Land of Fury, page 28
But then it dawns on me. “You,” I breathe, meeting Zander’s gaze. “She knew if she tried anything with me, you would surely find out. She said herself she knew your affection for me.”
Zander says nothing because there is nothing to say. Or perhaps he already put the pieces together himself.
“Will she be all right?” I ask the apothecary as he leans in, listening to Siggy’s breathing. “Will she recover?”
After a drawn-out moment, he sighs, straightens, and reluctantly meets my gaze. “I believe she will, Your Highness, but—” He looks at my sister, his eyes assessing her sweat-dampened brow before speaking again. “Only if we can break her fever.” He points to his potions lined along the bedside table. “Until she is well enough to drink, add a drop of each on her tongue every few hours, and if she will wake enough to drink something, that alone will help to purge her system of the toxins that linger.”
Nodding emphatically, I take his hand with gratitude and lower my forehead to it. “Thank you,” I whisper.
The apothecary rests his other hand on my head, then excuses himself from the room, leaving only Zander and me to stay with Siggy.
I look at my sister’s blonde hair—with barely a red sheen—and think of her gray-blue eyes I desperately wish to see again.
“Siggy,” I whisper. “If you can hear me, I want you to know I have come home. You are not alone.” I bring her clammy hand to my lips and press a kiss to her knuckles. I have never been very close to my sister, but I have never wished her dead. I have always judged her for allowing herself to be pushed around, but never felt indifference, like I often did with my mother. In fact, I have always felt sorry for her.
“Siggy,” I breathe. “Zander and I—” The tears roll down my cheeks. “We cannot do this without you. Can you imagine?” I say with a watery laugh. “Me with my bow, and Zander, who strikes fear in the strongest of men.” I shake my head. “I know nothing of this kingdom. Of its politics.” I lean forward. “I need you, Siggy.” It’s barely a whisper, but every word aches as it passes my lips. “I cannot do this without you,” I repeat.
Hesitantly, Reider steps into the room. His worried gaze shifts from my sister to Zander as he walks over to his perch in the corner. I watch their whispered conversation, their expressions grave. Finally, they look at me.
I wipe the tears from my cheek and rise to my feet. Swallowing thickly, I round my sister’s bed toward the door. “What is it?” I ask without ceremony, because whatever it is, I can’t bear to let it hang in the air unsaid. “What has happened now?”
“I found records, princess. In the abbess’s quarters.”
I frown, Reider’s reluctance sending goose bumps over my skin. “What sort of records?”
“Entries in a journal of sorts,” he says carefully, “about your family.” He looks at Siggy’s bed, his expression shadowed with as much fury as sorrow. Then he seems to remember himself and looks at me again. “You should see for yourself what I found.”
43
THORA
The scent of dank earth, excrement, and putrid decay fills my nose as I follow Zander and Reider through the dungeon catacombs. I don’t pretend to know how many poor souls my mother and the queens before her have banished and tortured down here over the centuries, but in this moment, I wonder if any of them were as truly deserving as Abbess Blanca.
Running my hand down the front of my dress, I exhale the rage and astonishment frothing inside me.
The torch lights flicker through the warren of cold stone and echoing footsteps. Zander navigates the corridors so easily that I hate to think how many times he’s been down here, and what he’s had to do at my mother’s command over the years.
Eventually, the passageway opens to a vast room exposing half a dozen alcoves, their barred doors glinting in the torch flames.
The abbess sits against the wall of her cell, her black garb puddling around her. Though she steeples her hands in prayer, I wonder if it is really the Christian God she prays to, or an entity far more sinister.
I stop outside her enclosure, and slowly, Abbess Blanca looks up at me. Her lips curve with a hint of a smile, making her gaunt face more wicked than I thought possible. That a woman locked in a cell, uncertain of her future, can look so smug, terrifies and infuriates me. But I reel my boiling emotions in, knowing she will do all she can to get a rise out of me, a pleasure I refuse to allow her this time.
“Thora,” she simpers, “how good of you to come.” The abbess doesn’t take her eyes from me as she rises to her feet and gestures for me to come inside. “I have been longing for a visit.”
I clasp my hands in front of me, fighting a grin of my own. “Did you ever think in all your years, abbess, it would be you inside this dungeon, and that I would be the one to put you in it?”
Abbess Blanca’s bony fingers wrap around the bars and she leans closer. Firelight gleams in her pale, ghostlike eyes. I’ve always known how horrible she is, but I wonder how I’d never realized just how malevolent.
“It is true,” she admits. “I had hoped Harald had found you and broken you—that you were the least of my worries, and I would only have a money hungry warlord to deal with upon his return. But it seems I was mistaken about his competence.”
“And now you have me to deal with, despite your plotting.”
“It’s true,” the abbess concedes. “I have clearly underestimated you, Thora. You have always been the headstrong one—not as easily influenced as your sister or as blinded by anger as your mother . . .” She eyes me closely. “After my spies alerted Harald to your leaving, I thought that might be the last I would ever see of you.”
“Well I am happy to disappoint you, then,” I say. “With my mother dead,” I think aloud, “my sister nearly so, and me in the hands of Harald, you thought you could, what, rule the kingdom in place of a Storrada queen?”
