Chapter 8
I woke some while later; I don't really know how long. The skinny stripe of moonlight had moved, but not a lot. Lexa was breathing deeply and steadily, but I didn't think she was asleep. Then it came again, the sound that had woken me up-footsteps outside in the passage. The dancing light of a lantern flickered across the wall. It was Ontari.
"Lexa," she called softly. "Lexa, are you awake?"
Lexa eased herself out from under me, carefully so as not to disturb me - she hadn't realized that I was no longer asleep. And I kept my eyes shut and pretended to be, in order not to interrupt anything. Ontari had called her Lexa - and Lexa had said that only her friends did that.
"I'm awake," she said.
"The Soul Seer still claims that you are innocent. She is absolutely adamant. And so I thought... perhaps I had better come and talk to you myself. I hardly know what to believe anymore."
Lexa slowly got to her feet. Watching through my lashes, I could see that she was moving stiffly - lying still in the chill of the night had done her bruised and battered body no good.
"I'm glad you came," she said softly. "But there's not much I can tell you. I remember nothing until you and the guards shook me awake and I saw... everything."
"But before that? You must have had a reason to go to Costia's rooms."
Lexa shook her head. "I really don't know. Ryker had come up with that silly barrel race, and we were yelling our heads off and drinking too much, and I lost three silver marks to Lincoln and nearly killed myself thinking I could stay balanced on the barrel with him inside it... but you were there. You saw it. Better than I, probably."
"The last thing I saw of you, you were sitting on top of a haystack, having declared it your kingdom. It was late in the afternoon, and you were very, very drunk."
"I don't even remember that."
"You were singing at the top of your lungs, earsplittingly off-key, and when Lincoln wanted to make you stop, you held him off with a pitchfork. Finally, you collapsed and started snoring, and we carried you off to your rooms. But you must have revived and drunk even more, there were that many bottles in your room. And then you must have gone to Costia's rooms. Lexa, you must have."
"I don't remember...," Lexa whispered, clutching the bars of the door.
"Try," Ontari demanded harshly. "Try. You are climbing the stairs in the west wing - you must have come up the Secret Steps or someone would have seen you - you're walking along the hall, you knock... or what? What did you want to see her for? Does she open the door? Or do you just walk right in? And why have you brought your dagger? Think, damn you. Remember."
Lexa made a sound, a sort of moan. "I can't. Do you think I haven't tried? I've thought of nothing else, how could I? But it's gone. All gone. I can't remember."
"I thought perhaps now that you had sobered up..."
"No. It's still just a blank."
"Lexa, I... really hope that the Soul Seer is right. You're my cousin. And my friend. And I have lost enough relatives."
"I've begun to think that perhaps... perhaps I really didn't do it. I still can't explain what I was doing in Costia's rooms. But something has changed inside me. Now I think that an explanation does exist. All I have to do is look for it..."
Ontari considered her cousin carefully. "Good luck in your search, then. And here. A small reconciliation gift." She held out a leather-covered bottle. "You must have the meanest hangover in the universe."
Lexa looked at the bottle but did not take it. "I don't think the kind of answers I am looking for can be found in that," she finally said.
Ontari smiled faintly. "Answers, no. But perhaps... peace. Take it. Keep it. Call it a peace offering. From me to you. I'm sorry I acted... like I did. But I was beside myself."
"With good reason." Lexa accepted the bottle. "And whatever the outcome... I am glad, cousin, that you came down here." She uncorked the bottle and took a sniff at the contents. "And not just because of this, though the bouquet is promising."
Ontari waved away her thanks. "And the girl? Was she very frightened?"
Lexa gave another of her short laughs. "Hardly. She is her mother's daughter."
Ontari sighed. "I was so furious at that Soul Seer. I didn't believe that she knew what she was doing. But now... I suppose she might as well have her daughter back. At least you will have that ledge to yourself." She unhooked the lantern again. "It might be a while—I have to find the key first. Let the wine warm you up meanwhile." She walked back along the passage, taking the light with him. Lexa remained at the door, sniffing the wine.
