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Ryson wielded their dogma artfully as if he’d studied it himself. She’d never thought to apply the phrase bad blooded to herself, but by her own description it fit like a blade, sliding between her ribs.
The silence lingered between them for a moment, and in that silence formed a strange and uncomfortable familiarity. He looked at her with some measure of understanding, and she hated it.
“You pity me,” she accused, hiding the way she felt choked for air. “But you don’t know what it’s like for the entire world to want to consume you in a different way without ever knowing who you truly are. To see you as an object so naturally that you have no idea how to see yourself. I’d gladly be isolated than–”
Be eaten.
She stopped herself before it slipped from her lips, nearly stunned by the words that revealed deeper fears that drove her. She’d never had to find the words before. No one had ever asked the questions.
“I don’t pity anyone,” he replied slowly, but he didn’t look away. It was as if he were very close to saying something but restraining himself. This sense was more alarming than any other, because Ryson had never seemed intent on restraining anything but her.
“You would have done things differently,” she remarked as she tried to search his reaction for judgment.
“If it came to it, I would have killed them,” he said easily.
She sensed his honesty and challenged it. “Your own family?”
“No status or relation has ever been a license to control me so completely.” He spoke without a single ounce of regret or guilt. His words illuminated a core conviction that gave her a vivid glimpse into what drove him. “Every step I’ve taken toward power has been to secure my own freedom, and no choice was ever too extreme to preserve it. I never tried to control anyone else, and anyone who tried to control me paid the highest price I could offer, maybe not at first, but always in the end.”
Clea was surprised by how the statements both hurt and confused her, and she visibly withdrew like the blow had been physical. The fact that Ryson’s words were void of spite or sarcasm made them harder to digest. She’d done the complete opposite of him. Worse, she was completely incapable of evenimagining making the choices he had. That wasn’t who she was. Did that make her weak?
“No one could touch you,” Ryson repeated. “What about your siblings?”
Clea’s arms tightened around her and she looked away. Ryson didn’t ask senseless questions. Each one was a key, and he was peeling her back. She could feel it and something in her core trembled.
Why did he care?
She stifled it with a breath and said, “My oldest brother died in the forest before I was born. When I was three, the illness came. It took my siblings one by one, at random. This happened for years while they were stuck to their beds, until only myself and my oldest sister remained without the illness. My oldest sister, upon finding the illness in herself, walked into the woods and delivered herself to the forest.”
Clea omitted the fact that she had been there. At the age of nine, she’d watched her sister from atop the wall, calling her name as the sixteen-year-old shed her clothes in the glow of the moonlight, her ghostly form fading into the darkness as she delivered her body to the beasts. They never found her, not even bloodied earth or stones to bury, as was the custom when Veilin were eaten.
“By the time I was thirteen, the others who had been bedridden were gone. All that time, I practiced healing like their lives depended on it, waiting for the illness to take me next. For whatever reason, it did not. Not yet.”
The finalnot yetechoed with resounding dread and the maskslipped at last. Tears bit at her eyes. Clea had never spoken of the events in a coherent story to anyone else before.
No one asked. No one wanted to know about the illness that even the royal Veilin had been unable to heal. No one wanted to speak of the illness because it brought everything into question, and so she was left alone with the confusion of it all, that and the wariness of her own traitorous body. It was a body that sometimes she pretended simply didn’t exist.
In sharing the story, she knew she confirmed what Ryson had pointed out from the start. Despite all her efforts to believe the traditions of her people, the illness had struck her in a different way. It had challenged everything she wanted to believe about light and darkness, ansra and cien. It planted a seed of doubt so deep in her soul she could never dig it out. She’d asked her questions time and time again in secrecy, speaking to no one but those plants that absorbed her words. The doubts burned.
If ansra was love and light, how had it succumbed to an illness which destroyed a family dedicated to protecting humanity?
She glanced over at Ryson when he didn’t respond. Ryson’s expression showed very little, creating more space for her to share. For a moment, she hesitated, but as if it needed to pour out of her, it did.
“Several of my siblings were much better fighters,” she said, “much better on horseback, much better in the sciences. They were wonderful, kind, and smart. They were experts in seals and weapons reinforcement, offense type Veilin practices that carry more weight than healing among my people. I’m sure they would have done so much for the world. What I have to offer is healing, healing of a powerful kind, but healingnonetheless born out of tragic attempts at changing unchangeable fates. Their deaths shaped me more than I could ever shape myself and I live in that shadow. Sometimes I feel as if I am little more than their collective ghost.”
She swallowed hard before continuing.
“Many of us don’t live through our thirties. I am destined to die even sooner and still, I cannot sacrifice my life for the cause. I’m afraid if it came down to it, I would sacrifice this entire world before giving up my life, and it scares me. But I suppose for you,” she hesitated, “I suppose for you, so accustomed to death, dying isn’t so frightening.”
“Life is the frightening one,” Ryson said. “There is no crime in wanting to live it.”
She chuckled sadly, but didn’t have anything else to say. She looked back into the woods, knowing the talisman was lying out there somewhere. She took several steps toward it but stopped, her fury replaced with sore vulnerability and exhaustion. Ryson didn’t move to stop her.
He seemed to sense her lingering attachment to it. “I mean it when I say it’s for the best.”
“You just threw it,” she said coolly. “The folder, the talisman, that’s all that’s left of…so many.”
“I’m sorry,” he replied.
