Chapter 27: 26. Ilya

“We will not take Corvo to Ewsos!” Eris nearly shrieked. “Banish such insanity from your mind at once!”

A day had passed, and Aletheia had dared to bring the topic up again in private, away from the rest of the party’s ears.

“We have to do something,” Aletheia said.

“Jumping from a mountain would be something, also. But you would not suggest it as a cure for my son.”

“Trito is right. The Elves would know what to do.”

“So would the Magisters, I am certain of it—yet we cannot go to Pyrthos, just as we cannot go to Seneria.”

Aletheia slumped down on the bed. Corvo covered his ears and put his head in a pillow, like he always did when his mother was upset. Eris usually preferred to argue when he was not present, or asleep, but there was no longer a choice. She could not leave him, so he had to see everything.

“I have been there,” Eris said quietly. “To Ewsos. Robur and I, together. We found a portal, in an ancient facility powered by a demon, and were transported to a tower in a land where it was always night. The sky thrummed with mana everywhere, pouring from the sky, and I saw the Regizar’s palace with my own eyes. It was—unlike anywhere else I have been, except the top of the Tower of Pyrthos. We were not there for five minutes before a demon attacked us. A true demon, like Lord Arqa. We were nearly killed. You cannot ask me to take my son there.”

“What choice do we have, Eris?” Aletheia whispered.

“We will think of something. But that is not a choice.”

Aletheia departed on that note. Nothing more was going to come from pressing the issue.

She didn’t know what to think. Ewsos was the City of the Dawn: the ancient capital of the Old Kingdom, the place where the world ended millennia ago. Books of history said it swelled with demons there, flooding in from the place where the veil between the Aether and the Earth had been shattered. Ewsos was so suffused with mana that it was nearly the same as being in the stars themselves.

Eris was right. It was the most dangerous place in the world. It wasn’t somewhere to bring a five-year-old child.

But Trito was also right. If they were going to find a cure for Corvo, where else would it be?

So she was not happy as she stalked down through the halls and back to her own chamber. It was an impossible choice. Her life seemed full of them.

When she opened the door, a flaming candle greeted her. A candle she had not left lit.

Ilya Nemirovich Kaylof, the Boyar, sat on her bed. And now she found another impossible choice facing her down.

He set the candle down and rose to greet her. Ilya was much taller than her, almost anyone was, and she had to crane her neck to find his eyes in the shadowy light.

He stopped an inch away from her. His hands hovered near her hips, but he did not touch her. Their gazes met.

“Most women would find this creepy,” she said.

Ilya smiled. And he frowned, and he stepped slightly back.

“Do you?” he asked.

She smiled back. When they had first met, briefly, when he was sick, she had visited him in his room, but they hadn’t spoken. His voice was nothing like she had imagined it being. Especially when he spoke Kathar, his tone was high-pitched, nasal, and almost completely disarming. She found it surprisingly cute.

“I haven’t decided yet,” she said.

She sat down at the room’s vanity and started to let down her hair. A servant had put its voluminous length up in a fashionable Veshod braid that had been strangulating her brain for the better part of the day. The operation to undo it quickly proved more complicated than she had anticipated. Ilya stepped forward to help, but she motioned for him to stop before he touched her.

“Maybe you should get a servant.” She looked at him through the mirror.

“You don’t trust me?” Ilya said.

She considered this for a moment. “You’re a lord.”

“Yes.”

“And a man. So—no. Servant. Please?”

Ilya relented. Thus a servant was fetched, a young girl with brown hair blue at the roots, dressed plainly in a white gown. Aletheia remembered the girls who had briefly waited on her at Rook’s estate, over the few-day period where she had been best friends with a Duke of Katharos, and how they all wore rich purples and pinks sourced from across Koilados and the rest of Esenia.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The Veshod were a humbler people. She had loved fine things as a girl, but these days, she preferred simplicity. White gowns were fine by her.

The girl set about untangling Aletheia’s hair. She worked quickly and efficiently, unbraiding at a thousand times the speed Aletheia might have managed.

Then Ilya spoke as if the girl wasn’t there. That was something Aletheia doubted she would ever get used to.

“I take it that Eris’ discovery is good news,” he said.

Aletheia glanced between herself and him in the vanity’s mirror. When Rada had brought her into the castle for the first time, Aletheia came as nothing but an altruistic adventurer. She wanted to help the Boyar because helping people was what she wanted to do.

But that had changed when she saw him. He had been so boyishly handsome, limp and barely breathing in his bed, like beautified cadaver at an open funeral. He immediately became something more than a sick young man to her. A fictionalized version of him had entered her imagination and hardly left in all the time since. The person she had imagined did not exist in reality, but it had been so easy to fantasize about what might happen when she came back. She was a girl dreaming of a prince who could save her, after she had saved him.