"I need it," she finally muttered, taking a swallow. "Just a little drink."
Ontari took her time. Lexa's little drink became five, then ten.
"Don't you think you've had enough?" I asked.
"Is that any of your business?" Lexa demanded. Not really angry, but certainly annoyed.
"You said it yourself - you won't find the answers in there."
"Little Miss Prim. Nose in the air, just like your mother." Her voice had already lost some of its distinction, had become blurred and somehow soggy. Ten drafts - eleven now - could she really become drunk so soon on so little?
"Lexa... hold on a minute. Isn't that stuff working a little too quickly?"
"Not quick enough for me. Not nearly. Life is short and you're such a long time dead." She took yet another swallow. "A very long time dead," she said. And then she peered at the bottle with some thoughtfulness.
"You're right," she said, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. "It really... does work... a lot more quickly... than it usually does..."
"Give it to me," I said, reaching for the bottle.
"Mine," she muttered, just like Madi does when you want to take something away from her. "My bottle. My death. Ontari gave it to me."
I placed myself squarely in front of her, in the middle of the stripe of moonlight. "Look at me," I said.
"Not again," she pleaded, so softly that it was barely more than a whimper.
"Look at me."
She slowly raised her eyes to mine. Not because I forced her to, but of her own free will. Whatever was wrong with her, that was one kind of courage she did not lack. The moonlight fell on one side of her face, leaving the other in shadow, and her eyes were so dark that they looked like caverns. But somewhere in those caverns was a light, a tiny glimmer of light. I stared into that light, and something weird happened to my head.
Images started to form in the darkness. A slender brown-haired girl on her seventh birthday, watching from the shadows as her brother wins the race astride a sweaty chestnut horse shining like copper in the sunlight. People clapping and cheering, a smiling King punching the older boy in the shoulder, proud of his heir, his brave boy.
The brown-haired girl, a little older now, face thrust into the cobbles in the Arsenal Court, her brother holding her down, yelling, "Give up yet? Huh, Lexa? Little Lexie, do you yield?"
Thirteen-year-old Lexa in front of the mirrors in the fencing hall, saber raised, dripping with sweat and trembling from the strain, as the swordmaster hits her with his stick every time she lowers her arm or slumps her shoulders.
Lexa, fourteen, staring across a wide dark canal, then making the decision: flinging the sword away from her, as hard as she can. The slender blade glitters, dropping into the black water with hardly a splash, and as she watches the saber disappear into the weedy depths, a deep sense of relief.
A man, hitting his nearly grown daughter again and again, with fists, with his stick, with the flat of his sword, again and again, pounding the lesson into him: "You are nothing without your sword!"
Lexa, meeting her brother's wife for the first time, staring into blue eyes and golden hair, whispering into her pillows at night and her horse's neck by day, "Costia, Costia, Costia!" yet knowing it is hopeless, and so, getting drunk, clowning, making the hall ring with laughter, men patting her back and encouraging her to drink still more, egging her on to wilder capers, only two people not sharing in the laughter, her furious father at the head of the table and Costia, who bends her head, letting the fall of golden hair hide her pity.
Other girls, girls she feels less than nothing for, except that they prove someone can like her, someone can love her...
Drinking, clowning, dropping, getting up to drink and clown some more. And caring not at all what happens to her or to anyone around her except two people, the furious father, the pitying Costia. Caring not at all. And then the darkness was back, and the moonlight, the moonlight that glittered in the trail of tears on Lexa's cheeks.
"You are a merciless mirror, Domiella," she whispered. "But the image is very clear."
There was a pain in my head, somewhere behind the eyes. But I knew that what I had seen was true, and that she had seen it with me.