Abbess Blanca blinks with a shrewd, eerily calm countenance. “I think it would not be difficult to step in,” she says flatly—too bold for my liking. “Especially when the loss of your mother is celebrated through the streets, not mourned.”
Scathing retorts claw for voice, but I refrain. Instead, regret tugs at my chest as the truth of her words sinks in. “And you saw to it that her reign nearly ruined this kingdom so that she would be hated.”
The abbess chuckles as she shakes her head. “Your naivety never ceases to amuse me, Thora. Your mother needed little coaxing. She was too paranoid she would fail and prove her mother right—I simply helped her see a way to claim such power.”
“Your way, you mean. One that benefited you most of all.”
“God’s way,” the abbess corrects, but it’s obvious she deviated from God years ago.
“You do not do this for the Christian God. You do it because you can—taking everything from others to make yourself feel better. To fuel your own ambitions. That is not God’s will.”
Ignoring me, Abbess Blanca looks at Zander. “I had expected you would meet your end by Harald’s blade, huntsman. Or that you would come upon the Blood Riders set out to find you. But it appears your gods have favored you. For now.”
I realize how differently the journey would have gone had the abbess known about Windwich, and had we not been stuck there in the storm.
“Your disloyalty to the queen should not surprise me,” she continues. “You are clearly as fickle with your heart as you are with your love of the gods.”
“Your disloyalty is far from surprising as well,” Zander replies.
“And yet, abbess,” I say, “for all of your spying, here we stand and there you are, caged away to await your end. You seem unfazed by it.”
She shrugs. “Lock me up or kill me, Thora, but all I have done for this kingdom will not be undone simply because you have put me in a cell. The tide has long been changing. It makes no difference if I am here to see the end.”
Her hubris is as laughable as it is maddening. “I believe I forgot to tell you,” I start. “I met the Reaper during my travels.”
Abbess Blanca’s brow twitches with a hint of alarm.
“Have you met him?” I wave my question away. “It’s no matter. He knows of you now, and suffice it to say, he was displeased to learn his name has been touted throughout the land with such little respect. He and his men have agreed to bring me the heads of your Blood Riders.”
That drains the amusement from the abbess’s face completely, and her nostrils flare before she can school her expression. As I suspected, without her Blood Riders, the abbess’s efforts are foiled.
“So, you see,” I continue, “I am not utterly alone in this. But that is not why I have come.”
Abbess Blanca tilts her head ever so slightly, and the wrinkles lining her thin lips purse with interest.
I pull some of the folded letters found inside her journal from my bodice, watching her expression closely.
Her eyes meet mine. “Am I supposed to cower as you stand there with pieces of parchment?” she says sharply, lifting a delicate eyebrow. A different me would’ve cowered at her severity, but with her ashen, dirt-streaked skin and the wiry hair escaping her habit, she looks utterly wretched.
“Of course not. I would never presume a vile woman like you would give me the privilege of witnessing such weakness,” I confess. “But I would like to know your role in the demise of my brother and father.”
The abbess’s cruel smile returns. “Ah. I was wondering if you would find my things.” She looks at Zander and Reider, standing sentry only inches behind me. “I suppose you think one of your hedonist gods aided you in your findings,” she says derisively.
Reider tilts his head, his expression giving nothing away. “You wear twice as many layers as the rest of your flock to keep warm because you refuse to use the hearth in your room. I figured your reason must have been great to deny yourself the heat of a fire—the only comfort you have ever denied yourself.” He lifts his chin. “I do not require help from the gods when logic suffices, abbess. It was a clever hiding place, I grant you that.”
Perturbed, the abbess looks at me as if she’s waiting for me to unleash my fury for such a knotted web of deceit. But I don’t give her the pleasure.
“My father,” I prompt. “I know he was an influential nobleman, someone who would get in your way should he learn of your scheming against the crown. So, you convinced my horrible grandmother to rid herself of future problems by killing him. But my brother? He was only minutes old before you took him away. My mother was still grieving the loss of my father, and you take her son?” An ache of sadness grips me.
The abbess scoffs. “I was merely an advisor—”
“No more games,” I tell her. “We are both too smart for that. You were close enough to my grandmother to think you could sway her to kill my mother’s newborn son, but she surprised you, didn’t she? My grandmother might’ve had my father killed, but she could not bear to kill an innocent child—her only grandson. Even she was not as heartless as you wanted her to be. She sent the child away like all princes preceding him, lying to you about having him killed.” I try and fail not to smile this time. “Oh, how I would have loved to have seen your face when you discovered he was still alive.” I hold up her correspondence with a monastery near the Onyx Mountains, the letter crinkling in my fingers.
“If you know all of this, then why are you here, Thora?” she hisses, clearly distressed as her life’s work unravels in front of her.
“It was only two years ago you found out he was still alive. So why not kill him?”
The abbess stares at me without blinking.
I look at her sidelong. “What was your plan with him?”
