The Griever's Mark (The Griever's Mark series Book 1) (25 page)

The prince’s face drains of color, but the old man stalks near. “How do you know that? Who are you?”

I should have anticipated this question and come up with a plausible lie. I certainly can’t tell them who I am. They’d never trust me, no more than Aron does.

I decide to say I’m a Drifter-whore who ran away with Martel, just in case Heborian recognizes me from our first encounter, when I hear, “Her name is Astarti.”

My eyes snap to Heborian. How on earth does he know my name? His shoulders are sagging, as though under an immerse weight. His eyes are crinkled with pain, but he holds them on me. “She works for Belos. That is how she knows.”

From the edges of my vision, I see Rood step back and the white-haired Drifter freeze. But my eyes are really on Heborian, hunched now like an old man.

“How...” I shake my head to clear it. Something in Heborian’s tone, his resignation, seems to rob me of focus. “How could you possibly know that?”

He doesn’t answer at first, then his shoulders draw back and he takes a deep breath. “Because I sold you to him. Seventeen years ago.”

Chapter 26

SILENCE FILLS THE room like water, enveloping us, making everything slow and surreal. Only my pulse marks the time, beating remotely with strange, heavy dullness.

“Father.” Rood’s voice, which seems to come from far away. “What are you talking about?”

The white-haired Drifter, who’s been staring at me like I’ve grown an extra head, shakes himself and looks to Heborian. “Sire, do you think it wise?”

Heborian ignores him. “You came here, that night Rood was taken. That was you.”

When I don’t answer, Heborian nods his own confirmation. “I knew it. I didn’t believe it, but I knew it. I dreamed that night of Sibyl, and I have every night since.”

Sibyl?

Sibyl?

I am trying to assimilate this information, to make some sense of this madness, but my mind churns, and the answers skim by me and away.

The white-haired Drifter shifts uncomfortably. “Sire.”

I find my voice, though it stumbles out barely above a whisper, “My mother abandoned me and Belos found me. I wasn’t sold.”

Heborian snaps, “That’s a lie.”

His anger wakens me fully, and I am shaken by his certainty, by the way he is trying to shatter everything I know. I fixate instead on what I have come to accept. Even if it hurts, at least it’s familiar. “She left me to die.”

“Your mother would never have abandoned you.” He adds, almost accusingly, “She died that night.”

“You knew her?”

He looks at me like that should have been obvious. “Of course. She was my—”

“
Sire
.”

Heborian gives the white-haired Drifter a sharp look. “Wulfstan, I will speak.”

“Why?” I snarl, clinging hard to anger, terrified to let it go and find myself shattered by more things Belos did not tell me. Somehow, I know what Heborian is about to say, even though it makes no sense at all, even though I don’t believe it and don’t want to hear it. I have learned to deal with the ugliness of what I am. What will I be if his words remake me into something worse?

Heborian says gravely, “You need to know the truth.”

“No, I don’t.”

He crosses his arms. “There are many things I knew you would become, but I never thought you’d be a coward.”

My breath stops. My heart hammers. I am not a coward.

I harden my jaw, and he nods.

“Wulfstan, take Prince Rood out. I would speak with my daughter alone.”

Even though I somehow expected this, the word makes me go deaf. The arguing voices grow distant, and I register only the blurs of Rood and Wulstan moving, the dragging of the unconscious guard. Heborian is a dark smudge in front of me.

When the doors slam shut, I jump, scrambling to my feet. “What do you want? How can I know you’re not lying?”

“I’m not lying, Astarti. You are my daughter. Your mother was named Sibyl, and she was an Earthmaker. A Healer, cast out by her stubborn, foolish people.”

I cover my ears and stalk to the window, where the rising sun blinds me. I catch myself against the window sill. Maybe I am a coward; I don’t want to hear this after all.

“Astarti—”

“You can
not
be my father.”

He doesn’t answer.

My heart is beating with panic, and I throw Bran’s guess at him. “My father was an Earthmaker—”

“Your
mother
was an Earthmaker.”

My mother. For so long that word has filled me with bitterness. I say, wanting still to hate her, needing to cling to what I know, “She abandoned me. I was nothing to her.”

