Page 14 of Angel in Absentia (Light Locked #2)

“I was never meant to rule,” she said, calm, collected, not in a rejection of her responsibilities but accepting that she might soon have to carry them anyway.

And therein she found her reason for avoiding her father.

His sickness would have progressed. He was at the edge of death when she left Loda, and he would be closer now.

When he died, Loda would be hers to oversee.

A year of training, as grueling as it was, couldn’t prepare her for that.

Nothing could, and it wasn’t that she didn’t feel capable of learning the responsibility, but it would never feel suited to her.

She’d spend her days either battling the council or consenting to be their proxy, having children, raising children in the way of tradition.

There would be visits between Ruedom and Loda, back and forth, all planned, all secure.

For some, such a life would be suitable, even pleasurable, but for her, it simply felt like a role in a play meant for someone else. She would still play it anyway.

Iris continued after a brief pause, “You say all these things about how you love healing, and yet you limit yourself and push yourself toward weaponry, which you hate. Dae keeps saying you need to recover, but I don’t understand. Healing makes you happy.”

“He’s right,” Clea whispered, and the silence drew out between them for a long moment.

She looked down at the water, and Iris maintained the silence as if sensing the gravity of her thoughts.

Clea reflected back on Iris’s question about exchanging hearts and wondered what threat there could really be in being a bit more honest.

“Iris,” she started. “You said I am like water. There is a reason healers are often compared to such. I didn’t used to think healing had any limits. But I made a mistake. I healed someone I shouldn’t have,” she whispered and then paused.

Iris said nothing, seeming to sense that Clea wasn’t done.

“They say barriers and seals are the discipline of the body, weaponry is the discipline of the heart, expulsion the discipline of the mind, and healing the discipline of the soul. When I heal someone, I—” She paused.

“I open myself to them. Even with the forest, each time I heal it, I don’t force it to recover.

That’s not possible. Healing is about asking something for an exchange, asking to be let in, and when they let you in, you bring the light in with you, becoming a channel for ansra in its purest form.

My soul touches theirs. I am but a channel, and in that way, I extend through them.

I expose my soul to things, and while in the forest, I healed someone. I don’t regret it, but—”

She remembered standing in the crater of Ryson’s soul and knew now, had his soul existed there, she very well could have been trapped by it forever.

She’d heard about people exchanging hearts and losing minds, but to have her soul trapped by another, she couldn’t even fathom the consequences.

She had felt his wounds, experienced them in her own way, and had she not regained enough power to withdraw, she might have been lost in that empty space forever.

“The necklace I wear, I wear perhaps to protect against that. His heart—” she whispered, and stopped short, realizing in that moment she’d shared the secret that perhaps Iris knew already.

But how?

“His heart compels me, even, to wear this, as if trying to protect me.” It was as if, even from a distance, he was trying to guard her from the consequences of their bond.

He had been right to fear for her when she healed him.

“I think it helps me,” she whispered, “without it, I—well, even with it, when I heal too much.”

I feel more connected to the forest than any Veilin should.

“You have the dreams Dae keeps talking about?” Iris asked.

“Yes,” Clea admitted. “The dreams.”

The strange, powerful dreams that offered strange symbols and a mysterious pull in a direction she didn’t want to explore. Each time in her dreams, she could clutch the necklace and it would help draw her back to herself, the opposite of the medallion in every way.

“You want to end all of this,” Iris restated.

“What were you meant to do then? Obviously, there must still be something left for you to do, and I don’t think it’s swinging a sword around.

Maybe it’s related to healing, but maybe not the forest, or minor cuts and bruises.

What finishes this battle for you? If you haven’t decided to do it already, then clearly it must be something you’re afraid of. What is that thing? What’s left?”

Just as Iris said it, Clea knew it was the right thing to ask. The question settled like a dipping chalice in her mind, absorbing the muddle of her thoughts in an organized way. The past few years, her discussion with Myken, her upcoming meeting with her father—it all swirled into a single place.

