Page 201 of Disillusioned
Garin stared at his feet.
It had been so long. Bitter memories stained the place, lifting from the floorboards like creeping ghouls. Tendrils of time and past had tugged at him the first time he’d visited with Lilac. Tonight, they had him by the throat.
He saw himself, scrawny and helpless, pulling Aimee’s body from the kitchen and into the yard. He’d cradled her cold torso to his chest, shouting, waiting for help to come because he’d refused to leave her, cursing the way he’d dawdled for a pastry and cup of milk from the bakery on the way home from the brothel after the Madame told him there must be some sort of mistake: Aimee wasn’t working that evening, and might’ve simply experienced a spell of forgetfulness when she’d asked Garin to meet her there.
Unlike the fantasy he’d painted in a heroic, almost boring lie for Lilac, his childhood—what little he’d allowed himself to scrape from the surface of his muddy memory—wasn’t exactly something to preserve. His parents’ screaming matches they thought they’d hidden well behind the paper-thin walls, and Pascal threatening to report Aimee to the Church.
It was painful. It hadn’t made him stronger, or better. Time alone hadn’t healed him.
This farmhouse hadn’t been Garin’s home in many years, if ever—not in the way The Fenfoss Inn had become. Bast, Adelaide, the Algovens. Not in the way that Lilac was. There was no use in mourning ghosts, not when his future was paved with them.
Not when Garin promised Loumarch he would live.
Flashes of unwelcome memory assaulted him: the witches’ uncertainty surrounding Lilac’s survival, pouring over that bookas he’d sat at her bedside andhatingwhat he’d read as he monitored her every pause in breathing, every irregular heartbeat.
Lorietta begging him to reconsider as he mounted Loïg and dragged Myrddin with him, pleading Garin to simply tell Lilac the truth about what he’d done. As if there was any easy way to explain why Albrecht was being picked apart at the bottom of the Argent, along with Lori’s copy ofThe Histories of the Lasting Night. Garin had thrown it in, hopeless, wholly convinced there was no other choice—thathecould never be her choice, with or without the threat of France.
Then, watching Lilac awkwardly sway with Rupert at the feast, trying to distract himself from the thought of massacring half the room to steal the dance.
Fool, he thought aggressively, regarding his empty hands that wished to tear, maim, and—and hold.The moment you let your walls dissipate, the fangs of love impale you.
“Garin,” came Lilac’s voice, a hymn to his ears. “Come to me. Let us leave.”
She stood next to Yanna, who’d shifted her body protectively closer to her friend, arrow still aimed. Myrddin hovered behind them both, glancing occasionally over his shoulder at the guards.
Oddly, not one of them had uttered a single word since their arrival.
The corner of Garin’s mouth quirked. He peered back at the aumbry, then hummed to himself, lifting the nearest flickering oil lamp from the porch railing as he made his way down the steps. “Goodnight, Artus.”
“What? Where are you going?” the fallen duke spat.
“To be a proper gentleman and see a woman to the altar.”
“You, a gentleman?” Artus tutted, chuckling in pity. “France will reign. A formidable army does not matter when one’s neighbor has a flaming arrow aimed at their window. They will conquer, and I’ll rejoice in soon seeing the day your queen is overthrown and hung from the gallows once Maximilian realizes she is not worth the resources. I tried to finish the job at the castle, that fateful eve of our meeting.”
Garin stopped at the last step, refusing to allow the memory of that night into focus. Still, his body remembered for him. The world began toslowly spin, and he grasped the bannister for support. Lilac was there, straight ahead. Her arm was outstretched, those generous, round eyes beckoning him further.
He swallowed, desperate to wet his parched throat. Lilac. Eleanor. She was so—so good. So warm. She was patient and full of vigor; everything he was not. He’d go to her, collapse into her arms, and nuzzle his face into her warm, nectared hair. He’d sink to his knees and?—
“They’ll drown your parents’ farmland in flame, just as they will your precious forest. Though, if I’d have known this was your home, I would have taken the honor upon myself years ago.”
Garin’s fist tightened around the lamp’s handle. “Then let me help you.”
There was a flash of realization in Lilac’s enlarged pupils, just before Garin whirled and flung the oil lamp straight at the torch above Artus’s head.
It shattered. Oil and flame rained down upon Artus’s face, engulfing his entire head.
The entryway burst into flames immediately after, fire rapidly spreading wherever else the oil had splashed—down Artus’s torso, the coatroom door, into the hallway.
There was a scream and sound of shattered glass; someone leapt through the slow-spreading flames in the hallway and had thrown the table vase out the window to the right of the door. Garin started toward the man lowering himself out, but an arrow stuck in the escapee’s back before his feet hit the floor.
Although Yanna wasn’t in sight, Garin could hear her shouting around the back. Lilac had taken her friend’s place; she’d picked up her bow and quiver again, her exquisite face wrought in a smoldering concentration. He watched her chest rise, then fall, as she loosed the next arrow into a second escapee’s chest.
Everyone was either abandoning the shelter of the structure to evade the fire spreading throughout the halls, or trapping themselves further into the bowels of the house. Garin could see his bedroom door up the stairs was wide open, probably filled with those who forgot smoke rose. It would choke the breath from their lungs if the flames didn’t eat through the dry beams quick enough. It was an old house, after all.
Myrddin watched the blaze from the path as if in a trance, flamesreflected in his somber eyes. Lilac shook with fury, alternating between shouting at those climbing over each other to escape and cursing through gritted teeth, pulling hawthorn arrow after hawthorn arrow out of the quiver slipping off her shoulder.
She’d shot five in under a minute despite her fumbling fingers and awkward stance.
