The Black Mage: Candidate (37 page)

Yes. I did.
I made myself blink away the tears.

“We never talked after…” Darren’s voice fell to a whisper. “I would have let him go, Ryiah. I know it would have been a mistake. Gods, after all the rebels have done…” He was quiet for a minute, and then he made himself continue. “I swear to you, Ryiah, if I had known Mira was there, I would have stopped her.
For you
.” His voice broke. “No one should ever have to watch their brother die.”

My whole face was wet, and my hands were trembling in my lap. I shoved them under the cover and held my breath, waiting for him to leave.

“I wish I could take it all away.” Darren’s hand pressed against my wrist as he stood to go.

There was the shift of shadows, and then he was walking toward the door.

“Stay,” I whispered.

The outline of his shoulders froze, and I heard the soft pad of his boots. They grew louder until he was at the edge of my bed.

I was curled up to my knees, sitting against the frame. The tears were drowning me. I didn’t want to be alone.

Not tonight
.

Darren’s arms wrapped around my waist, and he pulled me against him, my back pressing against his front.

He held me.

The rise and fall of his chest carried me to sleep. His chin resting on my shoulder. Pine and cloves enveloping me whole.

Darren’s whisper was the last thing I heard.

“I love you, Ryiah.”

****

Over the next two weeks it got easier to breathe. In. And out. With Darren’s arms around me as I slept. He came to my room each night, each morning a pressed flower next to my head. Without fail.

The prince was going to cure me of everything Derrick had taken that night. Everything Alex had stolen the day he joined the rebel cause.

All Darren ever did was hold me. But that act alone was...
everything
.

It was a drop of sunlight in a prison of ice. It warmed the part of me I was afraid I’d lost. It took the fear, the doubt, the terror, and it pushed it all away.

And that morning I awoke. My ladies-in-waiting came to the door, and I smiled. It was small, barely a tug of the lips. But it was real.

I could be happy.

And today I am marrying my best friend.
Because that’s what Darren was. After all these years. Ella was one—she had held my hand and carried me through the trial year and our apprenticeship—But this last year had been Darren. The two of us had held each other through the darkest part of our lives, and never once let go.

Madame Pollina and Celine and Gemma helped me bathe. Soft-scented rose water and oils that made my skin glisten. They brushed my hair, pinning just a couple strands behind my head with sparkly pins. The rest remained down, loose waves framing my face.

The powders they applied were bare and set to highlight my narrow cheeks, the softest gloss to my mouth, the lightest shadows to darken the corners of my eyes.

Then they brought out my gown. A cream yellow, light ruffles running diagonally down its silken skirts, a fitted bodice of gold and orange beads. Nothing like I had ever imagined, and everything that I had never known I wanted. With its matching satin slippers it was fit for a princess.

The loveliest thing I would ever wear.

I stood on a small raised stand as they helped me into the dress in front of a gilded mirror studded with pearls.

They laced the bodice, and I held my breath, my arms free from the weight of traditional sleeves.

It was then I read his letter:
“This dress reminds me of the midwinter solstice, our second year in the apprenticeship. Your arms were bare and Priscilla told you it made you look common…I remember your friend asked me what I thought, and I remember your face when I didn’t reply. Ryiah, I want you to know that you looked beautiful. So beautiful, that I couldn’t stop staring even if I tried. And then I asked you to dance—and even though I knew it would only bring the both of us heartache—it was the best night of my life. And now I want you to wear a dress just like it, today, as you become my wife.”

“Don’t cry!” Celine snatched the card out of my hand before I could read it again. “We just finished with your face.”

“I-I’m sorry,” I stammered. But I wasn’t. Not after reading Darren’s letter.

I started to smile and then grimaced as the extra inhale stabbed at my ribs. The dress was tighter than anything I’d ever worn.

My eyes were a bit blurry, and ever mindful of Celine’s warning I lifted a cautious finger to swipe away the water that had started to form at the rims.

I blinked twice, and then regarded myself in the mirror.

