Page 26 of The Half King
“I’m afraid this is all we have.” Father Padron backed up, grinning apologetically before he turned and strode out of the antechamber. “I did warn you it wasn’t intriguing.”
With sagging shoulders, she followed him. “I’m still grateful for…”
She trailed off as a flame leaped in her peripheral vision. One of the wall sconces was burning more brightly than the others. She didn’t think much of it until she glanced down and noticed an imprint of a shoe in the dirt. But only half of a shoe print: the small, square-heeled portion of a boot or a dress loafer. The rest of the imprint disappeared beneath the marble—as though someone had parted the wall and stepped through it.
There was another antechamber. One Father Padron had hidden from her.
She felt a pinch in her chest. She tried telling herself that perhaps he was unaware of the room’s existence, but that was a lie, and she knew it in her bones. Her instincts had been right. He had deliberately chosen not to tell her about the archives because there was something in the hidden room that he didn’t want her to find.
Maybe some ends weren’t so dead after all.
…
Hours later, she paced the garden, seeing nothing, feeling nothing.
She wished Daerick were there. With him holed up in the palace doing research, she had no one to talk to about the archives. She wanted so desperately to give Father Padron the benefit of the doubt, but the truth was that he had deceived her, and it stung. And then there was his embrace of suffering as atonement. Exactly what the Reverend Mother had warned her about. What else had been a lie? Had she been mistaken about his kindness? Did he secretly view her with the same contempt that Father Bishop displayed so openly?
She didn’t know, and that was maddening.
Distracted, she reached out to skim a rosebush and pricked her little finger. She hissed and brought the finger to her mouth. The pain turned her focus outward, making her aware of her surroundings once more. She heard a noise coming from a maze of hedges at the back of the garden: a muffled grunting, the sound of someone in pain.
She followed the noise to the center of the maze and discovered she was right. There on the grass knelt the king, pale in the face, more drunk than ever, clutching his stomach and trying not to lose its contents. Oddly enough, she empathized with his pain, having once enjoyed too much sacramental cider at the temple. She lifted her skirts and sat far enough away from him to avoid any unpleasantness.
“Your Majesty,” she greeted. “I would say you’re going to feel worse in the morning, but I don’t know if you will.” Perhaps the alcohol in his blood would disappear at sunset, along with the rest of him. “Your body is different than mine.”
The king sniffed a laugh and darted a glance at her chest. “Maybe you’re not as ignorant as I thought.”
“I know why you’re doing that,” she told him.
“Doing what? Defiling the garden with half-digested ale?”
“Belittling me,” she said. “The rumors you heard about me raised your hopes, and it hurt to learn that I’m ordinary. Your insults are a way of retaliating against me and also against yourself for believing the rumors in the first place.” When he opened his mouth to deny it, she added, “Daerick told me so.”
“Daerick,” the king grumbled. “One of these days he’s going to talk himself into a broken nose.”
“He told me more than just that,” she said. “He told me you remember your nights in the shadows. Is that true?”
For a sliver of a second, fear widened Kian’s gaze. If she had blinked, she would have missed it. But she didn’t miss it, and in that moment, she saw the king for who he truly was—a wounded young man who dreaded the night. Sympathy prickled behind her ribs, but she hid the emotion, afraid that he would mistake it for weakness and lose whatever respect he had for her.
“Daerick is mistaken,” Kian said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“So you’re an oracle now?”
“I only need eyes to see that you’re afraid.”
Kian spat into the grass and then shamelessly changed the subject. “You were wrong when you said I would feel worse in the morning. No matter what I do to myself—even if I lose a finger, which has actually happened—I wake up whole.” He tapped the visible patch of skin on his upper chest. “You can pierce my heart if you want to. As long as it’s beating when the sun goes down, I’ll have a new one at sunrise.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she told him. “If you can be polite and stop insulting me, I’ll wait until twilight to stab you.”
He released a soft, breathy chuckle that made his eyes crinkle at the edges. This time his laughter was genuine, and she found herself searching for another funny remark so she could hear it again.
“No one prepared me for my curse,” Kian said. “After my Claiming Day, it took me a fortnight to learn that my body restores itself at dawn. I found out the hard way when I fractured my elbow.” Absently, he rubbed the crook of his left arm. “That was the day I lost a finger, too.”
“Sounds like an eventful day,” she said. “What happened?”
“Daerick and I might have liberated a bottle of my father’s finest and then consumed it in the stables.” Kian grinned. “Did you know that horses dislike being dressed in men’s breeches?”
