Page 44 of The Castle & the Cloister

A lean, muscled arm pinned her fast to the bulk of someone else’s body, as the cool steel of a knife’s edge kissed her throat.

“Raea’s light, Fia, give me one reason not to kill you where you stand,” a furious, familiar voice said.

The knife’s contact grew insistent, and its razor tip pierced Fia’s skin. She could feel a thin trickle of blood and fought the urge to dab at it with her sleeve so that the blood could be soaked out later and offered to Raea.

“Hello, Nikolau,” she answered evenly, balling her hands into fists to hide how panic made them tremble. “It’s been a while.”

Tension sang through the darkness, finally broken by the small, sharp sound of a patch box striking sparks to tinder. Light flared. A flame caught. And Fia found herself in a windowless storeroom surrounded byempty shelves and half a dozen weatherbeaten men, every one of them armed and on edge. She recognized a few of them, though the venom in their gazes was new.

“I have a proposition for you,” Fia went on, with Nikolau still behind her, his knife still at her throat. “I swear by my mark and by Raea herself, hearing me out will be worth your time.”

After a moment, Fia felt him nod to the others. Her pulse slowed by a scant fraction.

“Leave,” Nikolau ordered. “I’ll deal with this.”

“But what if she’s sold us out, like before?” one of the men protested. “We ought to—”

“Leave,” Nikolau repeated, sharper this time. “Everyone keep to the back of the foundry, except Adrin, who’ll watch the front. If he sees anything—anything—untoward, he’ll signal and we all disappear. Good enough?”

Though there was some ill-tempered grumbling, the room cleared. The door opened, and shut once more, closing Fia in. Though she had the torchlight this time to bolster her, she was scarcely less afraid when Nikolau let her go and moved to sit at a small table.

“Well,” he said scornfully, setting the knife down before him and stretching out his legs to their full length. “You have my attention, Fia, if not an ounce of my trust. What could possibly be urgent enough to make you come crawling back to me?”

Fia looked him up and down. He was, in many ways, just as she remembered. Same blistering air of self-confidence. Same golden hair and lean, muscled body. Same far-seeing cobalt gaze and wind-burnt skin.

The only difference was that once, he’d looked at her as if the sun rose and set at her command. Now, when Fia met his eyes, there was nothing but bitterness behind them. Nikolau despised her, and Fia knew him well enough to understand that she might never undo that change. Once, when Nikolau of Vesper had looked at Fia, there’d been want and admiration and loyalty in his gaze. Now, there was only suspicion.

“I require the help of Honoria’s deserters,” Fia said, coming straight to the point. Nikolau had a great distaste for formalities—she was better off airing her intentions at once. “And all of you, though you’re not aware of it yet, require my help as well. I’m sure you’ve heard that Ordenmeans to go to war with Caervallion come autumn. If he does, there will be a great deal of trouble for your people. The pursuit of those who’ve sought to avoid the king’s pressers will grow far more determined, and the ranks of those unwillingly pressed into service will swell like never before. You will be overrun by people wanting your help, Nikolau, and plagued constantly by others who wish you dead. I don’t like your chances, if war breaks out on the Hand.”

Nikolau watched her closely, twining his hands together behind his head. “Since when have you ever been concerned about trouble coming to my people, rather than your own interests? What game is this you’re playing, Fia? Is there a contingent of guards waiting in the shadows outside, until you signal that they’re able to lay hands on me? They nearly managed to keep me in custody last time—what a triumph it would be for Orden, to finally decorate his walls with my head on a spike. I suppose he’d pay you handsomely for bringing the figurehead of his country’s most shameful faction to justice.”

Fia let out a frustrated sound. “Don’t be such a fool, Nikolau. I took every precaution in coming here. And what happened in the mountains—I didn’t want any of it.I’mnot the one who sold you out.”

“No, you swore up and down it was your mother. But without you, she’d never have known where to find us. You know Axom is dead? So are Morin and Bastinet. By the Three, Fia,Anderwas killed in that raid. Your own brother.”

Fia shut her eyes tight, blocking out the little storeroom and the disdain on Nikolau’s face. She could see Ander as she remembered him—a laughing boy, who’d made the best of their mountain life, and who’d been proud to join Nikolau’s network of deserters. He’d died without knowing that Fia bought him his place there, through her hard-won knowledge of the harsh land they lived upon and the comforts of her body.

“I know Ander was killed,” Fia murmured. “The pressers brought him home in four pieces and nailed them up at the village crossroads. I’m sorry about the others.”

“They’d all be alive if it wasn’t for you,” Nikolau said viciously. “If you’d kept your word, none of it would have happened. I’ll never forgive that, Fia. You know what it means to me, to be able to safeguard the people in my care. I put some of them in danger for your sake, and theydied because I was mistaken about you. Everything that happened to me pales in comparison to those deaths.”

Fia’s eyes flew open, and she fixed Nikolau with a piercing look. “Everything that happened to you?Did the pressers hurt you?”

He met her gaze with a withering stare. “Of course they did. But as you see, I came out alive and in one piece. I always do. You always do. That’s the only thing the two of us share anymore—a talent for survival.”

Nikolau said it as if the possession of that attribute was a terrible failing. Once, it had been something they joked over darkly together—that he’d lived through a childhood as difficult as Fia’s own, through being raised and shaped for the express purpose of clandestine service in Honoria, through years of determined pursuit by Honoria’s pressers. And that Fia had lived when all her siblings save Ander had died, surviving her mother’s cruelty and the privations of mountain life. It had been fate, Nikolau insisted, that kept the two of them alive. Fate that meant them to be together.

He’d been so certain. Fia was less sure, but she never spoke of her hesitance. She’d been starving for power back then, and for kindness and care. Nikolau had, in his own way, treated her like a queen. Been willing to take any risk for her.

It wasn’t until the very end that Fia learned she wasn’t willing to risk as much for him.

Settling herself at the table across from Nikolau, Fia let out a long breath.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I will always be sorry for how things happened between us. I had meant to finally come away with you until the last moment, and then I found I couldn’t do it. I’d have gone from one existence marked by hardship and trouble, to another plagued by the same evils in different guises. I wanted more than that, Nikolau. I wanted better.”

“If you’d come,Iwould have been there,” Nikolau said adamantly. “I’d have been a shield for you, if you’d let me.”

“It wasn’t enough,” Fia said. Even now, it hurt her to tell him the truth. But she wouldn’t lie. He deserved to know who she was, at her core. “I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t lean on you like that. I don’t—I’m not one for depending on or trusting people. And in your world, living at the edges,constantly having to move about to stay clear of the pressers, trust and each other are all you have. But I didn’t sell you out, either. You know me better than that. It was Nira who did it, and I only learned the truth when I went home from grieving over Ander’s body and found her gloating.”