The Heart of Betrayal (The Remnant Chronicles 2)

I lifted my foot onto the frame of the bed to unlace my boot. “Where were you all day?”

“Duties. Just attending to my duties as Keep.”

What kind of duties would take a toll on him like this? Or maybe he wasn’t well? He grabbed blankets from the top of the chest and dropped them to the fur rug.

“I’ll take the rug tonight,” I offered.

“No. I don’t mind.”

He took off his shirt. His scars always stopped me, no matter how many times I had seen them. They were a harsh reminder of how brutal his world was. He snuffed the lanterns, and once I had changed, he blew out the candle too. Tonight there weren’t even dancing shadows to ease me to sleep.

It was quiet for a long while, and I thought he had already fallen asleep, but then he asked, “Was there anything else you did today?”

He wasn’t too tired for his mind to still be churning with questions. Did he suspect something? “What do you mean by else?”

“Just wondering what you did all day. Besides climb out the window.”

“Nothing,” I whispered. “It was a long day for me too.”

The next day when Kaden had to go out, he had Eben come to keep me company, but I knew it was a ruse to keep an eye on me. Eben was guarding me, just as he had in the vagabond meadow—except that things were different between us now. He was still the trained killer, but now there was a chink in his armor, and a softness in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. Maybe it was that I had spared him the burden of killing his own horse. Maybe my whispered acknowledgment of Spirit’s name allowed something he had hidden inside to bloom. Just a little. Or maybe it was that we shared a similar grief, watching someone we loved be butchered before our eyes.

On Kaden’s orders, Eben was allowed to take me out of my room, but not outside of the Sanctum, not to this wing or that tower, only to a narrowly prescribed area. “For your own safety,” Kaden said when I shot him a questioning glare. In truth, I knew he was trying to keep me out of Malich’s path and that of certain Council members. By the end of the meal last night, it was apparent that hostility still ran high, more so among a few because of my welcome, but the ever-united Council seemed divided now into two camps, the curious and the haters.

Eben took me on a circuitous route to the paddocks behind the Council Wing. A new foal had been born while he was away. We watched the stick-legged foal frolic in a small corral, jumping for the sheer pleasure of trying out new legs. Eben balanced on the paddock rail trying to restrain a smile.

“What will you name him?” I asked.

“He’s not mine. Don’t want him anyway. Too much trouble to train.” His eyes flashed with every pain he still carried, and his tender years made his denial wooden.

I sighed. “I don’t blame you. It’s hard to commit to something after—” I let the thought dangle in the air. “Still, he is beautiful, and someone has to teach him. But there are probably trainers who are better at it than you.”

“I’m just as good as any old wrangler. Spirit knew what to do with just a twitch from my knee. He—” His chin jutted out and then, in a quiet voice, he added, “He was given to me by my father.”

And now I knew the true depth of Eben’s grief. Spirit wasn’t just any horse.

Eben had never made any mention of his parents. If Kaden hadn’t told me that Eben had witnessed their butchering, I’d have thought he was spawned by some impish beast and dropped to earth fully dressed and armed as a small Vendan soldier.

I understood the hole that Eben felt, the wicked depth of it, that no matter how much you wanted to pretend it wasn’t there, its black mouth opened up to swallow you again and again.

He shook off the mention of his father in a practiced way, flicking his hair from his eyes, and jumping down from the rail. “We should go back,” he said.

I wanted to say something wise, something comforting that would lessen his pain, but I was still feeling that hole myself. The only words that came were, “Thank you for my boots, Eben. They mean more to me than you can know.”

He nodded. “I cleaned them too.”

I wondered if, like Griz, this was a kindness to wipe out a debt.

“You owed me nothing, Eben. I took care of your horse for me as much as for you.”

“I already knew that,” he said, and hurried ahead of me.

We walked back through yet another tunnel, but I was getting good at memorizing them now, and I was beginning to understand a pattern to the chaotic layout of architecture. Small avenues, tunnels, and buildings emanated from larger ones. It was as if many large structures within this ancient city had slowly woven together, a graceless animal that grew extra arms, legs, and eyes without regard to aesthetics—only immediate need. The Sanctum was the heart of the beast, and the hidden caverns below, the bowels. No one ever mentioned what stirred beneath the Sanctum, and I never saw the robed figures at meals. They stayed to themselves.

As we walked the last hall to Kaden’s room, I asked, “Eben, what are those caverns down below? Aster mentioned them to me.”

“You mean the catacombs? Ghoul Caves, Finch calls them. Don’t go down there. Only thing in them is stale air, old books, and dark spirits.”

I suppressed a smile. It was almost the same description I used for the archives in Civica, only there the dark spirits were Civica scholars.