A Chill in the Flame (Villains #1)

Thirty-five

Thirty-five

“What are they asking for?” Ceneth rubbed his temples, hunched over his war room table. The room was windowless, midnight blue with the captured refraction of labradorite on which the castle was built, as if the night sky glittered in every precious stone. If it weren’t for the oil-soaked rags and torches, the room could have been utterly black.

“Eero has been very forthcoming, Your Majesty. He’s shared that Ophir is missing of her own volition, and that they’re hoping we might provide someone with the ability to scry.”

For years, the Castle of Gwydir had been undergoing the beautification process necessary to house its impending queen. Loving touches had filled every corridor. Luxurious curtains, latticed windows, ornate carvings in the once-plain pillars of the throne room, paintings of landscapes, planting of bushes and trees and flowers throughout the castle grounds. Now the blue-black stones of Gwydir seemed hauntingly cold. All efforts for renovation had ceased with the news of her passing. Scores of decorators, gardeners, landscapers, seamstresses, upholsters, painters, and the like had lost their stations in the castle overnight. Now it was a place where a heartbroken king would sit over his map and strategize, throwing himself into how to fulfill Caris’s vision for a better world even in her absence. He rarely left his war room, save for eating and sleeping. He had little reason to carry on without her.

The king’s hands slipped into his hair. “They’d have someone with the ability to scry in Farehold if they hadn’t spent hundreds of years demonizing powers they deemed ‘dark.’”

“You know as well as I that Eero and Darya are not to blame.”

He did know that. King Eero and Queen Darya had inherited a kingdom of systemic injustice. He also knew that passivity in the face of injustice was as good as condoning its continuity, and their daughter was the first to do something about it. Caris was a revolutionary. She wanted to use her power and privilege to make a change in the world. She wanted safety, she wanted education, she wanted not just tolerance, but peace, understanding, and appreciation among the people of the continent. Her heart had been too good for this world, and the world had killed her for it.

Ophir had killed her.

“Do we want to find Ophir?” Ceneth’s voice was tired. He hadn’t slept in months. He didn’t want the younger princess in Gwydir any more than she wanted to be there.

“The plan for the alliance has been in place before Eero and Darya even had children. The fact that they had daughters was advantageous, but irrelevant to the need for the alliance. It’s what’s right for Raascot.”

“Substantially harder to birth an heir to both thrones if they’d had sons, I suppose.” He wanted to smile but didn’t have it in him. He’d loved Caris. He’d loved her more than he’d thought possible. He’d wanted to tear down the world and make it new for her. He would have ripped out the hearts of her enemies, baked her ten thousand cakes, picked her flowers every day, given her the heads of her enemies, and made the world a new, beautiful place as they ruled. He would have given her every piece of himself every day for the rest of his life.

But Ophir had taken the most perfect treasure in this wretched world and dragged her to a viper’s den. And now he was supposed to marry his beloved’s murderer.

“I know you don’t care for Ophir, Your Majesty, but—”

Ceneth scoffed.

“The fact remains, she is your betrothed now.”

“Call a medium.”

“Your Highness?”

He continued to rub at his temples. “I don’t have one in the courts, and I’d like to appoint one to reside within the castle. Please inform whoever you find that I hope for them to take up residence in our guest wing. I need to speak with Caris.”

The man shook his head. “I have to disagree. There are some powers—”

“Some powers that what?” His voice was thick with challenge. “Some powers that are evil? Some powers that should be forced out of the south and sequestered to the north, where all evil things reside? Some powers that are only for the wicked, dark fae of Raascot?” He looked disgusted with the man. “Find a medium and put them in my employ. Give them whatever rooms in the castle they’d like. Pay them whatever they ask.”

“And of one who can scry, Your Majesty?”

“Eero can wait. If Farehold’s princess is missing now, either she’ll still be missing by the time we respond to his raven, or they’ll have found her and the problem will have resolved itself. Or maybe she’ll be eaten by wolves, and then once again, the problem will resolve itself.”

The man frowned disapprovingly.

