Her Cruel Redemption (The Dark Reflection #3)

Chapter Forty-Five

I swam out of the murky depths of unconsciousness, continually drifting back towards the dark. I caught a few snatches of sound, first. A soft, rhythmic rushing noise. A strained, ceaseless muttering, which I realised a second later was my own voice. Then I slipped down again. The next time, I caught a flicker of light through slitted eyelids, strange and shifting in patterns. But my eyes wouldn’t stay open and I was gone again. The last time, I surfaced in a panic, chased by a nightmare of a huge, white beast leaping out of the depths of the ocean, mouth open wide to swallow me whole. I thrashed violently, my legs tangling as I kicked them, crying out. I saw nothing, but felt fingers against my forehead, running through my hair. Water pressed to my mouth, accepted in greedy gulps. It settled me, slowing my heart rate, until I was sinking back into unawareness again, this time with no monster waiting. Just the embrace of a strangely warm sea.

I broke through unconsciousness fully to a body that felt like it had been beaten and buried. My limbs were heavy, and my head throbbed steadily. My eyes flickered open, squinting against the headache as I tried to make sense of what I saw. There were patterns of shifting light wavering over a ceiling of stone and dripping stalactites. Turning my head gingerly, caring for my stiff neck, I took in the cave, the river of gleaming water slowly rising and receding, the rolling rush of distant waves. The man sitting nearby, knife in hand, methodically working the bade between the lips of a shellfish, dark hair stiff with salt. I felt a brief, sharp spark of warmth, seeing him, right before I wondered what he was doing here. What I was doing here.

I licked my dry lips. Even simply moving my head made me feel dizzy. My thoughts were sluggish, the world tilting when I shifted my gaze, so I kept it fixed to those hands as they carefully peeled back a shell to expose the meat within before picking up the next one.

‘Where are we?’ I asked in a voice so raspy the words might just have been fingernails scratching at the stone. The hands stopped, head lifting. Something like relief crossing grey eyes.

‘In the cave system that runs beneath Port Howl.’

‘But how did we get here?’

‘You fell.’ There was something haunted, tormented in his eyes as he watched me. ‘So I jumped.’

Flashes of memory. The slippery bridge beneath my feet. The storm thundering all around me. The electrifying, chaotic maelstrom of my mind right before I’d realised I was about to black out. The sensation of falling. He’d jumped.

‘Why would you do that?’ The words grated out of me, little more than a raspy whisper. He turned back to shucking shellfish and didn’t answer. It was a long time before I could speak again. Before I had the courage to speak again. The words I wanted to say swam around inside my head for a long while before I did, pushed and pulled in currents of my stodgy memories, of our shared history, of all we had done and would do to each other, quickening my pulse and catching at my breath. They were mad words, words dreamed up by someone still half-gripped with this unnatural sleep, still reeling from the cold grip of the ocean and the warmth of his hands pulling me free. I was terrified to trust in them, terrified to believe in them, and even more terrified of how they might completely dismantle me. But they were the only words that made any sense, that put the world back into alignment with this, with his jumping into the teeming, lightning-streaked ocean after me.

‘You’re in love with me.’

He stiffened, hands going still again, as though he’d heard footsteps in the stones. But then he went right back to what he was doing without looking up. ‘I think you’ve known that for a while.’

What could I say to that? How could I speak around this deep, aching sorrow in my chest? How could I be trusted to speak when I could feel my defenses disintegrating, exposing the raw, painful regret behind them? So I just watched him in the humid dark, the distant waves echoing through the chamber in a soft lull, his hands so quick and capable, long fingers manipulating the knife like he’d been shucking clams all his life, until the fuzz in my head rose again, becoming too thick to see through any longer and I drifted back to sleep.

When I next woke, it felt like I finally broke from that woozy, stodgy suck of unconsciousness, like freeing a boot from being stuck in the mud. It took me a few moments and a brief attack of panic to get my bearings, scanning my surroundings, pulling at hazy memories of lightning tearing through me, of falling, of waking to this cavern before. But I was alone now. Had Draven really been here, or had I just dreamed him? No, he must have been here. There was a fire burning nearby, the smoke curling up a natural flute in the cave. There was a tin or a pot of some sort on the coals.

