Page 29 of The Gargoyle and the Maiden (Nightfall Guardians #1)

Brandt

T he mason’s tools gleamed like weapons in the lantern light. Brandt watched Aalis approach, armed with them, and felt his jaw clench as she lined them neatly on a tray beside his perch on the eastern balcony.

“Not tonight.”

She paused, frowning. “You agreed to endure nightly treatments.”

“I agreed to visit nightly. I’m here.” He folded his wings tight against his back. “I’ll take my tonic. But no picking at my skull. I need a break.”

“You will stymie your progress,” she warned.

He snorted. “I fought for years to get here. What are a few more days?”

The mason’s tail lashed irritably. “I’ll have to report this to the Zenith. I could remand you to our custody and compel the procedure. Without continuous treatment, you risk—”

“Riskier for me to lose control,” he interrupted. “Riskier for you , I mean. But by all means, you are welcome to try it and find out.”

He could see her weighing her options. She could have argued.

Could have called for guards, had him restrained.

But she seemed to accept that his partial compliance was a concession, so she made one of her own.

Sighing deeply, she produced a bottle of the golden tonic from a cloak pocket, measuring it carefully before offering him the spoon.

“Half measures are unwise,” she chided as he swallowed it.

“So is war.” The medicine spread through him like candlelight, easing the dark pressure in his skull. “Yet here we are. Put that in your report.” He dove from the roost before she could respond.

In his eyrie, he found Ghantal anxiously stripping leaves from a sheaf of birch and walnut branches to replenish the terrarium where her moths bred and laid their eggs. She looked up from her task when he entered. “How was it?”

“I didn’t let them touch me. Just took the medicine.” He moved past her to his nesting chamber, where he paused in the doorway to drink the dregs of his mate’s scent. He would not wash the furs until he found her.

She nodded. “I hope it will ease your mind to realize that their treatments are designed to help.”

“Are you sure of that?” He turned to face her. “Every time they chip at my walls and patch me back up, I lose something. But when I’m alone, things come back.”

“What reason do they have to hold back your progress?” When he struggled to answer, she nodded sadly. “It may feel that way. Perhaps they do as much harm as good. Or perhaps it is the uneven nature of healing. Only time will tell.”

He couldn’t convince her, but at least Ghantal wasn’t dismissing his suspicions entirely.

For the rest of the night he sat in his nest, breathing in the faint scent of his mate, and let his mind wander without forcing it.

His thoughts skimmed the walls, feeling for cracks rather than trying to pull them down.

He was glad he’d taken the medicine. It made everything gentler and less painful, like having a lantern in the pitch dark.

A memory surfaced:

Driving a goblin horde away from a vulnerable village.

The horde was on foot without any mounts, so the Sixth Watch pursued them easily from the air, forcing them back across a river.

The goblins struggled against the rushing current in their heavy armor, and many of them were swept downstream before they made it to safety.

The whole Sixth Watch had cheered on the river. Even Tael-Nost seemed on their side.

One of the goblins carried a halberd and managed to snag it on a rock in the middle of the river, pulling himself to safety. Brandt dove, triumphant, to knock him off again. The last nail in the victory.

But when he dropped like a hawk, clawed feet extended, the goblin cringed, calling out, “Mama!” in a desperate sob as he tumbled into the merciless current.

It was the cry of a child, not a coward.

He told no one at first, but his suspicions ate at him. The victory had been too easy. He sent two of his stealthiest scouts, brothers called Kerec and Tomin, to follow the retreating horde.

When they returned, their expressions were somber as they pressed their fists to their foreheads.

“We found their camp, Commander.” Kerec’s voice, usually deep and steady, cracked. “We were able to observe them easily.”

A sharp warning flared inside him. “At a distance, I hope? Their war bats didn’t scent you? No one followed you back?”

Tomin shook his head. “Their guards have no mounts. And only half of them have weapons, at the outside,” Tomin added. “Their defenses are laughably weak. That’s probably why they’ve been setting so many fires, to avoid a real fight.”

Kerec nodded in grim agreement. “You were right, they’re all younglings. Starving ones, by the look of it. They raided the settlements for food. They took little else, and they fought over what they were able to bring back across the river.”

He sent the two of them immediately to Meravenna with this intelligence. Starving children required different tactics than warrior hordes. Feed them, negotiate, find another solution that didn’t involve their wholesale slaughter.

But they hadn’t returned. A messenger delivered a terse set of orders from his superiors: “Continue as planned. Drive back the hordes.”

He remembered looking at his watchmates, good gargoyles, honorable gargoyles, some hardly more than fledglings themselves, and telling them they would be hunting and killing children.

Remembered their stoic faces as they accepted it as part of their guardian duties, because what choice did they have?

The rage that filled him at this recovered memory was different from the wild fury of frustration that had no target. This had focus: The Zenith. The Council. All of Tower leadership. The human king who had sent them to commit atrocities for political convenience.

Unlike his uncontrolled rages, he could think around this. He could plan through it. The medicine helped, but so did having a target for his fury that wasn’t everyone and everything. It was extraordinary to experience after only one missed mind-mason treatment.

And it left a single question burning in his mind: were these the memories the masons were trying to hide?

He had no one to ask. Everyone else who might share the same memories was dead, aside from Rikard, and he wasn’t well enough to talk.

More memories trickled through over the following nights. His mate’s laugh, bright and startled, like she hadn’t expected to find anything funny. The way she smelled of lemons and herbs, a mask over her natural scent. Her eyes, brown as earth, wide with fear and hope and even love.

