Page 58 of Nemesis Mine
Maximillian laughed, a lazy, pleased sound. Cyrus could picture him lounging in his chair, hair ruffled just so, long legs sprawled out with casual ease. “Oh, that would be telling.”
Cyrus stepped back from the drapes, his pulse thudding.
His magic. His most precious secret, the power he’d built his entire reputation—his safety—upon. Maximillian doubted it. And he would have all of Athaca doubt it too.
How could he have been so stupid? Maximillian wasn’t his ally, hisfriend. He had let him get too close. Those weren’t throwaway words blurted in a hurried interview. He meant them. It was right there in his voice, his true disdain unearthed when he thought Cyrus couldn’t hear, and Cyrus had been a fool.
All those letters in the writing desk, declarations of adoration from his fans. That was what mattered to Maximillian. It was all he’d known—since he was fourteen, for Spring’s sake, two decades of the Federation drummed into his very soul. He would hardly give that up for—
He had to get out of here. Cyrus backed away from the balcony doors, his hands twitchy with tension. He was struggling to think clearly. A disguise, he needed a disguise if he was to get back to Soulripper. Cyrus returned to the wardrobe to snatch up a midnight blue cloak, struck by the savage hope that it was Maximillian’s favourite. As heturned to leave, the elaborate display of daggers on the wall by the writing desk caught his eye.
Anger was easy. It was familiar.
He grabbed one of the daggers and wrenched it free. The sheets on Maximillian’s bed were still rumpled, tracing the outline of their bodies.
Cyrus allowed himself a generous ten seconds to slash the downy pillows to disaster, and then he was off, down the mahogany staircase and through the entrance hall with as much speed as his injury would allow.
Soulripper did not forgive his absence easily. The stableboy had left some hay and a bucket of fresh water out in the paddock, but she still punished Cyrus with a vicious nip when he returned. She kept up her petulance all the way back to Ranragh, her mood as black as her coat.
Cyrus’s mood wasn’t much better. Convinced as he was that it would be easier to put this unfortunate episode behind him when he was in his own space, reality was keen to prove him wrong.
Reminders of Maximillian were everywhere when Cyrus got home, tired and grimy and ready to upend half a bottle of lavender oil over the hottest bath he could muster. Maximillian standing outside his door on the day he proposed their scheme, Maximillian on the side of the couch that had become his. The goblin figurine, discarded where Maximillian had left it.
Offerings had piled up in the short time he’d been away.There was no avoiding the headline blaring out from one of the news parchments—“Earthshaker Escapes! Close Call with Maximillian in Heliarth”—but Cyrus carried them directly to his fireplace. He had no desire to read the full interview. He’d overheard enough.
Life before their scheme. That was what he needed to get back to. It shouldn’t be hard. He shouldwelcomeit. His life pre-Maximillian had been perfectly fulfilling, with plenty of mischief and malevolence, and without a champion’s obnoxious interference in his affairs. He’d used the champion to give his reputation a boost; that was his objective achieved. Now he could move on. He didn’t need Maximillian, not one bit.
Cyrus took care of his injury; he focused on his creative pursuits. He spent a couple of evenings venting his frustrations via poetry, stabbing down with his quill hard enough to break the parchment. His embroidery skills continued to vex, the crude words he fashioned on scraps of cloth infuriatingly clumsy.
He spent a lot of time in his garden. There were turnips to coax from seeds and beetroot to cultivate; he preferred his vegetables to begin developing naturally before he encouraged their growth with magic. They tasted better that way.
His sprites had been pleased to see him upon his return, zooming eagerly from their pine tree hollows to flutter around his head in welcome. One tried to perch on his shoulder until Cyrus swiped it away with a growl. They buzzed around him as he gardened, getting in the way and pouncing on his hands as he replenished his stock of dill and thyme. Hunting out an old bottle of sprite spray didn’tdeter them, even when he waved it threateningly in their faces. He didn’t spray it, but only because he didn’t want chemicals interfering with his herbs.
Just as the vegetable patch was a good way to fill his time, so too was the produce he harvested from it. Cyrus experimented with salads. He poured his aggression into rolling out pastry and got very into quiche. He ransacked the raspberry bushes and perfected his jam recipe, though by the time he finished he had enough to last him at least three years.