He clucked his tongue. “Come, now. I wouldn’t hurt Ophir. Do I blame her? Yes. Do I think she should have died instead of Caris? Yes. Every day of the year my answer to that will be yes. For as long as I live, my answer is yes. Am I angry with her? I think you know that response as well. But would I harm her?” He paused as if considering the question. “…No. It would upset Caris.”

“Caris is dead, Your Highness.”

Ceneth’s eyes flashed, burning with a dark, angry fire. The man flinched, understanding precisely what he’d done wrong. “And why are you wasting time telling me what I already know when you should be finding me a medium? Don’t come back until you have one.”

He didn’t want to sit alone in the war room with the smell of oil and fire.

When the advisor left, he took a rare stroll around the castle. Stroll may not have been the right word. Perhaps sulk would better suit his disposition. He wandered the grounds, looking at everything through the lens of what would never be. He and his golden, elfin bride had been meant to rule for one thousand years, madly in love. The castle grounds would have been filled with blossoming bushes. The yard may have had happy children, half him, half their beautiful mother, playing with well-loved puppies and bringing smiles to all of Gwydir. Instead, he’d be wed to her murderer.

But Ophir wasn’t the only one to blame.

No, the list of those who needed to pay was long and written in blood.

***

Even among the Raascot fae, there were a few gifts considered more terrible than others.

The wisdom of the kingdom was that an ability was no more good nor evil than the one wielding it. Surely that was true of all gifts, including mediums. Surely families were healed when they could learn their loved ones had forgiven them. A mother could hear that their child was safe and whole. A soldier might learn that the friend who’d fallen on the battlefield had passed on to drink pints in the great halls of the afterlife. Surely, there was good that could come from it.

Ceneth wasn’t sure why he was sweating.

He’d told his people for centuries that powers were morally neutral, as had his father before him. How could he believe that if he feared the gifts of the one visiting him now?

The war-room door opened and a somewhat androgynous fae stepped into the windowless room. A silk, copper-colored scarf was wound tightly around the fae’s hair, concealing it entirely, nearly matching the bronze of their skin. The medium examined the war room, then shook their head.

“I’m sorry,” said Ceneth. “I was expecting a woman.”

The medium waved a hand. “Such titles are constrictive and useless. Call me neither, for I am none.”

Ceneth nodded quickly. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

He was king. He shouldn’t be apologizing to anyone, but he was nervous. Yet, this individual might be the only person in his kingdom that might allow him to speak to Caris. He’d signed over whatever authority or respect he had the moment he’d recognized their power to connect him to the one he’d loved.

“This won’t do,” they said. “You’re in this room to avoid your emotions, Your Majesty, not to connect with them. Bring me to wherever you had the strongest connection to your loved one.”

He knew exactly where he felt most connected to his beloved—the bride who would never be.

Caris had been to Gwydir twice. The first time had been on an ambassador mission with the entire royal family. She’d been escorted by an entourage of guards. The King and Queen of Farehold had been ushered through the kingdom, waited on hand and foot. While the first night had come with its uncomfortable cordial interactions, by the second night, they’d had a chance interaction in the corridor.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” The fair princess shook her head, her blond hair cascading around her bare shoulders. “I was just looking for your gardens. You seem to have so much space between the castle and the river, but where are your flowers?”

He’d laughed, and then immediately stopped himself when he caught her expression. “No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh at you. I suppose the last woman on the grounds was my mother, and she wasn’t particularly interested in aesthetics. The castle really could use a lady’s touch.” He’d watched her blue eyes as she listened intently, nodding as he spoke to let him know she was engaged with his every word. “What would you do with it?”

It had been like breathing.

They’d stepped into one another’s lives as if they’d always existed there. Their stories had begun somewhere in the middle, as if it were quite by accident that the author of life and time had left out the first part of their lives, too tired to write how their souls had been born together, grown up together, known each other on a level deeper than blood and bones. Ceneth had accompanied her through the grounds as she commented on what she’d fix or change, all while showering Gwydir in sincere compliments every time she saw a lovely bend in the river, glisten in the stone, tall tree, or friendly face. He hadn’t faked a moment of sincerity with her. Everything between them had been so easy.

