Page 45 of Witchcraft and Fury (Chronicles of the Divided Isle #1)

‘My father’s soldiers – or killers, I should call them – tore aside the tent flaps of Yewbrook’s men and those of the other lords, and murdered all inside before they could rise and reach for their swords.

Screams split the night air, and I screamed too.

I’m not sure my father even heard me, such was the terrible cacophony of butchery and death.

‘It was over within ten minutes. Yewbrook’s head was brought and tossed unceremoniously onto the existing pile by the hooves of my father’s horse.

‘The next day my father and his six thousand followed Prince Galan’s instructions to the letter, marching to the rise before the plain and hiding from view.

Until, that is, the moment came – when Galan looked up from his charger on the battlefield, praying for Yewbrook to emerge – my father charged at Galan’s flank.

Galan had no inkling of what was about to happen, and his men could offer no resistance.

They were torn apart, reaped like a field of wheat.

‘My father received the rewards he’d dreamt of, and more.

The murderer Prince Edric became King Edric and gave my father all of Yewbrook’s lands and titles as thanks for his treachery.

That’s how I became the son of an earl, one of the great lords of the land.

And it’s also how I came to hate my father. ’

Solar’s eyes hadn’t left Cal’s face once throughout the tale. He was no longer smiling. So horrible and shocking was it that a part of her didn’t want him to continue, but when he started speaking again she found herself unable to interrupt him.

‘In the years that followed I tried my hardest to avoid my father, the man who I had once been so proud of. I had come to fear and revile him. We moved into Earl Yewbrook’s castle, and in every room I felt the ghost of the great man.

I absorbed myself in my studies – anything that would distract me from the father I hated and the memories of that awful night in Yewbrook’s camp.

I locked myself away in my room for hours at a time to pore over the poems and tales of the ancients.

My private tutor said I was the best student he’d ever had.

I don’t know if he ever guessed the reason behind my fanatical enthusiasm.

‘But, most of all, I drew. The act of creating a work of art is so immersive, so absorbing, that it makes you forget the world in a way that simply reading a poem or fairy tale cannot. Before I knew it, drawing and painting were my passions in life, and the only things I could ever imagine doing as an adult. I didn’t want to be earl after my father and rule the lands that he had won with such dishonesty and ruthlessness. I wanted to escape.

‘My chance came at the age of seventeen, when my father commissioned a new temple to be constructed outside his castle to the God of Mettle and Stratagem, the god that we Roundtowers have honoured above all others since time immemorial. I helped the artists paint the interior, and they were impressed with my work. It wasn’t work fit for the son of an earl, of course, but my father had no inkling of what I was doing.

He never paid any attention to how my sister, Lizbeth, and I spent our free time, so preoccupied was he with hunting on his newly won lands.

‘When the artists finished their work and left, moving on to their next big commission elsewhere in the realm, I ran away with them. The head artist who took me under his wing was a kindly old man, but I now know that he was na?ve and foolish too. Brun, his name was.

‘And when my father realised I had fled, he was livid. He made it known that a substantial reward would be paid to whoever found me and brought me home. One of the men from our wandering band found the offer too tempting and sent word to my father’s soldiers.

They dragged me home along with my mentor, Brun.

My father had him flogged through the streets on the very day we were brought back.

‘“You are a Roundtower,” my father said to me, as he made me watch Brun’s humiliation, “and Roundtowers paint only in blood.”

‘I had shamed my father to such an extent that he renounced me as his heir, sending me away to study magic like he would a younger son.

My fourteen-year-old sister, Lizbeth, was in tears to see me go, not just because she would miss me but also because she had always dreamt of becoming a witch herself.

You see, since I had no younger brother, Lizbeth had let herself dream that she would be allowed to study magic.

Of course, I wish it could have been that way.

I love my sister, and I had no special desire to become a wizard myself.

‘Soon after my departure my mother gave birth to another son, Orin. He will inherit my father’s lands when he leaves this world.’

Cal fixed Solar with his sapphire-blue eyes. They were full of sorrow and regret.

‘I hope now that you can forgive me, though I would fully understand if it is beyond you. I … I truly am sorry,’ he said.

‘Sorry for what?’ asked Solar, her mind still reeling from Cal’s story.

‘For my treatment of you. I acted like I hated you from the moment you showed up at our camp, and, to be honest, I think I really did … in the beginning at least. But I hope you see now that I didn’t hate you because you are a witch or low-born.

I resented you because you could study magic in a royally sanctioned encampment, the first girl to do so in a hundred years, when Lizbeth could not.

I hated you because you chose to study magic, whereas I was forced into it.

And I was jealous of you because of the love with which you always speak of your father, when my own raised me with brutality and detachment.

The love that your father, a carpenter, shares with you is worth infinitely more than the expensive clothes and weapons my father gave me. ’

There was no mistaking the sincerity in his voice. Solar hesitantly put an arm around him, feeling the warmth of his body through his shirt.

‘There is nothing to forgive, Cal,’ she said quietly.

Cal turned within the circle of her arm to face her. His face was little more than a handspan from her own, close enough for her to make out every detail of expression, every subtlety of emotion. He seemed on the verge of saying something, but then his eyes dropped.

‘I’m not worthy of your friendship,’ he muttered.

Without thinking, Solar reached out with an open palm. She placed her fingertips delicately beneath Cal’s chin and tilted his face up so that their eyes met again.

‘I said,’ she whispered, suddenly breathless, ‘that there is nothing to forgive.’

He sat there, utterly still, and Solar found herself unable or unwilling to move her hand away.

The silver flecks in Cal’s eyes seemed to shimmer in the firelight, and Solar recalled with perfect clarity a moment from their first sparring session in the forest surrounding Falcontop, when Cal had ended a bout with his sword tip beneath her chin, angling her gaze towards his.

She remembered the way her heart had thudded, her suspicion that the flush on his checks was caused not just by exertion.

She came back to the present. The stars above. The fire at their side.

Cal’s eyes still locked with hers, no longer filled with sorrow but smouldering with desire.

Her heart pounded with an urgency that was now becoming familiar. The heat rose in her cheeks as she felt herself almost burn with the need to be close to him.

Her fingers left his chin with utmost gentleness. Her thumb trailed the line of his jaw as she moved her hand to the back of his head. She ran her fingers through his thick, dark hair, then lowered his head until his lips met hers.