Page 22 of Brought to Light
Six-year-old siblings.
“What’s the plan?” I murmured to Oskar, quietly enough that Linden couldn’t possibly hear me over the sound of his own protests. “Linden ought to stay here, but he won’t stay willingly.”
“I can’t lie,” Oskar said apologetically. I started to argue, but he held up a hand. “No, I truly can’t lie. None of us can. It’s part of our nature. Except for you.”
I took a second to absorb that, thinking back over all the bizarro conversations I’d had with my three examples of people from this realm. In the labyrinth, Linden had told me he’d never lied to me, and I hadn’t been able to refute it. Now I had some independent confirmation. This realm got weirder and weirder. “For guys who can’t lie, you skirt the truth a whole fucking lot.”
“It’s our way,” Oskar said. “But I’m being honest with you now, no sidestepping. I can’t lie to Linden to make him stay behind. And you could.”
Kaspar and Linden were still arguing, and it sounded like they’d moved on to bringing up childhood misbehavior on both sides to bolster their points. Christ. At least they were distracted.
And I needed them to stay that way, because I couldn’t make up my mind. Leaving Linden behind had a lot of advantages, mainly the whole ‘Linden not being available for Evalt to murder’ thing, with a side of ‘not having to protect him while I watched my own back.’ But could I lie to him about something so important? Yes, on balance. Would it work, though?
“I don’t think there’s anything I can say to him that’ll keep him here. Even if we leave out anything about his mom. Even if we tell him Evalt’s summoned him to a meeting place somewhere else. He won’t stay behind, because he won’t let us go off to maybe die for him. Won’t let you do that, anyway. If he had any sense, he’d let me do it no problem.”
Oskar nodded, giving me a grunt of agreement. Fuck, but it was refreshing to talk to someone who didn’t see the point in sugar-coating anything.
“He doesn’t have any sense,” Oskar said after a second. “We’d have to compel him somehow. I’d be willing to do that, but we’d need Kaspar’s help, and he wouldn’t agree. He’d say Linden wasn’t a child and shouldn’t be treated like one.”
Linden might be arguing like one right at that moment, but then again, so was Kaspar. I took the opportunity to stare my fill. Linden wasn’t childlike. If he had been, I wouldn’t have been getting hard thinking about him wanting me to keep him warm at night.
Fuck.
But with his soft mouth and wide blue eyes and slender, graceful everything, hewasdelicate. Fragile, even, compared to me or Oskar. Of course, I’d seen monster trucks that were fragile compared to Oskar—but I wasn’t a fair comparison either. I’d been shot three times, stabbed more often than I’d bothered to keep track of, concussed, thrown out of a helicopter, and beaten up enough that it didn’t bother me anymore. And here I was, still alive and pissed off.
No, not a fair comparison.
Still. He wasn’tweak. I didn’t need any more proof of that than the fact he’d insist on going with us if he knew what was up, and I didn’t doubt that for a second. He was a man, not a kid, and he had the right to go die in the effort to save his own mother’s life if he fucking well wanted to. I didn’t have to like it. I just had to accept it.
“I’m not lying to him about this. Sorry. No can do.”
Oskar looked at me long and hard, and finally nodded slowly. “For the record, I disagree with that decision.”
“Sure you do. But you’re relieved anyway. You don’t have to decide, and you know if you did it’d be wrong.”
Oskar barked a laugh. “Fair enough. All right. Are we going to draw straws for which of us has to tell him what the crow said?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “You’ve known him longer. This one’s all yours.”
“Fuck you,” Oskar sighed resignedly, and we headed back to the lodge to break up the fight and face the music.
Chapter Eleven
Linden
We’d marched for nearly six hours, and I’d begun to wish I’d spent more time walking during my exile to the human realm. My legs burned, my back ached, and I couldn’t feel my feet. That last might’ve been a good thing if it hadn’t meant I kept stumbling over every root and rock.
In front of me, Oskar strode ahead like he’d just popped out of a featherbed. Beside me, Kaspar muttered low-voiced complaints but went on gamely enough. And behind me—well, I couldn’t see what Callum was doing, but I’d have been willing to bet he hadn’t flagged, and that his expression hadn’t changed in the slightest from the hard, focused look he’d had ever since he and Oskar came inside and told me my mother would die the following day if we didn’t walk into a trap.
I knew I should’ve been afraid, anxious, overwhelmed with worry and grief.
But I wasn’t. I couldn’t feel anything. My peaceful, rural home, with its low stone walls separating sheep pastures from farmland, its deep-green hedgerows and pale-green meadows, its brilliant, many-hued roses and orchards of apples and apricots…Lord Evalt was there now, his troops churning the gardens to mud with their heavy boots and filling Lady Lisandra’s quiet halls with harsh laughter and curses.
It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real, because I simply couldn’t make it more than a nightmare.
My mother, forced to kneel before Lord Evalt, weeping.
Or perhaps she wouldn’t weep. Perhaps she’d hold her head up and spit in his face. She’d always been braver than I had.
