Page 76 of Iridian

“I do. It’s actually…easier than I thought,” he said in wonder. “Talking about it out loud, I mean.”

I nodded, kissed him on the chest again, right on his tallarose. “Then tell me everything.”

The night was young, and Taland spoke slowly, told me stories about the soldiers who had been tricked and manipulated by a man seven centuries ago like it all had happened these past few years. I listened to every word he said, absorbed every little detail, and by the time the sun lit up the sky outside our window,I felt like I knew those men as personally as Taland did. I felt like I’d sat with them, had talked to them, had created connections with them, too.

And for a while, I couldn’t stop crying silent tears for all of them.

Chapter 19

Rosabel La Rouge

Fresh sunlight warmed the side of my face, fell over my shoulders like it wanted to hold me in its embrace. Like it knew exactly what I was feeling as I looked at the soldiers in silence, side by side with Taland.

They were different now, so different. Not just monstrous beings with white eyes like I’d thought when I first saw them, but now they were alive to me. Victims of an evil, cunning man who’d offered them slavery masked as freedom.

One choice they’d made and look what it had cost them. One choice, and they were suffering because of it seven hundred years later.

I bit my tongue so hard my mouth was full of blood, but I’d cried enough. While I lay on the bed with Taland and he told me about them all night, I’d cried enough for days and weeks and years.

These soldiers didn’t need my tears now—far from it.

“Why is he bloody?” I asked as I walked in front of a soldier with blood on his chin and a cut on his arm that looked deep, even though the blood over it had long dried.

Taland came closer, his eyes on the soldier I spoke of. He was shorter than the ones by his sides, his shoulders wider, his lips thin and his wounded chin pointy. They were all so different from one another, even though they looked like copies of the same man from a distance or when you first laid eyes on them. They were all individuals. You just didn’t see it unless you spent time watching them, I guessed. Unless you didn’t know their stories.

“He fought a few agents alone,” Taland said as he stopped beside me, looking at the soldiers, too. “The wounds weren’t deep. He healed himself right away. That’s just old blood.”

“Can they do that? Heal themselves?”

“They can when I tell them to. Basically give them permission to do magic. It all comes from me,” said Taland, and I pretended I understood exactly what he meant.

“They bleed yet they don’t breathe. Their beards don’t grow. They don’t eat,” I said in wonder, and continued to walk in front of them, thinking about which of the stories Taland had told me about them belonged to which soldier.

“They run on magic,” Taland said. “They’re…animated corpses, sweetness.”

Goddess, those words didn’t sit well with me at all.

“I think this is him,” I whispered, ignoring the tears that had welled in my eyes, blinking them away as I focused on the soldier in front of me now, who had only three fingers on his right hand. “This is the one whose stepmother tortured him.”

That story was particularly sad, I thought. A reverse Cinderella story, where he was the son of a rich man whose mother died, and whose father married again within the month. And his stepmother was an awful woman from what Taland saw,who’d tortured the kid physically whenever his father wasn’t home. She’d cut a toe and two fingers off him, as well as pulled out most of his teeth, among other things. All of it when he was only a boy, powerless to do anything to stop her. Too afraid to tell his father—or maybe he just knew nothing would change if he did.

And finally, Taland said, when he’d gotten the courage to strike back, he had gone into the house one night to kill both her and his father in bed. He’d found her sleeping in a nightgown and had noticed her growing belly.

He couldn’t do it, couldn’t kill her, not with a baby inside of her.

So, he’d ran away from home instead and had lived in the streets for the next few years, stealing, killing for food, nearly dying of plagues.

Then Titus had found him, had offered him a house anywhere he pleased, and a fortune to live with for the rest of his days if he served in his army.

Look at him now.

“The one whose stepmother despised him,” Taland said, looking at the soldier’s missing fingers.

Goddess, my heart ached as I tried to imagine it but couldn’t get the details right; and then I imagined the bigger picture, the pain he must have felt; and then I tried tostopimagining—all within the same minute.

“Do it,” I whispered, digging my fingernails into my palms, trying to keep from screaming my lungs out—at the sky, the earth, everything that had stood by and just watched such cruelty happen without interfering.

But the man responsible was already dead, his bones inside the bodies of these very soldiers, and now I wished that I could bring back David Hill again just to feel him exploding to piecesonce more. I wished I could somehow bring back Titus, too, and watch the life drain from his eyes little by little.

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