Page 49 of Tales of a Deadly Devotion
Notes on the saltorvarious pox. The thing that had brought me here in the first place. How easily I’d forgotten that desperation to fix something. To see the world right.
How easily I’d believed I could. Write a paper good enough to graduate. Find Alma a home. Find some useful position and live the life I’d dreamt of: helping fey.
Only it was a lie. They’d been dying all this time.
Everything that had happened … I believed it had to be for a purpose. To graduate. To be the first. To prove them all wrong.
Only the bitter reality was impossible to deny. It was all for nothing.
My gaze blurred with tears of frustration as I pushed the papers away and tugged out my training clothes, only for the clatter of something hitting the floor to stop me.
The hilt of my father’s blade, glinting in the dusk light.
A flare of memory made the training clothes slip from my fingers. Remembering how the sword had clattered against that seal. How Emrys had touched it, brought it to me.
How it had come to me, despite all my mistakes in leading us to that horrid place.
With trembling fingers, I picked it up. Letting my thumb run over the scratched and tarnished metal.
‘I shouldn’t have let you rest so long.’ Guilt raked at my bones. How long I’d left the thing in disuse, how long my muscled ached for the strength they once had.
Too long pretending to be something I wasn’t. Mortal. A simple girl with no ambition or choice.
Again, Tauria. My father’s soft command brushed my ear, making my breath catch as the hilt almost slipped from my numb fingers.
Tauria. The name the darkness knew. Knew I was here. Knew the power in my blood to awaken it or seal it. A realisation that only deepened my panic, my throat too tight as I sank to my knees.
‘Please.’ The word was too small from my lips as I looked down at the hilt curled in my fist. The smooth warmth of the blade so real.
A Kysillian is never beaten. Never marked by the viciousness of this world because the kings in our blood bow to no other.
Words from the ancient texts I’d found in the abandoned Fifth Library. Those scars on my back burning like a brand. I’d been beaten. Marked. I’d let them scar my very soul. I’d lost, over and over again.
Imperfections that I knew meant I was unworthy of the Kysillian name my father had given me. Unworthy of the fire in my blood. How the ancestors would see me as a disgrace. A weakness.
‘Forgive me,’ I whispered. Too small and pathetic for a creature that held the right to wield an ancient blade. I pressed the hilt against my brow, bowing forward as the emotion cracked me open.
Knowing only one truth: I’d always be my father’s daughter. That he’d love me … no matter what I’d done, or how foolish I’d become.
Always. A word whispered in my mind, a word from my mother’s lips with the ghost of a kiss against my cheek. The barest hint of memory as I took myself back. Back to that beach. To the day I’d said goodbye. To all the things I’d allowed myself to forget.
The crashing of the waves, high and rough as they always were on the north sea. The briny taste on my lips. The bitter cold bite in the air. How I’d tumbled down on that wet sand, only for my mother to kneel in it with me.
‘Tauria.’ Her hands took hold of my shoulders as the storm raged around us, plastering her dark hair to her cheeks. How perfectly beautiful she was, even in her grief.
‘He has to come back!’ I cried, breaths uneven with my sobbing. Using my small fists to rub my eyes, stinging from my tears.
‘He will, my love.’ She brought my sandy fingers to her lips, her smile weighted with sorrow before she presented the hilt of my father’ssword to me, letting it rest across her palm as the rain puddled around it. ‘Do you think he’d leave this behind forever?’
A small offering. A hope between us. A promise and a lie.
‘No.’ I shook my head as she wrapped my hand around the hilt so we both held it. Still warm from his touch. From the chaos in his blood.
‘It’s your job to keep it safe. Just as he taught you.’ One arm came around me to bring me closer, to wrap her cloak around my shoulders, the other hand falling to her very pregnant stomach between us.
‘He loves us very much,’ she averred, her brown eyes filled with such endless love and hope. Even then. ‘Never doubt that, Tauria.’
I curled myself into her arms as she kissed my tear-stained cheeks as my hair tangled with hers in the harsh wind.
