Page 143 of The Courting of Bristol Keats
August’s back shivered, and his tail whipped the air.
He understood.
Tyghan took his position near the corner of the barn, the seconds lasting hours. Sweat trickled down his back.What if she resists?He still didn’t know what he would do.
CHAPTER 99
Bristol leaned forward, her head in her hands, sickened, a sour taste swelling on her tongue. She stared at her boots. Swirling in the dirt beneath them she saw the horror of Tyghan’s study. The scrawled hash marks on walls. The shattered glass. Melted candles. Madness.
We were like brothers.
It was her father who had stabbed Tyghan with the demon blade. He was the traitorous best friend. Her father,the knight. The one who had lived in this world just a short time ago. Now she knew why he left Elphame without saying goodbye to Jasmine and his aunts. The aunts had known all along who he was and his reason for leaving.
And so had Tyghan.
Her shoulders shivered with ice, her fingers numb. She was in Dante’s ninth circle of hell. And her father had led her there.
Scream.
Cry.
Do something.
But she couldn’t. There was nothing left in her. She’d been chasing trows when she should have been chasing something else. Or not chasing anything at all. When she should have stayed home with her sisters. Stayed home where a tick on her back would have remained an innocent ladybug birthmark.
“You’re the one who stabbed him,” she said, her realization spoken aloud.
“He told you.”
She shook her head. “He didn’t name you. He only said it was his best friend.”
“I didn’t want to, but he gave me no choice. I couldn’t change his mind. He was going to kill your mother.”
His accusations were getting crazier by the moment. “Why would Tyghan want to kill her?”
“Because—” He grimaced like he didn’t want to say it.
“You promised me the whole truth.”
He looked at her, his eyes a dark, bottomless well. “Your mother . . . By some, she’s known as the Darkland monster.”
Bristol’s next question pooled somewhere inside her, lost, the barn, the floor, everything becoming a murky mist. Blood swelled in her veins, the deep leaden throb of it filling her ears. The ground at her feet ebbed and flowed, a blurred tide circling her ankles, her knees. She was drowning. Water rising, past her chin, her mouth, her nose. It was never going to stop. She was in over her head. She looked up, watching her father’s lips move, sounds coming from them. It echoed in waves, surreal, distant, like nothing she heard was real.
He told her the plan that he and Tyghan had concocted together. They heard the Darkland monster favored mortal lovers, and it was her father’s job to seduce and kill her, but their plan had gone awry. “I fell in love with her instead. It wasn’t planned. I never intended to betray Danu. But she wasn’t what any of us thought. She was trapped in her world as much as I was trapped in mine. It was only in those days and weeks with her that I realized, I wanted out. We both wanted out.” He told her they both wanted to live different lives. He had gone to the king two years earlier and asked for a leave so he could study art again, and the king had laughed him out of the throne room. He’d been ashamed that he ever entertained such a wild idea. “And your mother, she never had a chance to choose any life at all. One horror rolled into another. She was only sixteen when Kormick found her in the forest chained to a post.”
“Kormick?” The name was a gust of wind, and Bristol’s fog vanished.
“The king of Fomoria,” he clarified. “Her uncles explained to him that she kept running away, creating portals to escape. That’s why they chained her. They saw her portals as defiance and an evil kind of magic because it was so rare. Kormick saw it as opportunity. He gave them a purse full of gold and said he would take her off their hands. But he had other plans for her.”
He explained that Kormick treated her well—at least compared to her uncles and cousins who terrorized her, and that she thought of him as her savior. For a time. Kormick educated her in the arts, languages, literature, and schooled her in magic. He gave her the finest gowns to wear, servants to wait on her, tutors, her own personal guards, and he never beat her, as her uncles had done. “Most important, he gave her power—in measured doses. He seduced her with her own frailties and fears. He kept her scars fresh. Her first victims were her uncles. What better way to help her control her nightmares than to let her become one?”
He said with each passing day together in the cottage, Kormick’s hold over her waned and their love grew. “We were planning to leave when Kasta found us.”
“Kasta found you first?”
“Yes. I begged her to walk away, to give your mother and me a chance to leave together, and she did. But only minutes later, as we prepared to set out, Tyghan found us too. I asked the same thing of him. Walk away. Let us go. I told him we were in love. But he wouldn’t listen. I stepped in front of him, tried to block his way, but he drew his sword, claiming she had enchanted me, and started toward the cottage. I had already sold my weapons, and the only one I had was her knife, and I used it, but not to kill. Just to slow him down. At that point, she and I ran, and we’ve been running ever since. Until now.”
“Mother is the Darkland monster.”
