Page 177 of Wolf Caged
I looked at the city, at the home he had built for himself and his sister, for his people, abandoning the one he had shared with his parents.
Deep in my heart, I felt the truth of him.
He had run away from his pain—his grief—and had moulded it into a hunger for revenge rather than dealing with his hurt. He had built a castle to escape it, so he didn’t need to see the constant reminder of the warm home and loving parents he had lost. He had locked it all deep inside him, using it as fuel for his wrath.
How would he feel when he found the fae who had murdered his family and killed them?
Would he find the closure he needed in their brutal deaths or would he find only a hollow kind of victory, one that wouldn’t ease the pain he continued to carry in his heart?
Like a festering wound that was slowly poisoning him.
I looked back at the castle, desperate to understand him, to understand the strength of the hunger that consumed him and had done forcenturies.
And I wondered.
What would I do if my parents were taken from me?
Chapter 48
KAELERON
Malachi checked his weapons, a tower of black leather and muscle, the silver blades glinting in the warm torchlight in the great hall as he cleaned and sheathed them against his ribs one by one. “I still wonder whether it was wise to teach the wolf to fight when you did not know what she might be. For all Neve can see, she might be your future enemy, and now you have made her stronger.”
We had been going over this argument for the last fifteen minutes, since I had mentioned resuming my training of Saphira once we returned from the Wastes, a way of smoothing things over with the little wolf and hopefully taking the edge off the mood that would no doubt hit her the moment she realised I had gone ahead and left for the Wastes with Malachi instead of her.
“If we are meant to fight one day, I will deal with it when it happens, but I was not going to leave her unable to defend herself when there was something I could do about it.” I tucked rolls of gauze into the leather satchel and two vials of liquid the physicians had prepared for us—one to speed healing, the other to reverse any poison that hit us. A third vial followed it, this one gifted to me by my royal necromancers, an elixir that wouldremove any necrotic effects should the lich we were due to fight manage to hit us with any of his dark spells.
“You could have locked her away again.” Malachi did not even glance my way as he said that, his words as cold and carefully crafted as the steel he carried.
I pushed my hair back and neatened the top half, the black leather of my light armour creaking as I retied it, aware where this was going. “She was in the cell for barely a few days, until I had made sure it was safe to allow her out.”
Mal grunted, “Until Vyr wore you down.”
I did not deign that with a response.
Thunder rumbled in the distance and the scent of rain covered the subtler smells in the castle as the temperature dropped a few degrees.
“Neve believes you should take Saphira.” Malachi tossed a change of clothes into his own pack.
“Has she recruited you to her side too now?” First it had been Saphira, and then my sister had been intent on bringing up what Neve had seen, and now Malachi was going to push me in a direction I did not want to take—one I had considered just this morning, when Neve had told me bluntly that my vengeance would fail without Saphira at my side.
Lightning struck in the mountains, the thunder echoing around them, rattling the castle, and the sound of heavy rain reached us even in the heart of it.
A summer storm.
That bad feeling that had been nagging at my gut all day grew stronger, but I continued to shove things in my pack, ignoring it. I would not take Saphira to the Wastes. It was far too dangerous.
Malachi straightened and looked towards the entrance to the great hall as footsteps sounded. Hurried footsteps.
A guard halted at the threshold, his black armour dripping water all over the floor as he pressed his hand to his chest and his words fell like a death knell.
“My king, there is a visitor at the gatehouse.”
A traveller.
I stilled right down to my breathing as thunder rattled the windows again, as I stared beyond the guard to the end of the long hallway and the rain that pelted Falkyr so hard that it was like a mist, obscuring everything from view.
A traveller in a summer storm.
