Chapter 15 : EIRA - The Prince's Bedchamber59Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfpAwWhO9TV
She found him in his chambers after midnight, long after the Council had adjourned and the Citadel had settled into the kind of hollow silence that came before a storm. She hadn't meant to go there. She'd meant to go to the infirmary, to sit with Aren until he fell asleep, to tell him she was leaving and she'd be back and he needed to be brave. She'd done that. She'd held him while he cried—silent tears, the worst kind, the kind that came without sound because he'd learned that sound didn't help—and she'd promised him she'd return. Then she'd walked the cold stone corridors with no destination in mind, and her feet had brought her here.
The door was slightly ajar. She pushed it open without knocking.
Vail's bedchamber was smaller than she'd expected. Not the grand quarters of a prince, but a plain room with a narrow bed, a writing desk, a hearth where a fire was dying. The walls were lined with books—more books, always books, as if he was trying to build a fortress out of paper and ink. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, still in his dark tunic, a half-empty bottle of brandy on the floor beside him. His hands were shaking. She'd never seen them shake before.
"You should be asleep," he said, without looking up.
"So should you."
"I don't sleep. Not anymore. Not since—" He stopped. His hand went to the bottle, and he poured himself a glass with the careful precision of a man who knew he was drunk and was trying very hard not to show it. "Not since the archives. Not since I spoke its name aloud and felt it turn its attention toward me."
Eira closed the door behind her. The latch clicked. "Yska."
"Don't say it. Not here. Not now. The walls are thinner than you think." He took a long swallow of brandy. "But yes. That name. The name that hears."
She crossed the room and sat on the chair by the dead hearth. Her hand was throbbing under the fresh bandages Liska had applied, and her back ached from the tension of the day, and she could still feel the ghost of Aren's small arms around her neck. She was seventeen years old, and she was leaving in the morning to march into the Frostwood and find a prison that had been sealed for five centuries and kill something that called itself a god. It didn't feel real. None of it felt real.
"You said you'd give your mother's death," she said. "If you had to feed a memory to Yska. You said it would choke on it."
"I said a lot of things."
"Did you mean it?"
Vail was silent for a long moment. The fire popped, sending a single spark spiralling up the chimney. His hands were still shaking, but his voice was steady when he spoke. "My mother died of the wasting sickness. You know that. Everyone knows that. It's the kind of thing that becomes public property when you're the heir to a Council seat. The sympathetic looks. The murmured condolences. The way people stop talking when you enter a room." He took another drink. "What they don't know is that I watched it happen. Every day, for six months. I was eighteen. I sat by her bed and held her hand and watched her tongue turn black and her eyes go hollow, and I didn't feel anything. Not grief. Not fear. Not even relief when it was over. Just... nothing."
"Nothing at all?"
"Nothing useful. I catalogued her symptoms. I took notes on the progression of the disease. I cross-referenced her decline with the medical texts in the archives. I was conducting an experiment, and she was the subject." His voice cracked on the last word. "She was my mother, and I treated her like a specimen. Because that was the only way I could survive it. The only way I could keep from—" He stopped. His hand tightened on the glass. "From feeling what I should have felt."
Eira leaned forward. The firelight caught the planes of his face, the hollows of his cheeks, the shadows under his eyes. He looked younger than his twenty-three years, and older, both at once. "And what should you have felt?"
"Grief. Rage. The kind of pain you fed to the Lament. The kind of pain that burns." He looked at her, and his grey eyes were bright with something that might have been tears or might have been the brandy. "I didn't feel any of it. I still don't. She's been dead for five years, and I still don't feel anything except—" He stopped again.
"Except what?"
"Except this." He held up his shaking hand. "My body remembers. My body shakes and my chest gets tight and I can't sleep, I can't fucking sleep, because every time I close my eyes I see her face. But the feelings—the grief, the love, the loss—they're locked away somewhere I can't reach. I've been trying to access them for years. I've run experiments on myself. Memory extraction, sensory deprivation, emotional induction. Nothing works. I'm empty, Eira. I'm the Prince of Empty Hands, and the name isn't a metaphor. It's a diagnosis."