He’d known his heart belonged to her before they’d left the gardens.

They wanted as one. They planned as one. They even dreamed as one.

Ceneth blinked away from the memory. “My bedchambers, I suppose. No, no, nothing untoward. I won’t have you thinking a single improper thought of her. She was perfect and peerless in every way. It was me. I used to dream of her all the time while she lived. Almost every night, in fact. And now…”

The medium turned from the war room as if they were leading the way, even though they had no idea where the king slumbered. Fortunately, Ceneth’s advisor was still present to escort the medium through the halls. The castle had its twists and turns, but after a few winding flights of stairs, they found themselves in the king’s room. It was ostentatiously large, with a wall of floor-to-ceiling latticed windows that opened onto an enormous balcony overlooking Gwydir.

“Your bed?” the medium asked, their expression heavy with implication, though not of judgment.

Ceneth felt a compulsion toward honesty. Caris had passed, and there were no secrets worth protecting if they might cost him the ability to reunite with her once more. “We weren’t intimate. Not in the flesh. But my dreams knew only her nearly every night after we met. I haven’t dreamed of her since she passed, and it’s like I’ve lost her all over again.”

The medium took it upon themself to drag the desk from where it had rested against the wall closer to the fireplace. The grating sounds of wood and stone disrupted any sense of peace and decorum, but after the curtains were drawn and candles were lit, a deeper, more ominous energy filled the room. The medium sat on one side of the desk with their back to the fire, becoming a dark silhouette as the flames licked behind them. They extended their hands across the table and made a sweeping gesture for Ceneth to take a seat.

The advisor had remained idling in the doorway, but with one pointed look from the medium, the man was dismissed. He closed the door behind him to give them privacy.

“Sit,” the medium said.

Ceneth knew exactly why nervous adrenaline coursed through him. He wasn’t afraid of what he might meet. He was afraid of disappointment. Caris’s absence would be yet another loss in a string of acute, painful streams of mourning. He was afraid that she would not answer his call. He was afraid to face the reality that perhaps the spirit did not live on after death. A greater fear seized him that even if there was, she wouldn’t want to see him.

The medium’s hands remained extended until Ceneth placed his palms in each of the medium’s hands, clasping them loosely.

“Let your mind go blank,” the medium said, voice low.

Ceneth silently obeyed.

“Picture her.”

He did.

“Listen to my voice as I take you to her. Listen as I count backward from ten. When I reach one, you will be reunited with your beloved. Ten”—the medium’s voice continued in a slow, steady pattern—“nine, your heart feels light. Eight, your mind is empty. Seven, your body is relaxing. Six.”

They continued to count down, and with each number, Ceneth felt himself disconnect further and further from the chair, the desk, the bedchamber, and the mortal plane. He heard the number two, and then opened his eyes when the number one failed to come.

The medium wasn’t there.

“Caris?” His voice caught in his throat as he stared into the ocean eyes of his beloved. The outline of her hair, her shoulders, her slim frame caught against the flickering backlight of the fire. The smell of newly budding flowers and the petrichor just after a spring rain filled the room. Her hands were soft yet strong as she held him.

She smiled sadly back at him, squeezing his hands. “I’m so sorry we never get our wedding.”

A hot, violent spike of tears stung his eyes, but he didn’t dare release her hands to wipe them away. “Are you really here?”

“Yes, and no,” she said, testing each word for accuracy. She spoke slowly, carefully. “Time is blurry here. I’m with you. I’m before you. I’m thousands of years beyond you. Things have never been and will always be. Threads, tangled and interwoven. Tapestries and patterns and lines between then and now and next. All of it, and none of it, and yet I still wish you could have seen me in white. I have the loveliest dress picked for our day. Had. Will have. It’s hard to say.”

The tears spilled over his lids as he looked at her, cheeks pink and healthy, hair as golden as the sun. Her lips puckered in a sympathetic pout, as if she knew that nothing she could say or do would ever ease this pain. There was no comfort. She tried, releasing the grip from one hand so that she could use her gentle fingers to run soothing pats and traces along the king’s giant, calloused hands.

