Page 14 of Daughter of the Ninth Line, Part Three

Fourteen

Vox

H ayle’s words and Avalon’s taste haunted me all through training and lectures the following day.

It did feel like magic, this hold she had over me.

Before Avalon, the idea of sharing a table with Taeme would have been abhorrent to me, but now I was okay with sharing a girlfriend?

What magic did she hold that she’d taken us under her spell so easily?

My natural scepticism wanted me to suspect that it was all her doing, but the look of dumbfounded surprise on her face when we’d proposed our plan had been too genuine to be faked, unless she was an amazing actor or an even better spy.

No, something wasn’t adding up, and I was irritated at myself.

Irritated that I couldn’t just let myself have this moment, this time, without looking for some kind of subterfuge.

I couldn’t even go to Shay with this, because she would likely kill Avalon first and ask questions later.

She was steadfast in her protection of me, perhaps even a little overzealous.

As much as I wanted to trust my gut, I hadn’t survived this long without doing my due diligence.

Which meant I needed to know more about Avalon Halhed and the Ninth Line.

Actually, I needed to know everything.

As always, the best starting point was first-hand knowledge, which was definitely the only reason I found myself sneaking down to the lower levels of Boellium in the early hours of the morning. Staying in the shadows, I picked the lock on the dorm door and slid inside.

Only to be met by a giant hound with teeth that glinted in the dim wall sconces.

Lifting my hand, I held him still. “Your master knows about this. No need to take my arm off,” I whispered to the mutt.

No, not a mutt. Braxus’s breed had been kept by the Third Line for as long as I could remember. They were tall and regal, beautiful and deadly. Even the First Line feared the war creatures of the Third Line.

The hound didn’t move for a moment, but eventually, he huffed and stepped away. He trailed me to the bedroom, though, and I doubted that he was about to let me into Avalon’s room alone. As if he’d heard my thoughts and agreed, he let out a quick bark, alerting Avalon I was here.

I glared down at him. “Jokes on you, furball, because I was going to wake her anyway.”

A sleep-rumpled Avalon emerged from her room, her face screwed up in confusion in the low light of the common room. “Vox? What are you doing here? It’s…” She looked around for some kind of clock, but I realized the dorm didn’t have one. How did she make it anywhere on time?

“Four a.m.,” I provided. “I wanted to see you.” I needed to see her. It was a compulsion that resided deep in my chest.

She squinted at me. “At this ungodly hour of the morning?”

I gave her a lopsided smile. “Yes. I want to get to know you, without Taeme being here. This was the only time that was convenient.”

“Convenient for whom?” Sighing, she turned back toward the bedroom. “Well, let’s do it under the blankets. It’s freezing out here.”

I hadn’t noticed. The First Line prided itself on not feeling anything, let alone mundane things like cold, hot, or love.

I didn’t tell her that, though, just followed her into her room, hearing the hound huff an aggravated sound as she shut the door.

I didn’t do anything childish, like poke my tongue out at the beast, but I wanted to.

Avalon stumbled back toward her thin bed, while I looked around the room.

It was empty of anything but the bare bones of life.

Battered furniture. Scratchy blankets. The difference between our standards of living was stark.

Guilt gnawed at my gut, but I pushed it away.

I’d fix this, though I couldn’t do anything about it right now.

“If you’re done staring at my room like it’s a filthy barn, you can either get beneath the blankets or sit in the corner, but talk quick or I’m going back to sleep.”

I toed off my shoes and climbed beneath the blankets.

I wanted to feel her body pressed to mine.

It wasn’t polite, or gentlemanly, or appropriate in any way, but I didn’t care.

I was desperate to feel the curves of her body against mine.

I stretched my arm out along the pillow, and she lifted her head to lay it on my bicep.

My heart beat a little faster in my chest.

“I’m exhausted,” she mumbled. “Why did we have to have back-to-back stamina training?”

I was fairly sure the instructors just liked to torment us. “You can be the best swordsman in the world, but without stamina, you’re as good as dead,” I told her softly. “Swing while you can, but if you have to retreat, you’ll need to be able to run more than a hundred feet without puking.”

She grumbled something beneath her breath, but didn’t disagree. “What did you want to know, Vox?” My name, murmured in her husky voice that was soft with sleep, made my dick hard. I wanted her to whisper it to the darkness as I pleasured her.