A ravenous hunger roared to life in my stomach as I caught the scent of something edible, something that smelt vaguely of the sea. When I shifted to my side, my head spun and my vision darkened, but I was too hungry to close my eyes and let sleep claim me again. I waited for the spell to pass, taking stock of my makeshift bed. I was laid out on a sandy patch spread with what looked like part of a sail. There were a few different pieces of cloth—I’d hardly call them blankets—tucked around me. Most seemed like scraps pulled from gods knew where. One of them was garishly bright, decorated with pink and yellow flowers and when I touched it, it felt thick and soft.

Slowly, I sat up, the covers falling back, and with a flush of heat I realised I was naked.

I muttered a few vicious curses as I spied my clothes laid out near the fire, covering up my feeling of intense vulnerability with profanity. What the fuck had he been thinking? Stripping me naked. Caring for me while I was sick. Jumping into the ocean when I’d fallen. And he said we were still in Port Howl. What was left of his fleet would surely be gone by now. He’d given up his escape in jumping in after me. He’d be torn apart by anyone who caught him here. Why would he have done this? What was I supposed to do now that he had? How could I keep myself safe from him when he was dismantling so many of my beliefs about his motives and his intentions? That hazy half-conversation swum back to me, the one that seemed part dream. When I’d accused him of being in love with me.

I think you’ve known that for a while.

By the time I’d crawled out of the nest and struggled into my salt-streaked clothes, I was burning with something. Some sort of snarled agony of fury and hatred and anguish and gratitude and bitterness for having to feel it all. Look what he had done to me . My hatred of him had twisted me up so tightly with the need to destroy him that I’d let it almost destroy me. Flashes of the harbour tore through my mind, of magic burning through my body, of flinging a hand out to strike, of hitting Goras and sending him flying. I had become a monster. He had turned me into a monster. How could Draven have brought me here? How could he have risked so much when he had done such terrible things? How could he have started a war and used me and lied to me and compelled me and let me be burned alive only to turn around and keep saving my life? How could he admit that he was in love with me ? And how could I—

‘How are you feeling?’ The words split a stillness I had been filling with my own gasping breaths as I stood doubled over, hands wrapped around my stomach in a fit of some kind of emotional spiral. And they belonged to a voice that made me wild. He was in a deeper part of the cavern, where a tunnel snaked off into the dark, watching me with an expression I couldn’t read, a water flask held in one hand. He seemed to be paused on the stony threshold, like he had been about to approach but now wasn’t sure if he should come in.

I straightened up. Crossed the cave. Placed my hands on his chest. Pushed him. Hard. He staggered backwards, arms going out to fend me off. The flask crashed to the floor, splashing my calves and spilling water onto the sand.

‘How dare you,’ I snarled, pushing him again, tears blurring my vision. ‘How dare you do something as heinous as you did. How dare you make it impossible to forgive you and then do this. How fucking dare you jump in after me.’ I was pounding his chest, tears spilling down my cheeks now, hot and furious. Because this was worse than all of it. Worse than the lies and the betrayals, worse than the terrible things he’d done. This was wrong. He was wrong. He was supposed to be the monster. A liar. A user. The man who had destroyed me, who had taken me and twisted me and left me with nothing but the ruins of myself.

He gripped my shoulders, trying to hold me off. ‘What was I supposed to do, let you drown?’

My hand met his cheek with a sharp crack!

‘Yes!’ I shrieked. ‘You were fine with letting me burn, so you should have let me drown! You had no right to go jumping in after me. No right! Just as you had no right to compel me to stop!’

He managed to lock his arms around my shoulders, pulling me in tight. My blows lost their force as I gave myself over to sobbing, my fingers curling in his shirt like I wanted to hold on and push him away at once.

