Page 59 of Quiver of Cobras
‘No.’
I stepped back and sniffed. ‘It’s not like I care. The pair of you can do whatever you want, it’s got nothing to do with me. Some people would say that you’re perfect idiots but I say you’re not perfect. In fact—’
‘Maddy,’ Morgan said. ‘Shut up.’
I snapped my mouth closed. Well, someone got out of the wrong side of bed this morning.
The corners of the lips crooked up. ‘So much for all that open honesty,’ he murmured.
Artemesia cleared her throat. ‘Perhaps we should get back to the revelation that Madrona is responsible for all the border closures.’
I’d forgotten my admission in the wake of her and Morgan’s non-sexual relationship. Uh-oh. I scratched my head awkwardly. ‘I don’t remember any of it,’ I said. ‘Obviously.’
Morgan’s eyes held mine. ‘You were nineteen. And foolhardy.’
‘Nineteen,’ I argued. ‘Not nine. I should have known better.’
‘I can imagine,’ he said softly, ‘that the guilt over your mistake was tremendous. I could feel you pulling away from me, you know. As the months passed and the borders didn’t re-open, you became more and more distant – and more and more nasty. You already believed you were villainous so it wouldn’t have taken much for Rubus to persuade you on to his side.’
‘Heblackmailedme on to his side.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But I reckon you were relieved to go. You wanted to punish yourself for what you did.’ He raised his shoulders in a heavy shrug. ‘We can’t change the past, Maddy. You did what you did. We can only do better in the future.’
I stared at him. ‘That’s it?’
‘What do you want me to say?’
I threw my hands up in the air. ‘That this is my fault! All this is my fault! All these faeries are trapped here because of me and a stupid stunt that I pulled! If Rubus gets his hands on the sphere, floods this place with magic and kills all the humans in the process, then that will be my fault too.’
‘No,’ Morgan said, with the apparent patience of a saint. ‘That will be down to Rubus. No one is forcing him to be a genocidal prick.’
‘I caused this situation, Morgan. Me. He’s just reacting to it.’
‘Actually,’ Artemesia interrupted, ‘as much fun as it would be to place you in the villain’s box, I’m with Morgan on this. You made a mistake and you’ve been paying for it ever since. You didn’t deliberately shut us all in here. It was an unintended consequence.’
‘Maybe I did do it deliberately. Unless my memory returns, we’ll never know for sure what I did.’
‘If you did it deliberately, Rubus would have made sure that you knew it.’
‘So I committed manslaughter rather than murder,’ I said. ‘Go me.’ What I didn’t add was that I waited a decade before escalating my sins to premeditated murder by killing Charrie. I was irredeemable. Both Morgan and Artemesia must see that.
‘You screwed up,’ Morgan told me. ‘Everyone does at some point or other.’
Artemesia’s eyes travelled to Morgan. ‘If only we’d known…’
I huffed. ‘If only you’d known what?’
‘We couldn’t know the reason for the border closure. We thought that maybe we’d displeased the authorities in Mag Mell. Maybe something was terribly wrong in this demesne and we just couldn’t see what. Now that we know the real reason why we’re stuck here, I feel a whole lot better.’
‘So it’s a good thing that I fucked us all?’ I demanded. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’
Her expression remained calm. ‘You forget that we’ve lived with this situation for ten years. Knowing the reason behind it doesn’t change the situation but potentially it makes it easier to fix. If we can get your memory back and find exactly what it is you did,’ her face glowed, ‘we can work to re-open the borders ourselves, without any freaky sphere crap. Truthfully, Madrona, this is fantastic news.’
‘You don’t want to kill me?’ I asked her doubtfully.
‘Of course I want to kill you. I kind of want to hug you too.’
I stepped to the side just in case she dared. ‘I’m evil,’ I said in a small voice.
