Page 15 of Angel in Absentia (Light Locked #2)

In the wake of his fading health, it now clicked that in his urgency, he didn’t just want her to have children.

He wanted her to have a family.

She examined the grayness of his eyes, and for the first time, despite how fierce and stubborn he was, she recognized that he was, in fact, weak. Even his iron will could not sustain him much longer.

They’d argued furiously and almost constantly.

He’d pushed and pushed and pushed, and though it had sometimes felt like a punishment, she saw now that he was using the last of his energy on her.

As imposing and domineering as he could be, there was a form of love there, the love that he was capable of.

What else could he offer her?

She exhaled.

“The last thing I want to do, I need to try and do,” she said. “Let me try and heal you one more time.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve tried twice. You failed. It’s time you accept that. Healing has its limits,” he replied sharply.

Healing has its limits.

Her father had always considered healing an art for children who didn’t yet have the capacity to channel ansra for offensive pursuits. He’d quoted the limits of healing more times than she could count, and yet she’d managed to surpass each barrier in the past beyond healing their dreadful illness.

This was the last one, and that repeated phrase now only made her eager to leap that hurdle.

“You’re to marry the Prince of Ruedom in a matter of days,” he continued again.

“I’m going to heal you,” Clea continued with conviction.

Now, he was the one who didn’t answer.

She’d tried several times before, determined to destroy the curse. Despite the fact that her own legend told that her curse had miraculously healed as she’d healed others, Clea was convinced that it was possible to heal their families’ illness somehow.

“This city needs an heir. We’ve waited long enough,” he said, as if healing him and producing an heir were mutually exclusive. Clea knew the truth of it was that he was exhausted and determined not to leave his bed. He’d resigned to die already, though she knew he would never admit it.

“You had a victory in Virday,” he said. “I know you don’t understand the urgency, but this is perhaps the most important front we fight on.

People need hope. You brought them the victory of Virday, and now you will bring them a wedding to unite the cities, and then children.

Others win on a battlefield, but only you can win here.

Restrain that restless spirit, Clea. You already risked too much by going to Virday.

You won. It’s a tremendous victory, but had you died, the cost would have been abysmal.

It was a risk we all agreed to take, but it ends there. ”

Clea exhaled, trying to stay on task and not start a completely different argument. Her father was a brutish master of provocation, and he knew exactly which buttons to press.

“I want to try and heal you again,” she continued with steel in her voice, ignoring any other topic.

“Stubborn,” he said. “Stubborn when you riffled through the censored libraries. Stubborn when you demanded the campaign of Virday and then brought back the Golden Army with a Virdain general of all things! A barbarian general!”

There it was. It was still a surprisingly light scolding, though perhaps only because it paled in comparison to all of her other apparent abuses of power.

She scoffed, waving off his comment. “As if the people of Ruedom don’t say the same about us!”

“Stubborn,” he continued, his raspy voice louder as it gathered momentum, “when you insist on keeping company with that Ruedom-born woman who risks polluting you with her immoral ideologies and undisciplined, animal behavior!”

Clea rubbed her face. “I feel like Dae is in the room with me right now. Have the two of you been taking tea together?”

“He visits me to honor me before my very own blood and daughter,” her father grumbled back. “At least he has some interest in the happenings of the royal estate and the future of our people!”

Clea threw a hand into the air. “I knew it! You were the one who told him about those rumors. The two of you are two of the gossips Catagard was so dismayed about. He thinks it’s the servants! Just wait until I tell Catagard. He will lose his head.”

“You will tell him no such thing!” her father roared, and Clea simply remained there, hands on her hips, an expression on her face that threatened to do just that.

Her father huffed, shifted in his bed, and then in a quieter tone added, “Catagard has been withholding information. He feels it’s been contributing to the rapid decline of my health, feeding the illness. Dae is passing along what he hears.”

“Witholding information. Doesn’t feel so good, does it?” Clea muttered. She hunkered down in front of him again, changing the topic. “Look, Father. I’m going to marry,” she insisted. “I’ll have plenty of children, hundreds of children, thousands of children. The streets will be full of children.”

His chest huffed with an empty dismissal at her teasing response.

“But I’m also going to try and heal you again. Tomorrow, after the Victas preparation performance. We try again.”

“You’d drag me into the pool if I kicked or screamed, wouldn’t you? I’m tired of crawling in and out of that water. Let me die in my own bed,” he snapped, arguing the truth of his resistance at last.

“Stubborn.” Clea sat back, arms folded. “I wonder who I get it from.”

“Your mother,” he replied gruffly.

She didn’t reply, and they sat in silence again for a moment. Their differences and past hurts aside, he was her only family now, and they settled back into a communal rest in each other’s company.

After several more minutes, Clea rose and looked out the window she’d stared out almost two years prior. She looked back over at her father, seeing the suffering that she too had suffered at the hands of that illness.

The curse was powerful, dangerous, and connected to Venennin of the likes many of her people had never seen.

She would shine a light on them, conquer the cast of their darkness with her own will, and then at last, she would return to these walls for good, relinquish the battle outside of her body, for the one she would then embrace inside it.

The High Council and her Veilin comrades would handle Myken’s warnings.

This was where she knew she could make a difference.

She saw in her father her own silence. He’d carried it with dignity, but she knew the illness was a kind of suffering that became a language no one else knew how to speak.

It committed its sufferer to shrivel and die in isolation of the soul.

She had been so close to that, and the curse had been defeated for her.

Tomorrow night, she would defeat it for him.