Abbess Blanca’s witchlike fingers grip the bars of her cell so tightly, her knuckles turn white, and satisfaction flashes across her face, maddening me further. Her games and schemes, her lies and deceit. My skin itches, anxious to put them all to rest, and even if I have never been like my mother, I can’t help but wonder what she would do in this moment. Then I see the truth.
“Because he was worth more to you alive than dead.”
“Good girl,” the abbess hums. “You are getting the hang of this queenly business. Perhaps there is hope for you yet.”
“Did my mother know he was alive? Were you using him to sway her?” Suddenly, my mother’s quips and comments about enemies and obligations over the years seem more like thinly veiled clues. But if that’s true, why would my mother not confide any of this in Zander? My mind spins with possible answers I fear I’ll never learn, and rage fills me to brimming.
First, the abbess breaks my mother by killing my father, and turns her into a brutal, callous leader. Then, she forces my mother’s hand and poisons my sister, all while keeping a brother from us—a son his mother thought was ripped away and murdered. And now, so close to death, the abbess smiles as if she’s won despite her cage.
My cheeks burn red and my hands are shaking with exhausted, barely contained rage. How could we all have been so blind?
“I don’t know how many queens you have killed, Abbess Blanca, but you have committed far more atrocities than that. And I mean to make you pay for them,” I promise her.
As she watches me, a sick gleam of satisfaction shimmers in her eyes as if she’s won something. She wants me to snap. She wants me to be ruthless like the rest, giving her one last satisfaction in this life. As much as I want to strike the smug look from her face, I want something else far more than that. “You think my anger equals your end, but you forget I have never been like my mother. It will not be me who decides your death.”
Her brow twitches.
“I leave your punishment to them,” I say, nodding toward Zander and Reider, “and the people of Winterwood. The people whose lives you have had a hand in ruining. For they will know the truth about you. And whatever Winterwood decides, I imagine it will be unpleasant.”
For the first time in the twenty years I’ve known her, when Abbess Blanca’s eyes shift to the huntsman and his right hand, I see fear in their pale green depths.
As the abbess swallows thickly, I turn on my heel, unable to stomach the sight of her a moment longer.
“The abbess has killed enough queens and poisoned enough princesses,” I grit out as Zander falls into step behind me. “See that the decision is made quickly. She has no more power here.”
44
THORA
Snow drifts around me as I stand in the graveyard, glaring at my grandmother’s stately headstone—a stone pillar inlaid with mountain glass, covered in lichen and speckled with mud and snow. One of ten Storrada queens whose dynasty was a brutal reign of discontent and fear, bred by the whispers of the Abbess General and all the queenmakers who came before her.
Despite my grandmother’s monument that time has all but forgotten in this graveyard, it’s the small stone cross under the weeping spruce I’ve come to visit. My father’s empty grave. There’s no nameplate, yet its existence served as a reminder to the abbess and crown that they might have taken him from my mother, but they can never erase his memory. It’s one of many truths over the past fifty years come to light since reading Abbess Blanca’s letters and journal entries—truths about her interferences that have shaped Norseland’s history since she took her predecessor’s place when she was but a girl. Entries about debts to be collected over the years, plans thwarted and carried out, and obstinate princesses she’s met along the way, my mother and I included.
The wind whips over me, stirring my daze, and I blink at the grave. My father. The mere thought of having a father I’ve never met has always been a strange one, let alone one who my mother actually loved. A man my mother would have died for, had my grandmother not taken him from her first. Because that is the way of the Storradas—there is no room for love or men, even when you give your life to your kingdom. It’s a sacrifice that has spurred my resistance to this life I was born into, but only now do I see it. I’ve known loneliness, and to live without companionship and true connection with another is not a life I can bear.
Biting the inside of my cheek, I stare at the small cross beside my father’s. For my little brother. My hands clench into fists at my sides as a tear drips down my cheek. Not for me, but for my mother, who only ever knew pain and sorrow. Who was never allowed to love, and those she dared to were taken from her.
Perhaps that is why she pushed me away, a fire-haired reminder of her past, too painful to look at. The female born and only spared should my mother need a second heir.
I squeeze my eyes shut as another tear, warm against my cold cheek, falls from my lashes and drips into the snow at my feet. “I will find you, brother,” I whisper. Then I turn back for Zander, who watches over me from the garden gate.
Wrapping my cloak tighter around me, I make my way through the maze of headstones. Each step is quicker and more determined. The more I understand the reality of this kingdom, the stronger my vow to rid us of the sickness that plagues it.
Zander drops his leg from where he leans against the wall and walks toward me. He is my connection to this life, to my humanity. He is my compass, who has helped me to see what is possible. What could be. What will be.
The look in his eyes is one of concern, but I cannot assure him all is well until I know the abbess is dead.
Zander must read as much on my face as he falls into step beside me. “One of her priests was happy to speak with us, hoping his fate will be better than the abbess’s.” I glare toward the holding cells as he continues. “We have discovered those within the city and these very walls who are loyal to her, not found in her pages. The horsemen and guards are seeing to them.”
I flash Zander a look of gratitude, but it falls flat when I note his pensive expression. “What is it?”
“Winterwood has spoken.” He says it softly—almost hesitant—as if he wishes he could prepare me for something disturbing.
“And?”