My fingers brushed across the tops of her shoulder almost of their own accord. “Everything.” Chuckling, I felt her shoulders lift as she breathed me in.

“You might need to narrow it down a little to start.”

“Why’d you come to Boellium?”

She snorted and burrowed closer. “You’re so warm.”

I could be warmer, cooler, whatever I desired; most powerful wielders of First Line magic controlled their own body temperature.

“I’m here because of conscription laws. You should know about those,” she teased.

“But why you?” I pressed. “Why not your brother, or the stable boy, or some farmer’s daughter? Why a female Heir?” I felt the tension stiffen her body, and I wondered if she really was a spy and was about to lie to me.

Instead, she sighed. “It’s not a secret—at least, not in the Ninth Line Barony. My father hates me. He blames me for my mother’s death.”

“She died in childbirth?” It happened all too frequently, especially in the Lower Line Baronies that didn’t have access to good physicians. Those wild, barren places where only the desperate people of Ebrus lived had higher mortality rates in general.

The tension in her body increased, like she was bracing herself. “No. It’s widely believed that I murdered her.”

The fuck?

Using every ounce of training I’d needed to survive my own childhood, I pushed down my reaction, placing it in a tiny box for me to open later, and kept my body language neutral. “Do you believe that? I wouldn’t think it was something that could be so ambiguous.”

Slipping away from me, she rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling.

“Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. I was three. Logically, I know that there isn’t anything a three-year-old can do that could be construed as intent.

But sometimes, I have nightmares. Nightmares of me being too close to the edge of those cliffs, of ignoring her words to come back.

I was a baby, so there’s no way I’m actually remembering the real event. Plus, it changes almost every time.

“Sometimes, if the dreams are good, I come back to her when she calls, but she dies anyway. She trips on a rock and stumbles forward, going over the edge. Sometimes, I ignore her words and start to fall, so she lunges forward and pushes me back, but falls herself. Sometimes, I dream that the maid pushes her instead, but that might just be my mind finding a reason to hate her.” As her voice broke, I dragged her a little closer to my body.

“It was the maid who informed my father that my mother had fallen. She was entering the clearing with a picnic basket and saw me grab my mother and push her over the edge, like I was possessed by evil spirits.”

The scoff that burst from my lips was unbidden.

“You were three. A baby from the Ninth Line with no magic. Surely your father didn’t believe that you’d suddenly gained the strength of a full-grown adult, able to heave your mother over the edge of a cliff?

” The very idea was preposterous. You’d have to be deficient in wits to believe that bullshit.

She shrugged. “I don’t know if he believed her or not, but he grieved his wife so wholeheartedly that it was whispered around the Barony. He needed a scapegoat, and I was conveniently there, unable to defend myself because my grasp on language was rough.”

Because she had been a toddler. Keeping that comment to myself was harder than I imagined. “Surely, after the grief subsided, he could think about it logically?”

Her tiny headshake planted a kernel of something in my chest. Rage? A thirst for revenge?

She let her lips rest against my skin. “I think I became a convenient outlet for his anger. At least until Kian was big enough to stand between us.”

Jealousy rose to fill the space of my rage. “Kian?”

“My oldest brother. The Heir.”

Feeling like an idiot, I was glad she couldn’t see inside my brain.

Of course she meant Kian Halhed, Heir to the Ninth Line.

I had met him once or twice at events, although he looked nothing like Avalon.

He was a quiet, silent man. Serious. So unlike my brother, it was surprising that we even shared a country, let alone ancestors from long ago.

I’d also met the spare Heir of the Ninth Line. Whenever there was a Conclave, we were forced to interact with the other spare Heirs. I’d forgotten the boy’s name, but he was much like his older brother, solemn and serious. What had that family seen? Why hadn’t they protected Avalon?

“Your father hurt you?” I asked the question, even though I knew the answer. I had to hear her say it.

She shrugged again. “Physically? Yeah, in the early days. After Kian stumbled on my father trying to stab me through the chest in a drunken rage, my brothers worked together to make sure I was never alone with him. I think it shocked even my father, though, whatever Kian said to him that night. After that, he kept his punishments to the verbal variety.”

I ground my back teeth so violently, I could hear the scrape in my ears. “I’m going to kill him for you.”

She laughed bitterly, like I was kidding. She didn’t understand yet the depths of my devotion, but she would. The Baron of the Ninth Line was living on borrowed time.