And that’s when I saw it.

What I had been missing all along. What I had failed to see until the moment that yellow silk caught the light.

“Might I have a couple minutes,” I rasped, “alone?”

“My lady, you don’t have much time before the ceremony!”

“Please?” I was gulping up air, my fingers trembling as I pressed them together in hopes no one would notice.

Madame Pollina sighed and then motioned for my ladies to go, trailing after them to the door. She ducked her head in one last time. “Ten minutes, my lady!”

I waited until their mindless chatter trailed off down the corridor.

I took one last look at my dress. My
yellow silk
dress.

Then I shut my eyes and let the memory come flooding back:

A scared girl, no more than six, tugging at a yellow
silk ribbon at the end of her curly black braid
.

A man who looked nothing like his daughter, dragging her along to meet with a crown prince in the stands of the Candidacy.

The black-haired Caltothian ambassador looking on, no longer indifferent, cold fury written across his face, fists clenched at his sides, eyes locked on the same pair as me.

And then Blayne’s voice:
“Come now, Father, everyone knows the noblemen take a lover or two during their travels. Even their wives.
Why, it’s a common enough saying: the longer at sea, the more lovers she keeps.”

The woman we kidnapped. During the apprenticeship. In Dastan’s Cove.

Lady Sybil was awaiting her husband’s return.

I left the dais to press my palms against the side of the wall. This couldn’t be happening. Not now. Not like this.

But now that the gates had been thrown open, the memories wouldn’t stop: Three years ago the lady had had a three-year-old daughter. With black curls.

The mother adjusting the pale silk ribbon on the waist of her daughter’s dress.

Little Tamora. Who looked just like that girl in the stands. The same blue eyes, the same age, the same fondness for silk. The black hair of the mother. The curls that mirrored Lord Tyrus. The blue eyes that matched both.

The cold fury on his face…

He couldn’t have been Baron Cyr. The other dignitaries would have recognized…

Was Lord Tyrus the lover?

Was Tamora his daughter?

Cold steel cut at my chest, and my whole body seized:
Had Blayne known?

But
how
? How would he—

And then I remembered.

The Caltothian traitor.
Flint
. A sentry who had served among Lady Sybil’s men. The man who had mapped out the terrain for Dastan Cove. A common soldier who knew the in’s and out’s of Baron Cyr’s castle. A husband who was away at sea for many months at a time.

Master Byron’s words returned:
“Lucky for you Commander Chen has recently received orders from the Crown itself.”

“Just think,”
Alex had said,
“a month at sea on a secret mission. Imagine all the stories you’ll be able to tell us when you return, Ry”

And finally, Mira’s threat as she informed us that our mission was,
“never, ever to be discussed with anyone unless you have permission from the king himself.”

The Crown had ordered a kidnapping. But on whose orders? King Lucius?

“I asked my father that year we returned to the palace,” Darren had replied. “He told me he couldn’t recall.”

What if the reason the king couldn’t recall was because the orders were never his?

Blayne and Darren had hated their father. But Blayne…Blayne had suffered much longer at his hand.

The crown prince just gave me a sardonic smile. “It takes much more to impress when you are his heir. Darren wasn’t always around. In any case I’m better for it now.”

Had Blayne planned all of this? Had he been planning this for
years?

Crown orders for a secret mission nobody knew about. Kidnapping the lover and child of the head Caltothian ambassador?

Blackmailing Lord Tyrus with his child’s life. Had the girl been brought to the Candidacy, within the lord’s sight as a reminder? A promise to keep her alive, in exchange for his crime? Murdering a king in front of a room of soldiers and knights and the world’s greatest mages. The man had never expected escape.

“For Caltoth!”
It had been a cry to remind the audience it was an attack. To show the other country’s ambassadors the ultimate breach of a treaty.

No one would be able to tie Lord Tyrus to Baron Cyr’s missing wife and child. No one would have known she had a lover.