Brown eyes. Not gray or black or even white.

She was human.

He sucked in a breath, the knowledge fitting into his mind like a key in a lock, opening a door to more memory.

Of course, she was human. That’s why Ghantal had been so secretive about her.

She couldn’t predict how he’d react to the news while he still didn’t remember his claiming.

A human mate was scandal enough, but for a commander?

He kept the knowledge to himself, watching his mother’s guilty hovering with new understanding. She thought she was protecting him. Or protecting his mate. Maybe both.

The bond between them was still missing. Sometimes he thought he felt it, some spider-silk-thin connection. But other times he couldn’t sense it at all in the impenetrable rubble of his fractured mind. They had been apart for so long. Maybe the time and distance had weakened it.

Three days after he’d stopped the masons’ treatments, another memory surfaced:

His human mate on the balcony of Maiden Hall, surrounded by growing plants. The look on her face when he’d destroyed them, like he’d torn out her heart and stomped on it.

But she’d been brave. She’d stood up to him despite barely reaching his chest, chin lifted like she was ready to fight him with her bare hands if necessary.

“I enjoyed this even less, I assure you,” he’d told her, the closest he could come to an apology given the circumstances.

The memory splintered to nothing there but more came the next night. Swooping down on her in the streets. The way she’d tried to duck past him. How desperately he’d wanted to know her true scent beneath all those mundane ones. Flying into the air with her in his arms.

And then, like a dam breaking, her name rushed through him.

Idabel.

His mate’s name was Idabel.

He was flying before conscious thought caught up, plummeting into the night. Foul weather slapped him in the face, but he barely felt it. He took the exterior route to Maiden Hall, landing on that same balcony where he’d first destroyed her world.

The roof was covered in a legal gardens now. Neat rows of approved vegetables soaked up the rain, nothing like the wild beauty she’d cultivated. His chest ached, seeing them. Seeing what could have been.

He barged inside, found his way to a hall where human women slept in narrow, curtained beds. Where is she?

A keeper appeared, lamp in hand and a lone clothes moth trailing after her. She squinted at him with suspicion from under her hood. “You’re not supposed to be here. What do you want?”

“Idabel.” Her name felt rusty on his tongue. “I’m looking for a human named Idabel.”

The keeper’s expression soured further. “No one by that name lives here.”

“She lived here. Before—” Before the war. Before he’d claimed her. “Six years ago.”

“Twenty-five generations!” the pesky little moth squeaked, not that the keeper could understand it.

“Maidens come and go. I don’t remember them all.”

“Surely you keep records.” But before he could press further, another voice whispered from a bed nearby.

“You mean the one who took up with a gargoyle?” A single eye peered out at him between two curtains. “Long, dark hair, worked in the Tower?”

Brandt nodded, heart thudding. The keeper hissed at the girl to get back to bed, but she pushed her bed curtain open even further. “She hasn’t lived here for years.”

His heart stuttered. He was so close, but still so far. “Do you know where she is now?”

“You need to go, sir. There are no males allowed in the sleeping areas. And you are dripping on the floor.” The keeper moved to block the woman from view, but she’d already pointed toward the Tower.

“The rookery. That’s what I heard. Got herself a roost there with her—”

“Bed! Now!” The matron shoved the woman back inside, yanked the curtains shut, then turned on Brandt. “Good night! If you cause any more disturbance, I’ll have a word with the Nadir.”

He had no doubt the self-important human would enjoy an audience with the Nadir, but he was already out the door and airborne, her protests fading behind him as the cold rain splashed against his wings.

The rookery. Why would Idabel live in the rookery? It was for low-ranking gargoyles, the clanless, the ones who hadn’t earned eyries. It wasn’t for humans of any station. Unless...

Unless she’d mated another gargoyle in his absence.

The thought nearly sent him crashing into the Tower wall.

Would she? Humans were different. Maybe when he’d been gone so long, presumed dead, and she couldn’t feel the bond anymore…

He landed hard on the rookery’s entrance platform, sending loose stones skittering. The corridors were narrow here, barely wide enough for spread wings. The damp odor of too many gargoyles in too small a space made his nostrils flare.

He roamed through the passages until he found her scent, faint but unmistakable: lemons and herbs and Idabel.

He followed it like a lifeline, through twisting passages and up worn stairs. It grew stronger, fresher, until he stood before a battered door on the lowest residential level. The kind of place given to servants or gargoyles with no status at all.

And at the door, overlaying Idabel’s scent, was another distinctive smell. Male. Gargoyle.

The rage that erupted made his previous anger seem like a candle flame. This was an inferno, white-hot and all-consuming. His mate— HIS MATE —with another male. Another gargoyle’s scent on her door, in her space, probably in her bed.

The roar that tore from his throat shook dust from the ceiling. Doors along the corridor flew open, startled faces peering out, but he didn’t see them clearly. Couldn’t see anything but red.

She’d replaced him. While he’d been fighting, bleeding, holding his dying watchmates, she’d been here with another. The bond meant nothing. He meant nothing. The pain of it was worse than any torture the goblins could have devised.

His fist connected with the wall, mortar crumbling under the impact. Again. Again. Until his knuckles bled and someone was shouting down the hall, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the betrayal, the loss, the absolute destruction of the one thing he’d thought was still his.

“ Idabel! ”

Her name was a battle cry, a plea, a dying word.

The door cracked open.

It was her. Her mouth opened, eyebrows rose. “Brandt?”

At the sound of his name, his mind shattered. Every wall he’d built, every protection he’d erected, came crashing down at once.