She took a deep breath, taking the question with her as she sank into the water. She tried to listen through the quiet. She listened to the sound of her own heartbeat and Ryson’s behind it.

She repeated the question, hoping the answer would materialize.

If everything else was not enough, what was there left to do? Why had she felt so at home around Ryson when she’d felt alien everywhere else?

At last, her spirit settled into a sense of restless peace. The warmth put her at ease. Myken’s words broke apart inside her mind, softening and flowing through her with the rest of her thoughts.

He’d warned of dark powers to come that she couldn’t face.

She was going to have to close out her life on the battlefield.

She was going to have to meet her father today.

She allowed the dreaded thoughts to flow through her rather than terrify her.

Not enough. Those haunting words echoed again.

The answer, or an answer, came at last from the soft darkness of her stirring thoughts.

She wrestled it into her grasp and burst up from the water. Iris shouted in surprise and nearly tumbled back down the stairs.

Clea snatched a towel folded near the bath and dried her body as she half-stumbled down toward the mirror.

“I know what it is,” she said, her voice lighter, her body and mind suddenly energized as she started to dress in a new, blue tunic.

Iris was now inspecting portions of her drenched clothes from Clea’s enthusiastic pounce from the bath.

“You’re heading out again?” Iris asked with interest as Clea pulled on a new outfit.

“I know what I need to do. I won’t have victory until it’s done, my version of things, my version of victory,” Clea said urgently, and left the room in a firm march, her wet hair draped over her shoulder. She whipped into the hallway.

???

The guards shifted nervously when she approached her father’s room, Iris stumbling curiously behind her at a distance.

The castle in its entirety seemed accustomed to the heated debates between Clea and her father, as well as Clea and Catagard, and Catagard and her father, and so on and so forth.

At the start of her return, Clea won the least of them, but by the time of her first campaign, she’d gained quite a few victories, which her father had begrudgingly, and perhaps somewhat proudly, relinquished.

The guards had grown so accustomed at this point to reading her walking pace that they seemed to anticipate an argument before she knew she was about to start one.

There was an almost comical nature to the people of Loda in that they brought every hallway, wall, and corner alive with ears and eyes eager to absorb information and respond accordingly in the city’s interest.

Outsiders assumed illustrious titles were the seat of power.

By cien, she was only a servant of the title as the people had given it to her.

If outsiders only knew what the traders, servants, and farmers were capable of, how they all worked in tandem, she was convinced no one would dare raise a sword against their royalty, no matter a foul word.

She knocked and entered to find her father lying in bed.

She noticed instantly how much more like a skeleton he appeared.

He was a shadow of his former self, brown beard overgrown, face sunken.

The disease crept across the collar of his shirt as he watched her enter.

She had expected to see the progression of the illness, and once hesitant, it only fueled her now.

She pulled up a chair, setting it next to him as she sat down with a quick and abrupt motion. They watched each other in silence for a moment.

“Father,” she said.

“It took you long enough,” he replied in a stern bark, body frail but gray eyes still full of that impossible stoniness. “Now,” he said, “an heir.”

Predictable. As always.

“There’s one thing I need to do first,” she said, determined as she leaned toward him.

“Yes, marriage,” he replied gruffly.

“I just went on a nine-month campaign,” she shot back, “or did you not hear?”

“You better be preparing for another nine-month campaign,” he groveled without humor. “Next week. Your marriage. Children.”

“Historical victory,” Clea said, raising her brows at him.

“I can name leaders right now who might have accomplished the same, but only one of them can give the Hart family an heir,” he said without pause, shifting in his loose, blue gown and easing up straighter against the headboard of the bed.

“It’s all arranged.” His expression held a peculiar intensity now.

She watched her father evenly, truly taking him in for the first time. His skin was dull, his cheeks sallow, his eyes dark. He would die soon.

She didn’t know why it had taken so long for the reality to sink in, why his death had seemed like such an impossibility. Maybe after losing everyone else, she never imagined he would die too.

She’d gotten so resistant to the message of marriage over the years that she’d been unable to accept how it had changed.