Page 73 of Angel in Absentia
“Why did you—” she started, resisting the urge to glance at her guards.
“You’ve been scanning me,” he said, “or trying to, for weeks.”
She lowered her hands by her side, gaping. “You can sense it?”
He raised an eyebrow, “Of course I can sense it,” he said emphatically. “You may as well be rifling under my clothes. I expected you to engage in some manner of warfare, but the incessant ansra scanning has been particularly distracting. There isn’t much I can feel, but I can certainly feel you poking around.”
Her eyes widened and she continued walking, staring ahead.
“But while the promise is still in effect,” he said, “you know exactly why I’m doing this.”
“What? A romantic gesture?” she shot back, eager to move to the next topic to avoid thinking about all of the Venennin she’d scanned with ansra in the past. “You think I’m so foolish as to be carried off with something like that and from someone like you? You’re toying with me,” she accused, adjusting the plain white cloak she wore around her body.
“It’s not romance,” he said with a chuckle. “There is a power between us, an exchange. We create something, you and I.”
“I kill for you, and you heal for me,” she repeated, recognizing for the first time that it wasn’t so much about actions; it was about energy. “I don’t understand.”
“You do,” he assured her with a lightness in his voice. “You feel it right now,” he said, glancing down at her.
She almost objected too quickly. Instead, she stopped and inspected him. They’d cleared many rows of cottages and were now on the outskirts of the inner city. Flower beds bloomed nearby; this was a familiar street she often visited simply to see those flowers. It was strange, having him here.
“What do you want from me?” she asked, watching him and almost desperately wanting him to answer the question. Every passing day had made her more restless, more tense. “I can’t help but think Prince was right. This is a trap. One choice I make will lead to destruction, and the other will lead to…” She hesitated, unsure what Prince had meant when he claimed that she could set them all free.
“A trap,” Ryson breathed, looking off with a chuckle and then directing his attention back to her. “I suppose that is one way of describing it, but just one way. Prince has his own motives. He just doesn’t want me to convince you to return to the woods with us. He wants you to resist, to defy any influence I might have and instead ask me to find his body again. He thinks if you come to the forest with us, you’ll become a Venennin. If you become a Venennin, you’ll lose any incentive to help him. I’m not sure why he thinks you’d help him now anyway, but I’m sure he plans to manipulate you for that very purpose.”
Clea paused, inspecting him closely. “Prince made it sound so…”
“Dramatic? Like the fate of the world depended on it?” Ryson replied, eyebrows raised. “I’m not going to make any claims about what the fate of the world depends on, but I can guarantee that Prince’s motives are certainly not, and never will be, to save the world.”
“So, he did lie to me?” She asked, coiling her sleeves softly into her hands as she searched him. His eyes were black now in broad daylight, his face dusted with the faint shadow of stubble. He almost looked human.
“Not at all, at least not on purpose. But you can’t really expect a Venennin’s version of reality to be exactly in line with the objective way of things.” He continued walking, and this time she followed along beside him thoughtfully.
“But…” She hesitated. “Alkerrai al Shambelin. Warlord of the Land of Light. Illusion. Your vice. You also have a vice that ensnares people.”
He grimaced slightly at the use of the name. She felt she could see a reaction each time she said it with such confidence.
“I do,” he admitted. “I am a slave to it. When it arrests me, I can’t see beyond it. I truly did believe the Belgear Kingdom was great. There was no convincing me otherwise. I presented myself to the Lord of the Belgear, convinced that he would see past my ruse, that such a great man would not so blindly underestimate me and then he would valiantly prove himself and thus be worth some kind of partnership.”
“But then when he fell for it, you killed him. What if you do the same to me?” she asked.
“Well, of course I did. He’s a Venennin Lord,” Ryson replied. “And he tortured me rather brutally.”
“But you wouldn’t have felt any of it. You’re sifted,” she argued.
“It’s the principle of the thing, which I’m surprised I have to explain,” he said, glancing down at her with a subtle grin. “You’re rather determined to see me as a villain, aren’t you?”
They arrived at the final street before Iris’s cottage.
She looked up at him, questioning Prince’s story and her own suspicions. Prince had also claimed that Ryson was ensnared by his own vice much like Prince could not resist the bodies he controlled, or how Alina was an addict of the fear she created. Ryson truly had believed the Lord of Belgear would be a great man, just as Lord Belgear believed himself to be great. She tried to unwind the complexity of it in her mind and apply it to her own situation.
If that logic applied again, then Ryson may not believe that he had set a trap for her because he, too, was a part of it. Carefully, she said, “So, you don’t set traps. Not really. You help people succumb to those wrong things they already believe about themselves. Illusions,” she whispered. He fell for the trap too.
No wonder the power was so potent, the vice so destructive.
She wondered then if she could even ask Ryson for a list of things he believed about her, suss out what could be true and what not, but she knew then this battle would need to happen within herself. Whatever destructive tool could destroy her was not an external enemy but an internal one. It was a false belief she had that he would only ever bring to fruition.
“There is something you believe about me that I also believe about myself. Something that’s wrong,” she whispered.
