Page 26 of Her Cruel Redemption (The Dark Reflection #3)

Chapter Twenty-Six

I watched the housemaids carefully as they went about clearing the breakfast dishes and stoking the fire the following morning. Both looked tense, teary, the blond one’s cheeks were pink and blotchy, and the brunette was biting her lips until they bled. I’d started watching them when I walked into breakfast to find them standing close together, heads bowed, whispering urgently. They’d sprang apart as soon as they’d seen me, but I’d caught a few words before they did. Just the end of a sentence. ‘My brother’s there. I hope the king will send reinforcements.’ Not much to go on, but enough to draw my attention, because it sounded like more than a scolding from the housekeeper had frightened them. But they seemed too scared of me to speak to each other again. The more I watched them, the deeper my sense of unease. One had knocked over a vase, the other had forgotten the light weave to start the fire. When she dropped the bucket of coal on her return, I decided I’d had enough of trying to guess.

‘Can you two please tell me what’s got you so twisted up in knots?’ I tried not to bark at them, but they both snapped upright with shocked faces anyway, hands clasped behind their backs.

‘Did we… do something to upset you ma’am?’ the brunette asked hesitantly.

‘Only if you don’t explain what’s going on. The footman from earlier looked rattled too.’

‘Have you not heard, ma’am? Port Howl has fallen.’

‘Fallen?’ I repeated. ‘What do you mean?’ I began running over what I’d learned about Oceatold from the guidebooks I’d studied. If I remembered right, Port Howl was the kingdom’s largest seaport. But fallen , surely that didn’t mean…

‘An attack was launched yesterday,’ the maid continued, her voice wavering. ‘It f-fell this morning.’

‘That can’t be right. It’s nowhere near the border. It should be miles from the fighting.’

‘I heard they attacked from the sea.’ The blond squeezed her friend’s hand, taking over the burden of answering when the other seemed too overcome to continue. ‘Enemy forces hold it now. I heard the Blood King himself fought, that he’s—’ She bit off the end of the sentence, suddenly blanching, eyes going wide, like she’d just remembered who I was. Maybe she was reacting to the way my expression had changed at the mention of Draven, at the suggestion that he was in Oceatold.

‘We didn’t mean to disturb you with our fear, ma’am,’ the girl continued, after she seemed to collect herself. ‘It’s just that Liddy has family there.’

‘No, of course. Thank you for telling me.’ I was already out of the conversation, crossing the room to an adjoining one, where my stack of books on Oceatold rested haphazardly on a table. I picked up the first one and flicked through it until I found a map, tracing my finger along ink lines. Port Howl . I was right. Nowhere near the border. Just a stone’s throw down the coast from Sarmiers, really. What the hell were they thinking? Why take a city so far away from the frontline? How did they expect to hold it?

And most importantly, what was Oceatold’s king going to do about it?

When I went in search of the answer to that question, I found the king’s quarters buzzing with activity. He was holding court from a lounge as ministers and lords and clerks and attendants raced around him, handing papers to one another, issuing instructions, sealing letters with hot wax, having tense conversations in corners. Gwinellyn was seated near the king, looking like she didn’t know what to do with her hands.

‘Your Majesty,’ I said, inclining my head to King Esario as I approached. He was halfway through signing a sheet of paper that had been thrust at him. ‘I hear you’ve been invaded. Though I’m not sure how reliable that information is, since I had to hear it from the servants.’

His hand paused mid-signature, his eyes flicking up to meet mine with a mixture of irritation and resignation. ‘Port Howl fell to Ashreign’s forces this morning.’

‘How could they have reached a city so deep in Oceatold territory?’

‘That, we aren’t sure yet. We know there was a fleet of Morwarian ships involved, but the walls are reported to be still standing.’ He resumed signing the paper with a swift, angry flourish, handing it off to a waiting clerk. ‘So they didn’t just shoot their way in.’

‘What’s the importance of Port Howl?’

‘There’s rich farming land around it, so it’s an important food supply, the port is our largest and serves as the departure point for ships crossing the Capricious Ocean, and the Guild stronghold there is one of the best resourced in the kingdom.’

‘Are you going to reclaim it?’

The king smacked his pen down on the table. ‘We are in the middle of managing a crisis. Forgive me if I don’t have time to answer your questions right now.’

‘Fine,’ I replied, folding my arms. ‘I thought perhaps my particular knowledge of your enemy might be useful, but if you don’t want it then don’t let me offend you with my company.’

He sighed, rubbing his brow. ‘I’m sure it’ll be useful, but right now I’m trying to gather forces from several different locations and redirect them at a target no one thought would be struck.’ Then he seemed to consider me, pursing his lips, before picking up a curled roll of paper and thrusting it at me. ‘If you want to be useful, use that knowledge of the enemy and tell me what he means by this.’

I took the paper and stared at it, a shiver brushing down the ladder of my spine. That familiar, spiky script. Just a single line. How about now?

‘It arrived shortly after the news of the attack,’ Esario said, eyes already returned to his papers, pen scribbling. ‘Delivered by one of Port Howl’s civilians. There was nothing else with it. No formalities. No context. Just that single line.’

‘He’s trying to force you into the negotiation he asked for,’ I said slowly.

His pen stilled a moment, before it continued waving again. ‘All the more reason I should refuse then. Not that I’ll have much choice but to agree now.’