‘I know,’ he murmured. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You have no right to be anywhere near me after what you’ve done to me,’ I cried. ‘I should be allowed to hate you. Left in peace to hate you. But you just keep coming. You just keep pushing. You won’t even let me have my hatred.’ My shoulders shuddered with my gasping, and he just kept saying he was sorry, over and over again, his voice hoarse, cracked through and wavering, and in this tangled, messy, fucked up embrace we sank to the floor. He cradled me to him, rocking me back and forth as I wept out everything that had been building since I saw him again at the crossing of the Cro. It poured out of me, and he held it all, unflinching as I called him every foul, dirty, insulting thing I could think of. Because this didn’t change anything. It couldn’t change anything. Because if I let myself believe—even for a second—that there was something in him that cared, something real and raw beneath all the ruthlessness, then where did that leave me? If I let this crack the walls I’d built, then everything would spill out—the regret, the fury, the grief, and the part of me that still, still, wanted to reach for him.

He didn’t get to make me hate him and then make me doubt it.

I accused him of every depraved act I could name. Laid responsibility for every wrong done to me since the moment I’d met him at his feet. It would have been better if he’d arced up, fought back, defended himself. It would have been easier. But his solemn vigil was impossible to rail against forever. With nothing more to feed it, my rage was eventually spent. My tears stopped, leaving behind eyes puffy and swollen, cheeks crusted with salt. I felt limp. Hollowed out. Cavernously empty, my insides a deep chasm still echoing with those words he kept saying. I’m sorry . As if that made it better. As if that made it okay.

‘You like to break things,’ I said finally, my voice thick and wavering. ‘Consider me broken. Be satisfied with that and leave me alone.’

He didn’t respond for a long time. When he finally did, it was as a murmur into my hair.

‘You aren’t broken,’ he said. ‘Fierce, formidable, beautiful thing. You could never be broken by the likes of me.’

I took a deep, shuddering breath. Scrubbed my eyes. Slammed the door on the gaping pit of pain that had been busted open to bleed all through my chest. Drew away from him. ‘What now?’ I asked. ‘Do we have some kind of final showdown here under Port Howl? Do we kill each other?’ My attempt at flippancy missed the mark. My voice was too tender and raw to carry the pretence that the idea did anything other than ruin me.

He released a bitter snort of laughter. ‘Just give me a few minutes to find my knives.’

‘I don’t know why that’s funny.’

‘If I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t have saved you. I’m many things, my dear, but fickle isn’t one of them.’

I considered him. That haunted, hungry look was in his eyes again. He was looking at me like I might be his deliverance or his damnation and he hadn’t decided which. ‘No, you’re not, are you?’ I shuffled back further. Considered whether I could kill him. My magic felt like a whisper in my veins, so distant and inaccessible, and even reaching for it made my stomach churn. If I wanted to strike him, I wasn’t sure I even could. ‘Will you let me leave?’

‘I won’t stop you,’ he said. ‘But I’d prefer it if you’d stay. At least… for a while.’

I drew my knees to my chest and hugged them close, like I was erecting a wall between us. ‘And do what, Draven? Live in these tunnels? Pretend we’re different people while the world is torn down above us because of a war that you started?’

‘Yes.’

That pulled me up short. ‘You’d lose whatever revenge you’ve been chasing.’

‘I suppose I’ve lost the taste for it.’

‘I’m so glad my life was upended for something that meant so little to you.’

He didn’t flinch. Just kept watching me with those haunted eyes. ‘It was my entire purpose. My entire existence. I never would have thought you’d matter so much more to me than that. But you do.’

I wanted to cry again. Would have, if I had any tears left in me. Maybe if I could, I would have been able to ease this throbbing ache in my chest, like something was burning me from the inside out, smouldering away just hot enough to keep my heart perpetually charred and unable to heal.

‘Just let me hate you,’ I almost begged.

He seemed to come back to himself, blinking that look out of his eyes, giving one resolute little nod before rising to his feet. ‘You should eat. You’ve been asleep for a long time.’

He went to the fire, stirred the pot on the coals, and I tried to reignite my fury in that echoing hollow of my chest so I could protect myself from whatever other feeling was trying to rise as I watched him balance a bowl on a stone, hook the pot up with a piece of driftwood and hiss when he burned his fingers trying to pour the contents into the bowl. But I couldn't seem to find anything other other than tenderness and sorrow to arm myself with, and that did absolutely nothing but increase the ache of wanting to twine my fingers through his capable hands, press my lips to those calloused palms and pretend he’d never done anything other than care for me.