She had dropped the bottle, and the remains of the wine spread in a pool across the floor, unnoticed. She turned her back on me, fumbling for the empty bucket. Kneeling, she thrust a finger into her mouth until she gagged, and then threw up. I swallowed. And swallowed some more. When Madi and Callum were ill, I sometimes threw up along with them in sheer sympathy. I did not dare go near her or try to help her, for fear of ending up with my own head over the bucket.
Finally, she stopped retching. Taking a mouthful of water from the other bucket, she rinsed her mouth. Then she stumbled to the ledge, grabbed my apron, which we had been using for a pillow, and dried her face with it.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I know it's not a pleasant sight, but at least it's effective." She leaned back against the wall, swallowing. Her face was gleaming with sweat. "God, I feel sick. The good Lord's just punishment for all drunks." Her breathing was coming hard and fast now; I could see her chest rising and falling at a much too rapid rate.
"Mom always tells us to keep our breathing slow and calm. It will make you feel better."
"Probably. Your mother is a wise woman." She did her best to slow her breathing, but it didn't seem to do much good. She got halfway to her feet, then fell back against the ledge again. "I think I'll have to lie down for a little while," she said.
I stayed where I was, midway between the window and the door. My own nausea had subsided, but I felt suddenly shy. Seeing the images inside somebody else's head... it was strange. Like seeing them with no clothes on, only worse. Staring right into their secrets, knowing things they had never told a soul... I was beginning to see why mom was usually so silent and tired, coming home from a Soul Seer's task. And some of the secrets she had seen were a lot worse than Lexa's.
"Was it lonely?" asked Lexa from her ledge. "I mean - growing up with eyes like yours? Making friends cannot be easy, when they can't look you in the eye without blushing."
"I don't have a lot of friends." None whatsoever, in fact, but I didn't want to tell her that. "But I have my family. Mama and Madi and particularly my older brother, Callum." Then I suddenly started thinking about her older brother. Do you yield? And of Costia, whom I had seen in Lexa's memory, alive and beautiful, and who now lay cold and dead and mutilated somewhere in the castle.
"Yes. Family." She was silent for a while. "Now that you know most of it, Clarke - are you still not afraid of me?" I had to take a minute to notice my feelings. Something had changed, of course. I had seen envy in her, and rage. Coldness.
Callousness. And that hopeless, forbidden love for Costia. But not murder. Not blood and dead bodies. And she had been neither cold nor callous with me. I did not answer her in so many words. I merely sat down next to her and took her hand.
"How brave you are," she said. "When I was your age, I was afraid of nearly everything." She was still breathing much too rapidly, and her hand was slick with sweat. "Clarke... if I fall asleep before Ontari comes back to get you, we... might not meet again. I want you to know that... that before you came, I thought that this last night would be a living hell. It... wasn't. Thanks to you."
Suddenly, I felt cold all over. "What do you mean - this last night. Why should it be the last? Mom knows you're innocent, and even Ontari is beginning to change her mind."
There was a movement at the corner of her mouth, grimace or smile, it was hard to tell. "Ontari has no illusions about my guilt."
"But she said..."
"Ontari is fully convinced that I did it. But your mother has perhaps persuaded her that I was out of my head at the time. Not myself, so to speak. And for that reason she has given me her own kind of mercy."
"Mercy? Lexa, what are you talking about?"
"They say beheading is a painful death. And I have never been particularly brave. This... whatever it is that Ontari has put in her peace offering, it promises to be painless."
"Lexa!" Poison. She meant poison. That peace offering - it was the peace of death that it would bring her. "Sit up. You can't die now!"
"I may not have much choice in the matter."
At least she had vomited up most of it; surely that had to help? "Sit up straight, come on..." I pulled at her shoulder, trying to raise her, but she was about as cooperative as a rag doll. "Come on!"
"Clarke... please... leave me be..." Her voice had become blurred and indistinct again. "Leave me... in peace..."
"Yes, Clarke. Leave her alone." I stiffened. It was Ontari's voice. She had returned, but without the lantern. I had not heard her approach. Just exactly how long had she been standing in the dark, listening?