Gwinellyn picked this moment to rise to her feet, seeming to think it was time to intervene. ‘I was just about to send for you,’ she said, beckoning me away from the irate and overrun king. ‘What happens now?’ she asked in a quiet voice.

‘I don’t know yet,’ I replied, drawing further away. ‘It might be a good idea to start tallying exactly how many men your lords crossed the border with, and how many able-bodied are among your refugees.’ And raising funds, I mentally added. Armies couldn’t live on hope and rousing speeches.

We watched the churn of frantic officials for a few moments as my mind ticked over, considering why Draven would want Port Howl and what his next move would be. Two children seemed to have snuck into the room and were running between and around the legs of the blustering adults, sending papers flying and towing a few angry words after them. One of them, a little red-headed boy about five or six, barrelled towards Esario, skidding to a slow as he approached the king with an expression trying very hard to be sober and serious for a child. Another, younger boy with the white-blond hair quickly drew up behind him.

‘What are you doing in here, you rascals?’ Esario chuckled as he caught sight of them, beckoning the older boy over.

‘Sadie said the Blood King is going to steal us from our beds,’ the boy said solemnly.

Esario’s smile slipped slightly, his brow creasing. ‘Have you seen the size of the city walls? You’re the safest boys in all of Oceatold. Come here. You too, Logan.’ He beckoned both boys over, and that name, Logan , suddenly chimed in my memory. I drew a little closer, looking at him more carefully, at his lovely blue eyes, as he accepted Esario’s soothing, before being fondly sent away with a harried-looking nurse who had finally caught up with them.

‘Yours?’ I asked the king.

‘The elder one is,’ he said, the smile already fading, replaced with the tight-lipped frown. ‘The younger is my ward.’

‘He’s your brother’s, isn’t he?’

His eyebrows hiked up his forehead. ‘Where did you hear that?’

‘I know his mother,’ I replied, staring after the little boy with the wide blue eyes. ‘Is she in Sarmiers?’

‘I never knew the women,’ Esario replied quietly. ‘I’d appreciate it if you would keep any notions about Logan’s parentage to yourself. As far as anyone is concerned, he was left to my care when his noble parents died. That’s all there is to be said on the matter.’

Accepting the dismissal, I retreated back to Gwinellyn, my mind whirling in several different directions at once. I lingered in the chaotic activity of Esario’s chamber for a while longer, but since it was fairly clear that Oceatold’s king would far prefer it that I didn’t, I left him to his scrambling. I needed to think where it was quiet, especially since he’d called an emergency conference with his council for the afternoon and I needed to decide how I’d prepare Gwinellyn. I returned to the rooms I’d been given and sat on the sill of one of the large, sea-facing windows to stare out at the frothy, grey ocean. I wasn’t sure why so many writers and artists seemed to have love affairs with the ocean. All I’d seen of it so far had inspired more fear than love.

Perhaps that was the point.

I was supposed to be thinking about Gwinellyn’s strategy going forwards, but instead I found my mind racing over that turbulent sea, imagining what it would be like be tossed about on it, to board a ship and traverse it. To stand on a deck at night and see only black around you, with no sense of where the water ends and the sky begins. To enter an enemy port in the dark.

Anticipation fired along my nerves, leaving me jittery. I left the windowsill to pace, needing to expel some of that nervous energy. The negotiation would surely be held in the next day or so, now that there’d been such a violent push into Oceatold territory. What was Draven hoping to achieve with his demand that I sit at that table with him? Surely it was some sort of trap. Did he want to tear apart my story of enchantment and cast yet more doubt on whether or not I was loyal to Gwinellyn? Surely no one would believe a word that came out of his mouth if he did. But even that wasn’t my greatest concern. What I was most afraid of was having to be still while I was near him. The last time I’d seen him had been so full of fear and violence, two emotions that thrived on action, that demanded movement and burned with purpose. There had been no time to feel anything quieter throughout the encounter, driven as I had been by instinct and adrenaline. What would it be like to sit in the same room as him with no onus to run?

What if I couldn’t hold onto my rage?

Crossing from the sitting room into the bedroom of the suite, I rifled through the drawer by the bed until I caught sight of a glint of red and gold. Daethie had said I wouldn’t be able to see him, that the magic in his blood made time bend and warp around him, just as it made it bend and warp around me . But I had three fat, gleaming bloodstones left unused in the necklace, and the temptation to try was strong. I mulled over the possibility for a few moments, before dropping the necklace back into the drawer, disgusted with myself. I hadn’t crossed the threshold before I turned back, my mind now rolling down a different path, thinking back to that little boy I’d seen in the king’s chamber. It was odd that Senafae hadn’t reached out to me. My presence at Bright Keep must have been whispered about all over Sarmiers by now, especially after my outrageously public annulment ceremony. When I’d last seen Senafae, she’d offered to help me. She’d known I was in some kind of trouble. And then she’d left Lee Helse with the Oceatold delegation without a word. For her to not reach out now to explain herself… call it an intuition, but it just didn’t feel right.

Drifting back to the drawers, I found the necklace again and rubbed my thumb over the surface of one of the stones. Was it a stupid reason to use them? Perhaps. But the memory of the little boy gnawed at me, and the silence from Senafae was deafening. Picking it up, I chose one of the still-red stones. I thought of Senafae, touched the stone, and was swallowed by grey mist.