When he returned to me, I was relieved to fixate on my feral hunger. Hunger, at least, was blessedly clear, with a straightforward cause and solution. I accepted the bowl and spoon and burned my tongue trying to get it into my mouth before it cooled. It took me several mouthfuls before I could even taste it.

‘Slow down. Your stomach will get a shock,’ Draven chided as he watched me eat. I eyed him from between the snarled curtains of my hair, trying to take his advice, but gods was I hungry.

‘What’s in it?’ I asked to delay the next bite.

‘What I could find nearby. Mostly shellfish. Enough for fuel, though maybe not enjoyment.’

I took a few more bites, sitting with the flavour, trying to decide if I liked it or hated it. Perhaps anything tasted edible when you hadn’t eaten in days. When I finished it, I barely refrained from licking the bowl. ‘Thank you,’ I said, staring at the bowl so I wouldn’t have to look him in the eye as I said it.

‘You can have more later. You’ll make yourself sick eating too much too soon.’

I handed the bowl back, and he returned to the fire to pour some for himself. It felt strangely intimate, the fact that he would use the same bowl, same spoon, which was a ridiculous thing to think since there was clearly no other choice.

‘Where has this stuff come from?’ I asked, rising and drawing closer to the fire, holding my hands out to catch some of the warmth. ‘You can’t have just found a pot and utensils washed up on the shore.’

‘It was stolen from a nearby farmhouse. But a long time ago.’

I watched the firelight play across his features, softening some of his sharper edges. ‘You said you escaped through these caverns once.’

He didn’t look up, scraping at his bowl. ‘I was wondering if you’d remember that conversation.’

The reminder silenced me for a long while as I remembered the rest of what he’d said. It felt like he was waiting for me to ask about that part. But I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.

‘Will you please just sit down?’ he said when he’d finished eating and looked up at me where I was still hovering around the edges of the firelight. ‘You’ve barely woken from a magic fever that nearly killed you. You should be resting. Or better yet, sleeping.’

‘I’ve had enough of sleep.’ I crept over to one of the larger rocks near the fire and dropped down onto it. I felt shaky, my legs weak, and my head was starting to ache again. But my sleep had drifted far too close to a kind of dark oblivion than I liked, as though I’d been dallying on the threshold of the shadow realm. I wasn’t anywhere near ready to trust that I’d wake up if I went to sleep again. ‘If you’ve been down here before, do you know where all these tunnels lead?’

‘Yes. That one leads to the surface. The opening is just beyond the city walls.’ He nodded towards a slender mouth in the wall behind me, and I turned to examine it. ‘There are others, but that one’s the most straightforward and least dangerous.’

‘How long were you down here?’

‘A month. Maybe more.’

His reply stung me with an image; of a boy not quite a man hiding down here in the dark, stealing from the surface, terrified of being caught and dragged back to the torment he’d fled from. ‘It must have felt like a very long month.’

‘You could say that.’

My gaze combed the rest of the cavern, taking it in slowly, fixating for a moment on the strange tidal pool that seemed to seep in beneath the rock. The water level rose and fell rhythmically, and there was a glow of light turning the water a crystalline blue, like there was sunlight touching it somewhere out of sight. ‘What happened after I fell?’

‘The sea was pretty wild with the storm. It was the most I could do to just keep us above water until we were washed ashore on the far side of the harbour. There was an opening to the cave system near where we washed up, so I carried you here.’

A lump rose in my throat as I imagined it. Him trying to swim, to hold our heads above crashing walls of water in a burning ocean. Carrying my limp body along a rocky beach in the dark. Watching his means of escape and survival slip out of the harbour. I still couldn’t fit it together, couldn’t understand it, couldn’t understand him, this man who seemed to think nothing of taking lives and then would risk himself like that. Risk himself for me .

‘So Port Howl is where Lidello held you,’ I said, hating saying the man’s name and watching Draven’s shoulders tense up. ‘That’s why you’re here.’

A silence fell. He seemed to struggle with what to say.