Eira looked at him. At his shaking hands and his brandy-slick voice and his eyes that were too bright, too sharp, too full of something he couldn't name. She thought about her own grief—the weight of her mother's death, the blood on the birthing bed, the way her father had screamed. She'd carried that grief for eleven years. It was the worst thing she had, and she'd fed it to the Lament, and it had burned. Vail was carrying his grief too. He just couldn't feel it.
"That's why you can't wound the gods," she said. "You don't have a memory that hurts enough."
"Exactly. I could stand in front of Yska itself and offer my mother's death, and it would be like offering water. Tasteless. Useless. The memory is there—I can describe every detail, the way her tongue turned black, the way her breathing stopped, the way the physicians pulled the sheet over her face—but the feeling is gone. It was never there to begin with."
"Then find another memory. Something else that hurts."
"There isn't anything else. My mother was the only person I ever—" He stopped. He looked at her, and something in his expression shifted. The brandy glass stopped halfway to his lips. "You. You're the first person since my mother died who's made me feel anything at all. Not affection. Not warmth. I don't know how to do those. But something. Something that isn't cold."
Eira's heart was beating very fast. She could feel it in her throat, her wrists, her bandaged hand. The room was very quiet, and the fire was very low, and Vail was looking at her with an expression she didn't know how to read. It wasn't desire—or not only desire. It was something more complicated. Something that looked almost like fear.
"What do you feel?" she asked.
"Terror. Mostly. You walked into my study covered in road dust and old blood, and you looked at me like I was something you might have to kill, and I felt—" He laughed, a short, humourless sound. "I felt interested. For the first time in years. You weren't a specimen. You weren't an experiment. You were just a girl from a fishing village who'd done something impossible, and you didn't give a shit about my title or my theories or my reputation. You just wanted to know if I could help you stop the plague. And I wanted to help you. Not because it was useful. Because it was you."
Eira stood. She crossed the room—three steps, no more—and sat on the bed beside him. She could smell the brandy on his breath, and the faint ozone tang that clung to his clothes from the laboratory, and underneath it something human, something warm. His hands were still shaking. She reached out and took one of them in hers. His fingers were cold, and the tremor vibrated through her own bones.
"You're not empty," she said. "You're just frozen. There's a difference."
"Not a useful one."
"The ice can melt. I've seen it happen. The Frostwood in spring—the rivers break open, and everything that was buried comes back to the surface." She squeezed his hand. "You're not a god. You're not a specimen. You're a man who watched his mother die and couldn't let himself feel it because feeling it would have destroyed you. That's not emptiness. That's survival."
Vail stared at their clasped hands. His shaking was slowing, just a little. "You're seventeen. You talk like someone twice your age."
"I've had to. I've been raising my brother since I was six. I've been hunting since I was ten. I've been grieving since my mother died, and I've never stopped, and I've never let it freeze. It hurts. It hurts every fucking day. But it's better than being numb."
"How do you know?"
"Because numbness doesn't stop the plague. Numbness doesn't save anyone. Numbness just sits in a room full of books and waits for the world to end." She met his eyes. "You're not sitting anymore. You're going north. That means you're not numb. You're just scared."
He didn't answer. He didn't need to. They sat together on the edge of his narrow bed, their hands intertwined, the fire dying in the hearth. Outside, the wind moaned against the Citadel's walls, and somewhere far below, a god-speaker was writing a name on stone, and somewhere far north, a mountain was kneeling before a door that had been sealed for five hundred years.
"If we survive this," Vail said, finally, "I want to learn how to feel it. The grief. The loss. The thing you fed to the Lament. I want to stop being empty."
"You will."
"You don't know that."
"I know that you just held my hand for five minutes and didn't let go. That's a start." She released his fingers and stood. "Get some sleep. We leave at dawn."
"Eira."
She turned at the door.
"If I have to feed Yska a memory—if it comes to that—I'll give it my mother's death. The details, the images, every clinical observation I made while she was dying. It won't hurt. It won't burn. But maybe—" He paused. "Maybe the truth of it will. Maybe the coldness of it will. Something that empty might choke a god that's spent five centuries feeding on love and fear and grief."
Eira looked at him. At his exhausted eyes and his shaking hands and the brandy bottle on the floor. "I hope it does. I hope it chokes on it."
She closed the door behind her.59Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡWf4aM6SgcE
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