No one but a traitorous sentry, one who had managed to explore every inch of Baron Cyr’s castle unnoticed. One who had perhaps seen Lord Tyrus visit Lady Sybil while her baron husband was away.

Perhaps Flint had been one of the traitors hired by King Lucius to stage the attacks on the Jerar-Caltothian border.

Maybe Commander Nyx and King Horrace had never lied. Maybe Derrick was telling the truth.

And maybe Blayne, tired of being in his tyrant father’s shadow, had decided to bribe his father’s man to learn Caltothian secrets. Something to use to his advantage.
Because perhaps his father had told him about all of the staged attacks.
After all, Blayne had been groomed as King Lucius’s successor for years.
Why wouldn’t the king share his secret with his heir?

And perhaps Blayne had needed a mage to help accomplish his mission. Not a commander, not the current Black Mage, but the jealous sister, Mage Mira. The one who would love more than anything a position of power. Something to distance herself from her prestigious brother.
Something to rise.

She stepped in like a hero to kill the king’s murderer. It had been so easy. So convenient. It had earned her a place as King’s Regiment lead mage. Blayne’s right hand in castle affairs.

Blackmailing Lord Tyrus with his lover and child would have accomplished two goals with one act:

First:
Kill the father.
The man who had tormented him for years. The king who had taken a sweet boy, and made him a monster.

“You see the boys as the men they are now,”
Benny had said.
“They were much different back then.”

Second: Convince the other countries that Caltoth had broken the Great Compromise in one indisputable act. Kill off a Pythian heir, an added blow to the shrewd King Joren who was so reluctant to pick a side?

Blayne had been poisoned, of course. But what if it had been a farce? What if one of the healers had already had an antidote on hand?

It took a mage precious minutes to identify a strange poison’s symptoms, and even longer to cast the correct balance of magic mixed with the herbs and powders on hand. I had seen the Restoration mages struggle during their Candidacy trials just to concoct the correct casting for their prisoner’s ailment in time. And those took close to an hour.

The crown prince had been healed within twenty minutes.

I slipped to the floor.

This past year. Everything Blayne had done to win my trust. I hadn’t ever trusted him, not completely.

But I had let down my guard after he had shown me a bit of his past.
Isn’t the best bit of truth always woven in with a lie?
Blayne had never lied about the cruelty of his father. But he had used it to garner my pity.

But why hadn’t he tried to kill me, too? Why didn’t he just get rid of the girl he hated and force his brother to marry Priscilla instead?

The crown prince had hated me from the moment we met. The second he saw the way Darren looked at me that second year at the ascension fest—

And then I paused.
Darren
. That was it.

“My dear,” Benny said.
“Darren is the only person that boy has ever cared for, besides himself.”

Blayne hadn’t been able to do it. Not after he saw how hard Darren had worked to trick his father into accepting me as his betrothed. An infatuation he could ignore. But love? As much as Blayne had hated me, he loved Darren more.
The younger brother who continuously fought his father to protect him from the blows.

Blayne had probably felt indebted to Darren. And so he had made me a part of his plans. He had changed his game, he had shown me vulnerability, sympathy in his father’s cruel acts to win me to his side.

It was all to further his ploy. Like Blayne had said:
“The two most formidable warrior mages our kingdom has ever seen... The Crown has never been more powerful.”

He had been building his indisputable reign. All along.

****

My head pressed against the chamber wall. I kept my eyes clenched shut as the wave of nausea hit, breathing heavily through my nose.

Derrick.

I slammed my fist to my mouth. Teeth scraped against skin as the scream ripped me apart. It clawed up from my chest. It was so long and so hard I had to slap my other hand over to muffle the cry. Blood coated my tongue. I was choking on hot metal that was melting my lungs.

DERRICK!

The screams rippled across my skin, one after the other, until all will left my limbs, my hands and arms went limp against the cold marble floor.

I let him die. I let him die, and I could have helped him escape.
I was the second best Combat mage in the realm. I could have taken on a whole legion of guards.
Why hadn’t I done something?