‘You don’t even want to explain it to me?’ I pushed when the silence stretched too long. ‘You don’t think you perhaps owe me some kind of justification for all you’ve done?’

‘I’m trying.’ His throat worked as he swallowed, and he finally took his eyes from the fire to look at me. ‘I promise you, I am. None of this is easy to talk about. Just… give me a moment.’

I held my tongue, watching him, waiting to see if he would finally crack open and reveal some of what I’d only ever learned in snatches from other people.

‘I think I have to start before Lidello,’ he said quietly. He sighed and leaned forward on his knees, putting the empty bowl on the floor and scrubbing a hand through his hair. ‘I’ve told you before I was born in Yaakandale. My mother was a Yoxvese woman called Lyrel and she was bound and sold into the harem of King Garnoc.’

I blinked. Frowned. ‘Your father was the fallen king of Yaakandale?’

Draven nodded. ‘He had this obsession with selecting his strongest son to be his heir. He used to put us through trials, make us fight each other, that sort of thing. Which it turns out I was pretty good at. Hatred is a good motivator, and I hated him.’ He was glaring into the flames again, and I studied his profile, the way the flickers of firelight picked out the edges of his sharp jaw, his straight nose, his sea-tousled hair. ‘Beating the shit out of his favourites was a satisfying revenge for what he put my mother through. She died when I was twelve. Wasted away in that place where they all despised her. I don’t… I don’t think she knew what gifting her magic would do to me.’ His eyes dropped to the floor, brow rippling with remembered pain. And I was beset with the urge to move closer, to take his hand. I didn’t, though. I didn’t know how to.

‘Wait,’ I said, something suddenly occurring to me. ‘How does Lester fit into this?’

A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. ‘Everyone needs allies. Lez is a good one. He knows when to call himself beaten and doesn’t get sulky about it. I broke a lot of his bones before we became friends, though.’

‘Seems a solid basis for a friendship,’ I muttered. Something Lester had said once came back to me. All of his relationships come at a knife’s edge. It seemed he had been speaking about their own as much as anything else. ‘It still doesn’t explain Lidello, though.’

He heaved a deep, shuddering sigh and held his hands to the fire, warming them. ‘Garnoc grew sick of me winning against his preferred sons, so I was sold to Lidello.’

I didn’t speak. Couldn’t speak. There was something dangerous rising in my chest and if I opened my mouth I was afraid it would spill out.

‘To the Brimordian Guild first,’ he continued, his voice so flat and blunt. Almost vacant. ‘And Dovegni . He got a little overexcited by the prospect of learning exactly how I’d come to wield magic in the first place, but the puritans of the Brimordian Sanctum wouldn’t approve any research in that field. Thought it was treading too close to sacrilege. Hence, Port Howl.’ He twirled a finger in the air, gesturing to the city somewhere above our heads.

‘I’m sorry,’ I found myself saying. ‘For your own father to do that…’ The words were hushed, almost a whisper. But he must have heard them, because he flicked his gaze to me and offered a sardonic smile.

‘He paid for it when I found my way back to Yaakandale.’

‘I thought King Garnoc was killed in the rebellion.’

‘He was.’

Realisation sunk through me. ‘So you’ve done this all before,’ I said, my voice hushed. I remembered news of the Yaakandale rebellion, of the king being handed to crowds of rabid, angry civilians, their rage so incendiary that they tore him apart. I studied the dark, dangerous man across from me and considered anew the horror of his magic. He could stir a crowd to tear their king limb from limb. In a flash, I remembered the burn of magic in my veins, the flashes of lightning, and then the terrifying sense of someone in my head, someone else’s will clamping down on my own, forcing me to comply. To stop.

And then I’d struck him. He wasn’t the only one who could be terrifying. Perhaps we were more alike than I’d ever wanted to admit.

‘So you went to the Living Valley and then to Baba Yaga, and ever since you’ve been, what, systematically destroying everyone who was ever involved in what happened to you? Will you be satisfied when Brimordia and Oceatold have torn each other apart and everything is in ruins? What comes after that?’

