The Beauty of Darkness - Mary E. Pearson Page 0,99

looked at me with everything her eyes could hold—hatred, tenderness, shame, sorrow, vengeance—and what I’d thought might be love. I’d thought I knew the language of Lia, but the look she’d had in her eyes the day she left Rafe behind, I had never seen.

Yes, it’s different between us. It always has been, Kaden, and if you’re honest with yourself, you’ve always known it too.…

We both care for Venda and Morrighan.… Don’t underestimate the bond we share. Great kingdoms have been built on far less.

Maybe with Lia, less could be more, the greater purpose my mother had always hoped for.

Maybe less could be enough.

* * *

The road to the manor was thicker with trees than I remembered. Branches hung overhead like a twisted-fingered canopy. For the first time, I wondered if I’d misremembered the way. I couldn’t imagine the grand and powerful Lord Roché living down this unassuming, remote lane. I had never been back. The beggar’s threats to a child had lodged somewhere in my skull, he will drown you in a bucket. Even once I was Venda’s Assassin, the one the rest of the Rahtan had feared, the memory of that threat could still make my heart beat faster. It still did, every scar resurfacing as if I were eight years old again. Would killing him change that? I’d always thought it would. Maybe today I would find out.

And then I saw it, a glimpse of the white stone through the trees. I hadn’t forgotten the way. As I drew closer, I saw that the grounds had fallen into disarray. The green clipped lawns were only stubble and dirt now, and the once-sculpted shrubs were overgrown and choked with vines. The sprawling manor, set far back from the road, looked unkempt and abandoned, but I spotted a thin trail of smoke rising from one of its five chimneys. Someone was there.

I circled around so no one would see me, and first I went to the cottage I had shared with my mother. It was once white too, but most of the paint had flaked away long ago. There was no doubt that it was uninhabited. The same vines that choked the shrubs crept over the porch and front window. I tied up my horse, and the warped door gave way under my shoulder. When I walked inside, it seemed smaller than I remembered. The furniture was all gone, probably sold to beggars too, disposable things just like me. The cottage was simply a dusty hull now that held no trace of my mother or the life I had when I was loved. I looked at the empty hearth, the empty mantel above it, the empty room that used to hold my bed, the emptiness that pervaded it all. I spun and walked out. I needed fresh air.

I leaned on the porch rail, staring at the quiet manor, the scent of jasmine strong in my memory. I pictured him sitting inside, stiff-backed in a chair, his trousers neatly pressed, a bucket of water at his side. Waiting. I couldn’t be drowned anymore. I stepped off the porch and walked to the eastern part of the estate, remaining out of sight. There was one place where I knew I would find my mother. Only the gravedigger and my father had been present when we buried her. Not even my half brothers, whom she had tutored and treated kindly, bothered to come and say a few last words. No marker had been made for her grave, so I had found the heaviest stones I could carry and laid them like a blanket atop the mounded dirt, fitting them together until my father told me to stop.

I searched for the mound of stones now, but it was gone too. There was nothing to mark where she lay in the earth—but there were other graves not far away—two of which had large chiseled headstones. I pulled away the vines, hoping I had forgotten where she lay and that one of these was for her. Neither was. One was for my eldest brother. He had died only a few weeks after I left. My stepmother, if I could even call her that, had died a month later. An accident? A fever?

I looked back at the house and the smoke curling from the chimney. Was it possible that my father was a sickly broken man now? That would explain the state of the grounds he had once taken so much pride in. My other half