Free Web NovelChapter 7: I Hated Myself for What I Thought Next
A scream tore me out of sleep.
Shrill, ragged, somewhere deep in the corridors. The kind of scream you don’t let out over ordinary bad news.
I was on my feet before I understood why. A bad feeling already twisted my gut, cold, instinctive, that animal thing that knows before the mind does. I bolted out, barefoot on the stone, and followed the sound, the rising voices, the commotion at the end of the wing.
Guards. Servants clustered together. Someone sobbing.
"Let me through."
They didn’t move fast enough. I forced my way past, shoved one shoulder aside, then another, and came out into the corridor.
And the world stopped.
There was a body on the floor. Curled up at the crossing of the corridors. Except it didn’t look like a body. It was dry. Shriveled. The skin drawn tight over the bones like parchment gone too old, the face hollowed out, the hands reduced to claws. A withered thing, emptied of all life, that you’d have thought dead for centuries.
But the dress, I knew it. And that strand of dark hair, escaped from the rest, I knew it too.
Beside her, shattered on the flagstones, a little jar of ointment. A bottle of wine knocked over, the liquid dried into a long red streak.
Alexia.
My legs gave out. I dropped to my knees, and my stomach turned over all at once. I threw up, right there, off to the side, unable to hold it back, unable to think.
Because everything came at once. Too much. Why. Who. How. The ointment. The wine. She was coming to see me. She was coming to my room, last night, with that ointment and that wine, and she’d never arrived. If I’d stayed up waiting. If I’d gone to check. If I hadn’t said yes. If. If. If—
My breathing went haywire, too short, too fast. My hands shook and I couldn’t stop them. The stone pitched under me. I was crying, I was choking, I couldn’t get the air in anymore, and the corridor narrowed into a black tunnel closing over me.
Around me, murmurs. The hero. Look, it’s the hero. The great summoned hero, on all fours on the floor, throwing up and crying like a lost child. Some distant part of me was ashamed. The rest didn’t care in the slightest.
And then there was her.
I don’t know where she came from. I lifted my head, and Alice was there, and I clung to her like a drowning man. I grabbed her by the arms, hard, too hard.
"Alice... Alice! She’s dead. Alexia’s dead, Alice, she’s—"
My voice broke.
She didn’t say anything at first. She laid a hand on the back of my neck, drew me against her, and rocked me — slow, certain, the gesture already smooth, as if her hands had made it a hundred times somewhere I’d never been.
"It’s going to be all right, Kuro," she murmured. "It’s going to be all right. I’m here now. You can’t stay here."
She lifted me up, drew my arm over her shoulders, and led me away. I let her, hollow, my legs like cotton. I think she said something to the guards, that you don’t put the hero on display in such a state in front of the entire court. I wasn’t listening. I saw the withered thing again every time I closed my eyes.
She brought me back to our room. Closed the door on the noise, on the world. And she set me down on the bed with infinite gentleness.
She said nothing.
Neither did I. I was empty. Unable to string two words together. We just stayed there, pressed against each other, her head against mine, without speaking, for long minutes.
And then I cracked.
The tears came all at once, scalding, uncontrollable, and with them everything else, everything I’d been carrying since the first day.
"I liked her," I gasped. "You understand? I really liked her. Her being there made all of this a little less heavy. Ever since we got here, I’ve had dozens of people staring at me, expecting enormous things from me, talking to me like I’m a savior. I’ve never been used to that. Never. And she was like a lifeline. The one moment of the day when I could just... breathe."
Alice listened, motionless.
"I know she maybe had her reasons," I went on, my throat tight. "We’re in a world of nobles, I’m not naive. She probably had intentions I didn’t know about, schemes, things... but..."
I didn’t finish. I couldn’t.
Alice drew me in. She lifted a hand to my face and wiped the tears from my cheek, one after another, slow strokes of her thumb, patient, unhurried, as if there were nowhere in any world she would rather be than right here, doing exactly this.
"I already know all that, Kuro," she said softly. "I know your whole being. And I want you to know one thing. Through all of this, you have me. You’ll always have me. There’s no one else now—"
A breath. Something in the sentence caught, and she let it go.
"—and you’ll never need anyone else. I promise you that."
I lifted my eyes to her. And my face contorted.
"But I don’t even deserve you, Alice."
She barely frowned.
"You know what I thought, when I saw her body? The very first thing?" My voice was climbing, cracking. "I thought of you."
Something passed over her face. A stillness — there and gone, so fast I couldn’t have sworn it had been anything at all.
"I thought it was you. That it was you who’d killed her."
And the worst of it — the part I couldn’t get out of my mouth — was that some buried thing in me already had a picture ready. That first night. When I’d opened my Eye and looked at her and seen it: the cold thing coiled against her, drinking the light instead of giving it back. It rose up in me now in a single flash, laid over the dried husk in the corridor, the two images snapping together like they’d been cut to fit.
Then I crushed it.