He clenched his jaw, and I wondered if he even knew the answer. Wondered at the extent of what Lidello had done to him when he’d tried to strip the magic from him. Wondered at the level of horror and pain he must have suffered to believe this, the war, the death, the levelling of kingdoms, was necessary.

‘I’ve never thought there was an after that,’ he said softly.

I felt a burst of sorrow I didn’t know how to swallow down. I kept tracing the lines of his face with my gaze the way I wanted to do with my hands, my fingers, wanting to smooth away the terrors of memory I could see tightening the edges of his eyes as I nursed a question I was no longer sure I wanted to know the answer to.

‘Why did you come looking for me in the Winking Nymph that night?

He seemed to sag, like his bones were weary, and his head dropped. ‘Baba Yaga told me my fate would hinge on you,’ he said finally, resignation weighing down every syllable. ‘That we were bound to each other, and you would decide whether I would succeed or fail. She told me where to look. That I’d know you as soon as I saw you. And I did. The second I laid eyes on you waving goodbye to that animal who’d grabbed you by the hair, all lit up with triumph. I just knew .’

‘And then? You’re missing out the most important part.’

He stared down at his hands, studying them like he wasn’t sure if they were his. ‘She told me you’d be attacked. And about the scars. I thought she was offering me the chance to have you in my power so you couldn’t rise against me. I never even considered warning you or trying to stop them.’

I blew out a breath as the pain of betrayal punched me in the gut all over again. Oh Madeia, it hurt to hear him admit it. To fully own it. To know finally, once and for all, that when he’d sat in the booth watching me the night I’d met him, it had been because he was waiting for the moment that would completely remake my life, the moment that would make me desperate enough to take his deal, with all its loose ends and undefined parameters.

‘So why this?’ I flicked a hand between us. ‘Why this hideous thing between us? A game gone wrong?’

He finally looked at me when he answered. ‘More like an inevitability.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Falling for you.’ In the pause he allowed, the words sank all the way through me, settling into the marrow of my bones in a way I wished they wouldn’t. ‘It was a tragedy in slow motion. I’d already made the mistakes that would doom us at the start. And I still couldn’t stop myself.’ A shadow of a smile. ‘You seem like you’ve been designed to get under my skin. First you intrigued me, then you provoked me, then I would’ve given anything to have you for my own. Maybe it’s some kind of punishment for all the wrongs I’ve done. But I can’t bring myself to regret you, either.’

Now I turned my own gaze to my hands, unable to look at him any longer with all those admissions burning me up. An inevitability . It was absurd. The moments I’d tried to charm him had been few and far between. He’d seen the very worst of me, when I was at my hardest, my angriest, my most cunning, my darkest. We sat in silence for a long time, two people tangled together in a web of wrongs and regrets and cruelties, our broken fragments sharp enough to cut each other to pieces as we struggled against each other. And never before had I wished so deeply and dearly that things could have been different. That we could have been different. I ached with it.

But this conversation had changed nothing. It didn’t undo what had been done.

A rumble rippled through the cavern, disturbing the silence. We both raised our heads, listening.

‘It’s probably just rock falling in one of the less stable tunnels,’ Draven said after a moment, rising to his feet. ‘But I’ll go and check.’ He cast his gaze over me, caressing me with it, expression softening. ‘Why don’t you try and get some more rest?’

‘I’m fine,’ I grumbled, pulling my knees into my chest.

He scoffed, shaking his head. ‘You don’t have to pretend for me. I know what it feels like to come out of magic fever. Just rest.’

I watched him pick his way through the stones and disappear into the dark. As soon as he was out of sight, I let my body slump, rubbing at aching muscles, chaffing at my skin against the chills rattling my chest. I was tired. Which was ridiculous, since I’d already been unconscious for days. But after a few minutes, I crept to that nest of a bed and settled back into it, grateful to bury myself beneath swathes of fabric and wait for the chills to ease. I thought about the people who’d be looking for me in the world above, wondering whether they were alright. How badly had I hurt Goras when I’d struck him? What sort of reckoning would there be for what I’d done? I drifted to sleep lying on my side, my face resting against my hand as I stared at the spot Draven had disappeared, waiting for him to return.