cheek. “I’m not the only monster in the capital. There are many loyal to the king. His dragons, he called us. I told you we wore masks when we carried out his handiwork. Well…” He gestured to the mask still gathering dust on the table.

“Then my mother…”

“Must have run afoul of one of them.” Probably in the process of carrying out some other heinous act. But to attack a woman, especially one heavy with child, was a terrible new low, one that turned his stomach and made his blood boil in equal measure. Another senseless death to lay at the king’s feet.

Ceridwen swayed before nearly collapsing against his bare chest. He held her close, petting her hair as she sniffed away her tears. “All this time…I thought it was some weird accident, that I was theonly one to blame.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Ceridwen.”

She nodded slightly, her tears leaking onto his skin. “And the king knows about all this and condones these villains?”

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