Page 85 of The Moon Blessed King
‘We’ll convince her otherwise. What woman wouldn’t want their child to become queen?’
‘You won’t convince her,’ Fen replies. ‘I’ve seen her kind of mettle before – she won’t bend beneath your hammer. She will fight us all the way until the end, and every moment she spends with her child is a moment that child could be used against us.’
‘I’ll take care of it.’
Breathe. Listen. Learn.
‘I shouldn’t have to tell you that you cannotmurderthat woman. Murder, unlike kidnapping, is not so easily reversed.’ There is a touch of irony in a Giver saying such things, but Hamad laughs at the joke. He nods his head gamely.
‘I’ll do my part when the time comes,’ he says simply. ‘Will you?’
Fen thinks of Elician’s orders. She knows full well Elician does not want this child as his own, and he has never given her an order regarding this child. But she knows how he wants the plague to be handled. She knows what Adalei and Lio are permitting right thisvery second. She knows, too, how terribly unfair all this is to Kassandra.
Sometimes, though, life is not fair.
‘Yes,’ she promises Hamad. ‘I’ll do my part. I trust my king.’
‘As do I,’ Hamad swears. ‘As do I.’
‘But how will we remove Adalei from the throne? We cannot just approach her with the child.’
‘No, but there are those in place who will ensure that she has no choice but to comply once the evidence is laid before the court.’
‘Someone in the palace?’
‘Yes.’
Fen nods slowly. ‘Good…then tell me how I can help.’ And he tells her everything.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Cat
Elician and Cat spend two days in Ines. It feels simultaneously like too much and not enough. Madame Leonde gives them a room at her inn, but Cat barely has time to sleep. Every moment, he feels drawn in one direction or another. He is asked endless questions. What does it feel like to be a Reaper? Can he really kill with a touch? How does he actually help any of them? How does he know he hasn’t condemned their souls by doing this? Should they not accept it’s their time to die?
Cat answers what he can. He asks questions of his own. What does it feel like tonotbe a Reaper? What would they want in their king? Where did they learn how to treat the illwithoutthe powers of the gods? Where could he learn such a thing as well? And – how can they believe that their souls were ever at stake? ‘If I am touched by Death, and Death must come for all things, then I am inevitable. But I am not here to kill you, and so that must be inevitable too. It’s not your time.’
As he speaks to his people, his Blue Guard ebbs and flows. Some remain steadfast and alert at his side, others filter through the city to subtly sing his praises. He spies Partho in the morning of the second day juggling balls and telling tales. Cat watches him, struck by a nostalgia he cannot quite name out loud. He never gets a chance tothink on it too deeply, as the moment he is seen, he is approached by more of the town’s councilmen. Each want to hear what his and Elician’s plans are. Each wants to debate. Each, also, wants to take Elician to task for the simple fact he is Soleben and they have found it in themselves to loathe him more than they fear the notion of a Reaper on the Alelunen throne.
Elician doesn’t react outwardly to the not-so-subtle barbs thrown against him. He stays close to Cat and nods his head as elder after elder castigates him for the war and for generations of grievances. Every town in the country has offered its people up to fight in the war. They are all familiar with the sting of loss. But he offers no apologies for their suffering, because these veterans offer no apologies for the pains they too have inflicted. Both sides have fought and died. That’s the problem with this war, after all; everyone involved has been hurt, everyone involved has felt pain. And so, while Elician does not argue with them, he does listen and he offers no judgement in turn.
‘And what of the rest of our soldiers?’ Leonde asks. ‘What can we expect of them?’
‘They’re in Altas,’ Cat tells her, though Leferge steps in soon after to provide an official account of her army’s diminished troops once the citizens began looking for their loved ones. Leferge reports on the Altasian attack, the orders that the Reapers were given and her decision to refuse those orders. She confesses her mutiny and offers herself to the city for judgement.
They are lucky. None of the soldiers who joined the attack on Altas hailed from this village, and once the returning soldiers have spoken to their families about the massacre at Altas and the horror of Endura, nothing could keep them from supporting Leferge’s cause. Leferge may not have any intention of helping Cat win his throne, but she fully intends to march her army against Gillage, and to that end, she is successful in earning the support of the people of Ines.
Madame Leonde takes in the information with a simmering impatience and quiet fury at Gillage’s actions. Her daughter, a young dark-haired soldier who always seems to flush whenever she sees Elician, sits at her mother’s side through all of this. ‘But you didn’t execute these traitors for what they did to Altas?’ Leonde asks Cat.
‘No. It wasn’t my place to offer that justice. Once this conflict is settled, the soldiers who attacked the city will be returned to Alelune, but…with the plague and the tensions between Soleb and Alelune still being what they are, we healed them, despite their protests, and came here first.’
‘Yes…I imagine they did not appreciate the fact you denied them their chance to die heroes of their nation.’
‘Dying isn’t heroic,’ Cat murmurs. ‘Death is an end that leads to a new beginning, but it is still only a point of transition. Actions are heroic, and actions require life. And their actions have been far from heroic despite those lives.’
‘Most would say action requires sacrifice.’
‘Sacrifice demanded of you by a force you cannot deny is no sacrifice, it’s enslavement.’ Elician laughs at that. It bursts out of him, startling several nearby people who have been surreptitiously watching them from only a few paces away. Cat smiles at him, though, delighted Elician understood his other meaning, and delighted even more to hear Elician laugh so loudly. He has missed it.