“I’m to marry Ophir.” He closed his eyes as he delivered the news.

“I know.” She nodded. “It’s already happened.”

Rejection and denial bubbled through him, horrified at her words. “No, she’s missing, she—”

“You’ll marry her, but she won’t be your bride. There’s no betrayal. I won’t feel hurt or wronged. You’ll need to do it to save her. From what could be, for her, for you, for the world. It doesn’t work. It does. It hasn’t. It will. The threads, the fabric, it’s still being woven. It’s already finished. It hasn’t begun.”

Half of what she said didn’t make sense. It was garbled and nonsensical, though her voice was bright, curious, and clear. “You speak of fabric? Time?”

“Yes, my love. The fabric of time. You understand. You don’t. You haven’t. You will. And you’ll marry her. I know you will, because you know I love her, and you love me. Loved me. Will love me. I loved her before we were born, and in one thousand years I love her still, though she breaks. Raascot breaks. Has broken. The gods will break it.”

“Raascot?” He looked at her, confused.

“It’s fuzzy, almost as if I’m looking through curtains, or hair, or as if the quilt is still on the loom. Sometimes I see it so clearly, and then it shifts. Sometimes it’s complete. It is complete. I see five generations of broken hearts on Raascot’s throne, then three, then ten. I see pain. I see terror and darkness. I see…” The lines across her forehead deepened.

“Caris? What? Are you safe? Where are you? What’s it like? Are you okay?”

She shook her head. “I’m yesterday, and one hundred years before that. It’s all a ball of yarn that’s been unraveled and put together again by careless hands. In some futures, I see you smile. You can smile again. You can have a child—he shares your wings.”

“That’s impossible.” He shook his head. “If I’m to marry your sister—”

“And you will. You already have.”

Frustration and sorrow collided as they seeped into him. He shook his head. “Caris, we were going to change the world. We were going to break the wheel. The people, the kingdoms…”

“Five generations,” she repeated. “I see it now, the threads, the stitching, the fabric. Things will get so much worse before they get better. An army. A league. A brotherhood. A tragedy. A war.”

“Caris… Are you seeing the future?” He was hurt and confused and nearly frantic as he held her small hands more tightly. He didn’t know how to make sense of any of her words. “What do I do?”

“No.” She shook her head. “It isn’t the future. It’s now. It’s then. It’s maybe. But so much of the maybe is dark. So much is pain. So much is…” She looked around. “Why am I here? Do you have a question for me?”

“What is the afterlife?”

She tilted her head slightly to the side as if she didn’t understand the question. “After?”

He swallowed, deciding it didn’t matter. Maybe this was not something he was meant to know or understand. Maybe that’s why the goddess saw fit to scramble her words, to jumble her meaning. “I don’t dream of you anymore.”

“You never dreamed of me,” she responded.

“I did. Every night. Every—”

“Wings, dreams, and heartache will be your family’s legacy, and blood, talons, and pain will be mine.” The words sounded like a witch’s curse, a horrible prophecy, an unhinged fate. They were said on a mouth so lovely, on a voice like a song. “Will you do something for me?”

Tears filled his eyes as he dug into hers as if prodding her bright, ocean-blue gaze with a shovel, burrowing himself into her gaze. “Anything.”

“Don’t call on me again.”

He nearly flinched. “Caris, how could you ask that of me? How could I…?”

“Because some futures have light, and joy, and kindness. That’s the one I see, and the one that changes. You won’t find them if you cling to the past. The one on the loom is dark, Ceneth. Threads of wild and shadow. You won’t be the one to see our dream, my love, my heart, my then, my next. But you can set the wheel in motion. One day the kingdoms can be united by the daughter of Raascot and Farehold—though she is not ours. Not our daughter. It wasn’t our time. It was. It did.”

“Who killed you? Please, goddess, tell me who did this?”