He says softly, “You were everything to her.”

I whip around. Heborian’s dark eyes are too bright, too shiny. His pain makes me furious. “Shut up! I don’t believe you! I never even met you before that night your son was taken.”

“Your brother. Half-brother, anyway.”

I grit my teeth. Without consciously willing it, my Drift-spear shapes in my hand. “Prove it.” I curl my lip, triumphant, certain he can’t.

Heborian eyes my spear, not with worry but with interest. “You bear the Griever’s Mark. On the back of your neck. A blue mark like a Y, with a third line dividing the wings.”

I stare, dumbfounded, then insist weakly, “Lucky guess.”

“I marked you with it myself, when you were a baby.”

“To protect me on my journey into death?”

“Like I said, I sold you to Belos.” His mouth twists with disgust, but I don’t know for whom. “Was that not a journey into death? The Mark was the one small thing I could give you that Belos could not take away.”

I shake my head, troubled by his twisted logic. The Griever’s Mark is something I’ve hidden in shame all my life; I don’t want to talk about it, to think about it, to even try to see it as anything but an ugly stain. I can only take so much at once. I steer the conversation back to more pressing issues. “If this is true, what do you mean that you sold me?”

His mouth works on an answer.

My eyes narrow. “You made a deal with him.”

Heborian turns away and walks to a table along the far wall. I hear the slide of a crystal stopper and the gurgling flow of liquid. He throws his head back and drinks. He stands at the table, head bowed.

By the gods—if they exist—he really means it. Some part of me had hoped all this was some trick, some trap, something for which I could later call myself stupid for even listening to. The earth seems to shift under me. I try to ground myself with facts. “What was the deal?”

Heborian comes back my way, a cup in his hand. He sits on a padded footstool by the fire. He nods to the footstool beside him.

I glare.

He sighs through his nose. “Have you ever been to Rune?”

I snap with impatience. “What does that matter?”

He fingers the rim of his silver cup. “It’s a cold, brutal land. Very little grows, and when winter is harsh, which it usually is, the game is poor and starving, just as the people are. We have always raided, taking from the lands around us, from Heradyn and the eastern plains, but they are poor as well.” He looks wistful when he adds, “The north is beautiful. Harsh and cruel—impossible—but beautiful.” He shakes his head. “Twenty years ago, Rune suffered through one harsh winter too many.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

“Everything, Astarti. It is the beginning. Listen.”

He watches me until I lean back against the lead-paned window, then he turns his eyes to the fire and continues.

“Our people were dying. Mothers’ milk dried in the breast, and the babies starved. Have you ever seen an infant that starved to death? Cheeks hollow, its tiny body shrunken to nothing. It doesn’t even look human.” He closes his eyes, remembering. “Something had to be done.

“Rune never had kings, only chieftains. I was a chieftain, as my father had been. After the Long Winter, I called together all chieftains who would swear fealty to me, all the warriors who would come, every Drifter I could find. I promised them a richer life in the south. They were desperate. They didn’t take much convincing. We sailed. At first we did well, sacking the northern Keldan towns. Barreston sent troops after us, but they were nothing to my Runian warriors.

“We talked about returning to Rune with our bounty, but I knew the problems would only return with the next winter. We could not eat gold, after all. The move had to be permanent. Some of the men wanted to settle in northern Kelda, but I knew Barreston wouldn’t stand for it. Eventually, he would send more troops than even we could handle. We had to take Tornelaine. We took horses from every town. Our force was large, strong, driven by need. We were heading south along the Kiss River when I met your mother.”

My chest aches at the word, and I’m torn between my comfortable, familiar anger and a new, painful hope.

“Some of the men found her. She was weak with hunger; she’d been wandering for a long time. As is typical with men on the march, they thought to make sport of her, but she broke open the earth under their feet and set two of them on fire. She may have been an Earthmaker, but she had a Runish warrior’s heart, your mother.”

A smile tugs the corner of his mouth, and his eyes are far away. I am jealous, saddened. I wish I could see what he is seeing. Then he shakes his head, throwing the image away. He takes a deep drink. His mouth settles back into a grim line.