Making his own food was much preferable to relying on anything that might carry unpleasant associations, however. Cyrus had already learned that lesson. Tired and achy from a day’s gardening, he’d reached for a box of sweetened oats from his kitchen shelf and failed to notice the obnoxiously bright lettering on the other side of the box, declaring that the Hoopsy Daisy had partnered with the Federation to offer a champion-themed lucky dip, courtesy of their latest partnership with a toymaker. When Cyrus tipped the box over his bowl, a small wooden figurine with a helmet of red-brown hair and a sword that was definitely a choking hazard tumbled out among the oat rings. Cyrus had snatched it up and hurled it across his lair with a bellow of outrage before he’d even paused to check that it was Maximillian.
(It was. Later, Cyrus recovered the figurine from behind his brooding chair and placed it carefully at the centre of his kindling, then sat and stared at it intently as the champion’s form disintegrated to ash. It didn’t really help.)
Eventually, Soulripper stopped acting like he didn’t exist and grudgingly allowed him to saddle her for a ride intothe forest to clear his head. She probably just wanted him to stop withholding carrots as bribery, but Cyrus didn’t care. Getting away from everything helped.
Two weeks crept by before Cyrus took a trip into Ranragh to see what trouble he might cause. He’d resisted until then, telling himself that he should give his injury time to heal. In truth, he didn’t want any more reminders of Maximillian. The tour stop might have been cancelled, but the stupid poster was probably still up.
It was, though it had been tacked over with other advertisements—cobblers and tanners highlighting their services, a local theatre troupe trying to sell tickets to their upcoming show (something about Spring and Autumn falling in love against the odds; Cyrus would rather die than subject himself to such torture).
Beneath the advertisements, a glimpse of Maximillian could still be seen. The quirk of a smile, a flash of coppery hair. Cyrus stared at it and tried very hard to pretend that the hollow sensation in his chest was simple rage.
As itshouldbe. That was what he ought to be focusing on, not trying to distract himself as though what had happened with Maximillian was anything other than a—a foolish mistake. He’d let his guard slip, let the champion get too close, but it wouldn’t happen again. He needed to move on and put it all behind him.
Cyrus turned slowly, his eyes roving the familiar sights of Ranragh. The time had come to get back to his true passion in life: wrongdoing.
He stalked around the town hall to the main square. It was market day, crowded with milling shoppers and stallscrammed in side by side, freshly dug potatoes piled high in wheelbarrows alongside the faded purples and dusty orange of other root vegetables. Not a patch on his, obviously. A stallholder kept up a droning call about the price of his tomatoes, trying to compete with somebody else yelling about the quality of her parsnips. Children chased each other around the well, their laughter rising above the general hubbub. The air was ripe with the tantalising smell of hot roasted meat and sweet baked almonds and the less-tantalising smell of the peasants. He’d shove them in the sea for a dunk in the name of wrongdoing if he could, only it wouldn’t be wrong at all.
No time like the present. Cyrus’s gaze travelled along the nearest line of stalls until it alighted upon a farmer’s table heaped with sacks of oats and wheat. Three hay bales were stacked at angles beside the stall, displaying more of the farmer’s goods: some healthy biscuits Cyrus didn’t like the sound of and small sacks tied with twine at the neck.Brand new, a wonky chalk sign declared,Farmer Robin’s fresh moosli. Trying to be funny, or questionably literate? Cyrus wasn’t sure. Leaning against those bales, completing the rustic aesthetic, was a scythe.
Ensuring his hood was down—all the better for making his grand reveal—he meandered over, pretending to examine the handmade soaps at the neighbouring stall. A hand slipped out to grab the scythe and tuck it under his cloak before he sidled around the back of the stalls.
The scythe was pleasingly heavy, the wooden handle well worn but the edge still sharp. Perfect. Cyrus weighed it in his hand, eyeing the backs of the stalls. Each was protectedby an overhead canopy, and those canopies were secured by five thin ropes hooked into the earth: one at each corner, and an additional one at the back for support.