“In some ways, it was the All Mother. Ophir will know—she does and she doesn’t. Help her, and when you help her, you’ll have helped me. Will help me? Had helped me.”

He loved her so much that his hatred for this false representative, this incomplete version of her burned through him. She was almost his Caris. She was nearly his beloved. But it was wrong. It was off. It hurt.

He couldn’t stop staring at her. She was so real, so solid. The slope of her nose, the flower-petal pink of her lips, the cream of her skin were so unbearably vivid. Every breath he took filled him with the devastatingly lovely, delicate scent of springtime rain. And yet, this wasn’t how Caris spoke. She’d always been always so articulate, so clever. Now her words twisted with each new sentence, fading in and out like a wandering mind. She was herself, and she wasn’t.

“I don’t want to let you go.”

She squeezed his hands again. “We shared more love than most people have in a lifetime. Everything we did was real. We’re lucky, Ceneth. And now Ophir needs you. I need you. Raascot needs you. The continent needs you. And when you find her—”

“Ophir?”

“No.” Her voice softened. “When you find your bride, I need you to know that I’m happy for you. Your son is beautiful, and strong, and kind. His son and the son after them are children of the sky in your kingdom of wings. And none of it will happen if you don’t help Ophir. If she’s left alone…she’ll unmake the world.”

“Don’t go,” he said quietly, knowing she couldn’t stay. He wanted to say she was wrong. That he’d never have children with Ophir. That everything she said was impossible. But he couldn’t.

“I was never here, and I always will be.”

***

“Your Highness?”

Ceneth continued to stare blankly forward. He’d died all over again. His body entombed the void of his heart as he stared blankly forward.

“Your Majesty?” the medium attempted once more.

His eyes slid to the medium, blinking against the stark contrast from the woman who’d been sitting there only moments before. The silk of their scarf, their androgynous features, their larger hands. Ceneth slipped his hands out of the medium’s. He smelled the smoke from his hearth and the medium’s spiced scent, but a lingering perfume of fresh spring rain remained faintly in the air.

“Thank you.” Ceneth cleared his throat, shaking his head as if to remove the cobwebs from where they’d knit within his mind.

“Did you learn all you sought?”

He stood from the table and took a few steps toward the door. “I don’t know. I didn’t know what I needed to learn when I began, and I’m perhaps more confused than I was before. May I ask you something?”

The medium dipped their chin.

“Time?”

They clucked their tongue knowingly. “You asked her about the afterlife, and she spoke of past and future, correct?”

Ceneth shook his head, uncomprehending. He began to pace around his room, walking from wall to wall with the carpeted rug, amidst the candles and paintings and four-post bed painting a striking, royal scene around him. “Do they all do that? She referred to a loom.”

The medium stood as well, straightening their shirt and pants and adjusting their scarf. “I’ve heard others speak of the loom. I cannot know anything for certain, except that they are not gone, even though they are. They depart from our moment in time, but they continue to exist in the past, in the future, just not in the present.”

“So, I’ll see her in the future?”

“No, for you, every moment is always the present. For all of us, each second, each minute is the present, no matter how old, or how gray, or how long.”

“She is always one second out of my grasp in either direction?”

“I cannot say for certain, Your Majesty.” They were apologetic, but their voice was firm.

“Every time but now?” His question was flat, empty, and hopeless.

The medium looked at him sadly. Ceneth’s emotion must have been familiar. This was a reaction they’d seen before.

He nodded, rubbing his temple as if fighting off an early headache. “Right, right. Thank you for your help. I’ll be sure you’re fairly compensated.”

The medium shook their head. “When the King of Raascot requests your natural wellspring of abilities, you do not ask for something in return. It was my pleasure to serve you. When your advisor met me, they asked me to move onto the castle grounds. Will you be calling on me again?”

Ceneth inhaled slowly through his nose. “She asked me not to.”

The medium nodded. “Yes, I expect she did. But that was not my question. Her will and your will may not be one in the same. For now, I will stay.” They offered a subtle bow as they departed from the room, leaving Ceneth alone, always one second out of Caris’s reach.