“We could have taken Tornelaine easily, you know, if the Earthmakers had stayed out of it. But they couldn’t stand the thought of a Drifter king, and they joined Barreston. It went on for months.” He frowns into the cup. “We had just suffered a major defeat when Belos first came to me.”

I feel my lip curl. I can picture this all too well.

“I refused him. I told him I would never wear a Leash.”

“Let me guess: you suggested a different kind of deal?”

Heborian’s eyes snap to me. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Oh? And how was it then?”

Heborian’s hand clenches on the cup. “Belos waited until I was truly desperate. Until my men lay half-frozen in their tents, and more abandoned our cause each night. He waited until Barreston had us surrounded, until I loved Sibyl far too much and knew she would die along with the rest of us. Then he came again. I told him I would let him Leash me if he would save my people, and Sibyl. He refused. I begged. It is the only time I have been on my knees before any man. But he didn’t want me anymore.”

Gooseflesh prickles along my arms and legs. “He wanted me.”

“Sibyl and I weren’t even married yet. We had never discussed children. The thought of my firstborn child was not very real to me.”

Later, I’m sure that will hurt me, but right now there is a greater horror roiling through my belly. “Why did Belos want me?”

“You can probably answer that better than I can. You know him as I do not.”

“Because I’m a Drifter?”

“You’re not only that. You’re an Earthmaker also. Your mother was a Healer. Very powerful.”

“Why did Belos never tell me about my mother? If I had known, maybe I could have learned earthmagic.”

“What would you have done, had you known the truth?”

I shrug. “Come after you? I don’t know.”

“And how would that have served Belos’s interests?”

I grunt acknowledgment. “Belos wanted me to believe I had nothing but him. But he was right. My mother was dead. You had thrown me away. His story wasn’t that far off.”

I want Heborian to look away in shame, but he doesn’t. “Oh, but it was. Why do you think Belos has joined Martel? Why do you think he wants to destroy me?”

A few more things click into place, confirming earlier suspicions. “You stood against him.”

“We took Tornelaine, with Belos’s help. But, months later, after Sibyl and I were married and she told me she was pregnant, I cannot describe to you how my blood went cold. For the first time it was real to me, that it was not just my own child I had promised. It was Sibyl’s.”

My fingers clench on the cold stone windowsill. “And she knew nothing of your deal?”

When Heborian shakes his head, the joy I have been holding back surges through me. My mother did not abandon me. But the joy dims quickly, because I will never know her. I am hollow and aching with loss as I listen to Heborian.

“She didn’t know until Belos came for you. You were six months old, a beautiful baby. I had tried to tell Sibyl so many times.” Heborian raises his cup with a shaking hand and finds it empty. He rests it on his knee, his hand clamped over the top.

“When Belos came, I yelled for Sibyl to run, and she fled with you in her arms. I fought Belos in the Drift.” His story comes now in a rush of words. “I held him off for a time, but it wasn’t enough. Belos caught up with Sibyl on the beach. She had escaped through a secret passageway and was making for the trees. I don’t know what she intended, but I suspect she meant to go to Avydos in the hope that they would take you in, even if they threw her out again. She had been Stricken, after all, and they take that seriously.” His voice flattens. “But she didn’t make it. Belos caught up with her. I arrived moments too late. I saw Belos vanish with you in his arms.”

“Where was Sibyl?”

“Gone. I don’t know. I’m sure he killed her. Or one of the Seven did.” His voice is emotionless, dead.

I study Heborian’s profile, seeing now my own dark hair, my own straight nose. What else comes from him? “I should kill you, you know.”

“Yes.” Heborian stands from the footstool and walks to the hearth. He plants one palm against the edge of the mantel, leaning his weight on it, staring into the fire.

“Just like that?”

“I’ve done you wrong. You have every right to hate me. You have every right to attempt revenge.”

I don’t fail to hear the word “attempt.”

He smiles ruefully. “That’s how we clean things up in Rune.”

I frown. “But you won’t apologize? For giving me to Belos?”

“And would that make it better? Undo anything that has happened?” He shakes his head. “What would it mean, really? I am sorry for what you’ve undoubtedly suffered, but I would make the same choice again. To save my people, to build this life for them here. I cannot pretend otherwise.”