Because it was impossible. Because she was a Saint, because her hands closed wounds, because the very idea was monstrous — and because I was a wreck on the floor of my own skull, inventing monsters to put a face on a horror I had no other way to hold.
I jerked back, as if ashamed to be near her at all.
"But I know you’d never do something like that! I know it! And above all, you don’t have any skill that could do... do that, what I saw in that corridor! You’re a Saint, you heal people, you don’t—" I clutched my head in my hands. "So why? Why do I doubt you, you who’ve always, always been there for me? What’s wrong with me?"
She rose from the bed.
I backed away. ƒree𝑤ebnσvel.com
"No. Stay back. I don’t want you to—"
She didn’t stop. She came toward me, calm, all the way to me, and pressed her body against mine, her chest against my torso, her hands sliding slowly up my shirt.
"You doubt me because I love you, Kuro," she said gently. "Because I was jealous, and you saw it. Because I wanted you all to myself."
I wasn’t surprised. Deep down, I think I already knew.
And then something in me simply gave.
It wasn’t a decision. There was nothing in it I chose. The grief had been climbing all morning with nowhere to go — too big for tears, too big for words, a pressure with no door anywhere in it — and her warmth was the only opening left in the entire world. I felt it tip. The part of me that was drowning stopped fighting the water and grabbed the nearest living thing, and the nearest living thing was her. Her breath on my mouth. Her heart slamming against my chest. Her hands fisted in my shirt. And somewhere in that half-second the grief and the wanting stopped being two separate things at all. They’d melted into one flood, and the flood had found one way out.
She caught me by the collar, pulled me to her, and kissed me.
And the dam broke.
I kissed her back — softly at first, then harder, then with a hunger that scared me, everything emptying out of me at once and into her: the fear, the loss, the guilt, the whole unbearable week of being a weapon, a symbol, a savior, anything at all except a person. All of it poured into her mouth and found, there, the only place it could go. Her fingers wound into my hair. I pulled her against me, harder—
A knock at the door.
Alice went still.
"Tch," she breathed against my lips.
The exact sound. The one she’d made the night a glowing circle tore us off the floor of my apartment and dropped us in another world. I was too far gone to do anything with the thought except let it slip past.
I pulled back, breathless, and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
"...Come in," I said, my voice still rough.
A servant entered, bowed low, eyes down.
"Forgive the intrusion. The king requests you at the palace entrance within the half hour, ready to depart."
"All right," Alice answered in my place, not a tremor anywhere in her voice, half a breath after a kiss, as though we’d done nothing in this room but fold clothes. "Thank you."
The servant left and closed the door behind her.
We looked at each other, the two of us, a little awkward.
"I... I’ll get my things ready," I said at last.
The sadness was still there, under the skin, despite everything. It wasn’t going to leave just like that.
"I’ll come help you," said Alice.
Half an hour later, we joined the king at the palace entrance.
I walked with empty eyes. I barely saw where I was putting my feet.
Artario was waiting for us, his face grave. He laid a hand on my shoulder.
"I know this morning was cruel," he said, and something in his tone told me he’d already been told about the scene in the corridor, the way I’d fallen apart. "To lose someone like that, on the eve of a departure, is an ordeal I’d wish on no one. But our world doesn’t wait, and your mission comes before all else, as you know."
He paused.
"I make you a promise, hero. Whoever committed this horror, I will find them. Whoever they are, wherever they hide. They will answer for what they’ve done."
I nodded without a word. What could I have said? And without thinking, the way you reach for the one fixed point in a room that won’t stop spinning, I turned my head and looked for Alice. She was right there at my side, close, her eyes lowered in something that looked exactly like grief, and her hand found mine and folded around it. The king’s promise hung in the air over the two of us. I held onto her fingers and felt, absurdly, a little less alone.
"May the gods watch over your road. The whole kingdom is counting on you both."
Then we climbed into a carriage. Elsa already held the reins, in traveling gear, a sword slung across her back. She threw us a glance over her shoulder, and for once, nothing cutting came to her.
"Get settled," was all she said. "The road is long, and it softens for no one. You’ll have all the time you need to grieve along the way."
That was, in her way, almost tenderness.
The carriage lurched into motion.
I watched the palace recede through the window. The towers, the ramparts, that gilded cage where I’d believed, for the space of a week, I’d found some semblance of respite. And I thought of Alexia. Of her laugh in the middle of the books, of the way she took the world apart with me, of the light kiss she’d left on my cheek. And of those two words she’d never come to keep: see you tonight. All of it, I was leaving behind me, dry and broken in a corridor.
Then I turned my eyes from the glass, and I looked straight ahead.
The horizon opened onto hills, a road, an entire world I didn’t know and that was waiting for me to save it. I had no idea what lay ahead out there. But I knew one thing: I had to move forward. For myself. And for her, who had never once stopped being there, at my side, when everything else was falling apart.
Alice was clinging to my arm, her head resting on my shoulder, the way she always did. Her eyes were closed, her breathing slow and even against my side.
She held on a little tighter, and let the road carry us west.
As if nothing else, in all the world, had ever existed.
