A Time of Blood (Of Blood and Bone #2) - John Gwynne Page 0,21

a disgusted look and took a shuddering breath. His gaze shifted to Riv, to her wings. He shook his head.

She glared at him, tested her chains. They were infuriatingly strong.

“We have much to talk about,” Kol said. “Sit down, all of you,” he muttered. “And you, behave yourself,” he said to Riv. With a grimace of pain, he sat, facing all three of them.

“So, Aphra, explain our daughter.”

“It’s plain enough,” Aphra said, her eyes dipping to the floor. An indrawn breath, shoulders straightening, eyes rising to meet Kol’s.

His mouth twisted. “That cannot be, I would have known—” His eyes narrowed and he snapped his fingers. “When Dalmae took you on campaign to the Agullas Mountains?”

“Aye.” Aphra nodded.

“Lorin?” Riv said. All her life she had thought the White-Wing had been her father. She had asked Aphra to tell her tales of her da, so many times.

“Lorin was not your father,” Aphra said, looking at Riv. Aphra drew in a deep breath, as she had when Riv was about to leap into the icy waters of the river Vold, north of Drassil. “He was my father, but not yours. Kol is your father.”

Riv just stared at Aphra, unable to squeeze words past the constriction in her throat.

“And Dalmae?” Kol said, leaning back with his arms folded across his chest. “What was her part in all of this?”

“It was all my mother’s—your grandmother,” Aphra directed to Riv. “It was all her idea.”

My grandmother. Another new fact that felt startlingly, shockingly, wrong.

“We were on campaign in the Agullas Mountains,” Aphra was saying, “fighting an uprising of rebels who wanted the land of Tenebral reformed, wanted to split from the Ben-Elim’s Land of the Faithful. My father, Lorin, was slain during an ambush. We were grieving, Mam and I, and at the same time I knew that your seed was growing in my belly, had known before we left Drassil. The grief of losing my father… I was a mess, felt at my wits’ end, and it just spilt out. I told Mam everything. About you, Kol, about the coterie of Ben-Elim that you had gathered to yourself, those that shared your… tastes. The secret meetings, the mock campaigns you took us on.”

“There are many of us,” Kol said with a twitching smile, a quick glance to the two Ben-Elim standing guard at the door. “And even more, now that Israfil is no longer around to take our wings or our heads.” His smile withered. “But how did you hide it? Even amongst Dalmae’s hundred, tongues would have wagged. Your belly…”

“Mother handed her command down, gave it to her second, and said we were taking my father’s body back to his kin in Ripa. Which we did, but then we left and lived alone in the forests around Balara for some months.” She paused, looked at Riv. “They were happy times. And then you were born, which was my greatest joy.” Her hand reached out again, hesitant, stopping at Riv’s dark look. She sucked in a long breath.

“Then we went back to Dalmae’s hundred, where she told them she had been pregnant with Lorin’s bairn. They rejoiced for her, and just like that, I had a new sister and was no longer a mother. Except in here.” She put fingertips over her heart.

“Lie upon lie upon lie,” Riv growled.

“I had to,” Aphra said to her desperately, “it was that or see you murdered. You just heard Kol talk of the agreement between us privileged few who were invited to partake of the Ben-Elim’s greatness. We could love the Ben-Elim, but if we ended up with child, then we had to eradicate that… consequence, as Kol put it. That was no choice at all for me.”

“It is not much of a sacrifice to make.” Kol shrugged.

“You may have become flesh,” Aphra growled, “but you are not acquainted with that quality that makes us human. Love. Bonds of family and friendship.”

Kol snorted. “Whatever frail, pathetic emotion guided you in your deception, you did it well. I never knew or suspected a thing,” he said, blowing between his teeth.

“You could not,” Aphra said to him. To both of them she said, “Else Riv’s corpse would have been out there lying beneath a cairn alongside all of the others. I could not, would not, do that.”

“There is still time for that,” Kol said, shooting Riv a flat look.

“Like to see you try,” Riv growled, rattling the chains that bound her wrists.

“You are an abomination, Elyon’s Lore demands your execution,”