Page 146 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Lorna

T here’s a door at the back of the Mercenian Church that should lead to the vestry, but has been replaced with my bedroom door.

I tug Shemza’s hand and walk towards it, ignoring the crowd as they applaud my union with Robert and throw confetti as we walk back down the aisle.

In the true timeline of things, we had photographs outside, then went back to Robert’s estate for a lavish party, where he spent many hours getting progressively more drunk as his friends brought him whiskey after whiskey to celebrate.

I watched him, hoping he would be too drunk to want his wedding night, then slipped into the kitchens and stole a knife, just in case.

When I open the door, it’s to me in my nightgown - a hideous, dowdy thing that made me look like I was ninety and nine at the same time, falling to my ankles, with sleeves that came all the way to my wrists.

Not sexy bed wear by any stretch. I’d picked it for exactly that reason, hoping the fabric all over my body would prevent Robert’s hands from finding my skin.

The knife I stole is in my younger self’s hand, and I look at it. I remember looking at it, wondering if I had the guts to use it.

“I only ever intended to scare him off,” I say, my voice high through my tight throat as I watch myself stash the knife under my pillow, then sit up in my bed, watching the door.

“I thought, if I had a knife, he wouldn’t be able to get close to me.

He’d leave me alone. Go back to his own rooms and forget about what a wife is supposed to give to her husband on their wedding night. ”

“You look as young as Jassal here,” Shemza says, and his voice is heavy with grief for me.

Then I hear it, the same as in my nightmare before - the heavy thump of footsteps coming up the stairs. I turn my head into Shemza’s side, because I don’t need to see what follows. I don’t need to see Robert barge through my door, dishevelled and drunk and lumbering towards me.

“Leave me alone,” my younger self says, my voice weak and pitiful.

My eyes are still pinched shut, but it plays out in front of them, anyway.

My hand reaching under the pillow for the knife.

Waving it at Robert as I tell him to back off.

His outrage at my defiance. A small struggle.

A slip and a slide. So easy. Right up between his ribs and into his heart, the weight of his own body impaling him on it.

He barely even twitched.

“I didn’t mean to,” I say. I’m saying it to Shemza, but the words come out of my younger self’s mouth as well - the exact words I said once I’d scrambled out from beneath Robert’s dead weight.

And then I’m me and her at the same time, the sticky feeling of the blood all over my hands, and I want to vomit and scream and I’m breathing so fast I might pass out and the only thing I can think to do is run.

I turn and fly through the bedroom door, down the narrow staircase, through the halls of Robert’s grand house, out into the gardens, across the lawns and to the aviary.

The door is locked, so I pick up a rock and smash it through one of the glass panes, reaching between shards of glass and wrought iron work to undo the latch.

Robert doesn’t have proper security on anything inside his border, because who would ever get past his border?

All the bird cages are locked with old-fashioned bolts, and I go to each one in turn, yanking them down and throwing open the cages of each of the birds, one by one by one.

When they’re all free, I collapse in the middle of the aviary, and that’s where I stay until Mercenia’s agents find me some hours later. Except now Shemza’s arms close around me, Shemza’s voice whispers in my ear that it’s okay, that I’m safe, that I’m with him.

When I open my eyes, I’m back in the healer’s hut. The door is just the usual door. Rosa is nowhere to be seen.

“This is the secret you have kept at the heart of you?” Shemza says. “This is all of it?”

I nod, mute.

Shemza is silent for a moment. “Though you were hurting and frightened, you still took the time to set free all the birds.”

There’s a hint of amusement in his tone, and I dare to look up at him. He gazes at me with warmth and love and it makes my heart want to burst and my stomach want to empty at the same time.

“Freeing the birds was just… I had nothing left to lose, you know? Nothing mattered anymore.”

“And your first thought was for the wellbeing of another creature. You are a kind female, my Lorna, no matter how you try to deny it.”

He cups my face in his hands, pressing his forehead to mine.

“I thank you for sharing your secret with me. I wish I could fully reassure you that you did nothing wrong, that the blame lies at the feet of the elders around you, your parents and that male.”

He almost spits this last word, as if even the thought of Robert leaves a bad taste in his mouth.

“But I know you will assume that I am twisted in my thinking when it comes to you, that my heartspace’s longing turns my headspace.

I think when you are well again, you should speak with Liv about this.

Tell your chieftess your truth, my Lorna.

Unburden yourself of these fears you carry. See that she will not resent you.”

“How can you possibly know that she won’t? I’m from the top tier. She’s from the bottom. I’m part of the people who oppressed her and the others.”

“I think she is clever enough to understand that it was no better for you on the top than it was for them at the bottom.”

“I hope you’re right about that,” I say.

“I know you’re right about telling her. I should have done that a long time ago.

I wish I could blame being injured, getting sick, but the real truth is I’ve just been so scared.

I’m scared they’ll not want to speak to me.

That Sally won’t want me near her kids…”

My breath hitches, but the sob building in my throat doesn’t quite escape - held back by the love and compassion in Shemza’s gaze.

“You do not need to be afraid anymore, my Lorna.”

He wraps his arms around me, holding me to him.

The braying voices in my ear, the jeers of the crowds at my trial, finally start to fade.

I wonder if I should try to summon that memory for him, but I realise I don’t need to.

I can already see what he’ll see - groups of frightened school girls, the same age or even younger than me, brought out to watch my downfall.

Not because of me. Not so I could know what my peers thought of me.

It was never about me. It was about showing them what happened if they stepped out of line, a message to everyone else around me about how easy it was to lose your place.

The chants, the jeers, they were probably encouraged by Mercenia’s agents. Whipping the mob up into a frenzy about me was just another way to cement the message.

You don’t want to be her. You’re a good little girl. You follow Mercenia’s rules.

You stay in our line.

There couldn’t be room for empathy, for the idea that maybe, in my situation, they might have been pushed to do the same thing. There are no shades of grey in the world Mercenia created, not outside of the concrete bottom tier districts. Only through absolutes can you have absolute power.

“Lorna isn’t my name, remember?” I say instead.

Shemza chuckles. “I struggle with the shapes of your human names. It has taken much to get them to stick in my headspace. Forgive me, you will have to remind me how your true name is said.”

I open my mouth to tell him, but then I pause.

Think of all the ways he said I wasn’t lying.

Joanna wouldn’t have done any of those things.

Joanna wasn’t allowed to play with children, Joanna hated the aviary and the dead-eyed birds inside it.

Joanna would have scorned the other girls for being bottom tier.

All this time I’ve been thinking of Lorna as the lie, but wasn’t Joanna a lie as well?

“I… I think I’ve been so worried that ‘Lorna’ is a lie, that I’ve been lying to all of you in everything I’ve done. But maybe Lorna is more real and more true than anything I ever was back home. Maybe I want to be Lorna more than I want to be my true self.”

“We all choose who we wish to be in life,” Shemza says.

“Other people made those choices for me when I was Joanna,” I say. “I don’t want to be her anymore.”

“Then stay as Lorna.”

I look up at him. “How do you make everything seem so simple?”

“I am a healer, not a hunter or a warrior. It is in my spirit to think on things and find solutions. But this does not seem simple, linasha. It is simple. You are free to make whatever choices you wish here. If you do not wish to be Joanna, then do not.”

“Free?” I say, my voice croaking.

He strokes a finger over a lock of my hair, brushing it out of my face. “Do you have an answer to your friend’s question yet, linasha? What would you do if you were free?”

I go to say that I don’t have an answer. That I’m still grappling with the idea of what freedom is, and that I can have it. But then I realise the answer is right on the tip of my tongue.

“This,” I say, and press my lips to his.