And now he was back, and she was terrified that things were proceeding nearly as how she had hoped they would.

She lost herself staring at his jaw. He was pretty, but he needed to gain weight.

“What?” she said.

He stepped forward. “Eris. She discussed her discovery with you? Is it good news?”

“Oh. We—I don’t know yet. Trito thinks he has a lead. But it’s in Seneria.”

“Seneria is close to Veshod.” He sat down on the bed. “What troubles you?”

“Seneria isn’t safe. Especially not for Corvo.”

“Is that it?” he said.

Aletheia sighed. Her hair loosened suddenly, and she gasped as the weight of a tiger disappeared from the back of her scalp. “Thank you,” she whispered to the servant.

She looked back up to Ilya.

“I think it’s our best chance,” she said. “But—I’ve also wanted to go there, to learn more about the elves, ever since Astera died.”

“Will that is all, My Ladyship?” the servant girl said in broken Kathar.

Aletheia smiled bemusedly. “Yes.”

The servant stood and silently departed. Aletheia brushed her hair back, letting golden fountains roll down her shoulder and cover her neck. She used a spell to keep it from getting matted on the road—it would have been impossible to keep so long otherwise—but sometimes wondered why she even bothered.

She spun around in the seat to look at Ilya directly.

But he did not reply promptly. Instead he stared at her, wordless, until he asked, “Are all Kathar women as beautiful as you?”

She felt a tinge of girlish satisfaction, primal, almost ape-like, in her chest. She was not used to being complimented. She blushed and looked away.

“Most are more beautiful,” she said. “And taller. Like Eris.”

“But her hair is dark. Not like yours.”

“My hair is almost dark. Plus I’m a magician. Do you know for sure that my hair is blonde?”

“Isn’t it?”

Aletheia ran a hand along her hair again, just as she had a moment prior. This time she cast an easy spell: every strand touched by her palm darkened to brown. Soon there was no blonde left at all on her head.

Ilya’s mouth hung open.

She snapped her finger, and all returned to how it was naturally.

“Just teasing,” she said.

The Boyar tapped his foot. They were both quiet a moment, until he said, “So you want to visit the elves. You’ll go with or without Eris, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Or you could stay here,” he suggested slowly.

Aletheia shook her head. But she echoed herself, saying again, “I don’t know.”

She pulled a circular locket from beneath her shirt. Its metal was cool and uncomfortable against her skin during the day, but she wore it always anyway on its silver chain. A tap on its side opened it, and two mirrors, identical, revealed themselves.

She saw herself in both. Yet her reflection was not in either.

“There could be a place for you here,” Ilya said.

Aletheia snapped the locket shut. She shook her head. “It wouldn’t be fair. You deserve better than me.”

“Could a lord want more than a heroine such as Aletheia of Snaiga?”

“A lord shouldn’t want a heroine,” she said. “That’s what a little boy wants. A lord should want a wife.”

“I think you could be a wife,” he said.

She thought back to what she had seen in the locket not a moment prior. It seemed to think she could be a wife, too. And wasn’t that what she wanted?

“You have no idea who I am,” she said slowly.

“You saved my life,” he said. “I know you well enough.”

“You really don’t.” Aletheia sighed. “I’m a magician. I have enemies. They would be your enemies, too.”

“New enemies are a small price to pay for a chance to live a full life with a beautiful woman.”

“Just wait until I’m old and ugly,” she said. “It won’t seem so worth it then.”

She had lived for years under Eris’ shadow. The men they met wanted her, not Aletheia, inevitably. But things had been different the last year. There had been much more attention, and far more temptation. She wondered if she had simply bloomed late—or if being the only woman in the vicinity was truly all it took. She still did not see anything but a plain little girl when she looked into her reflection.

But she still understood what a young man like Ilya saw in her. It was the same thing she saw in him.

Something new. Something different. Something tempting.

“I think it would be,” he said at last. “Worth it.”

He stood and came near her, and she stood, too, so they faced each other again.

Something very tempting. But she shook her head.

“I can’t leave Corvo. He needs me. So it doesn’t matter for now. I’m sorry.”

“Can I kiss you once, at least?” he said.

Aletheia licked her topmost teeth. Ilya must have thought that her answer was a definitive “no,” for as her face scrunched in contemplation, his darkened. So she acted.

She stood on her tiptoes, tugged him downward, and let her lips brush against his. Some kind of a kiss followed, chaste and momentary, and then she returned to the ground. She felt a tingling in her stomach and heat in her head.

It was too nice to give up. So she kissed him again. Then she pulled away.

“Your mother is probably looking for you,” she said quietly. “You should go. I have to do some reading.”

Ilya didn’t move. He stared at her like a statue. It almost became awkward—more awkward—until he nodded, and he wordlessly departed.

Aletheia sighed in relief. And while she did have a tome from the library to continue studying, she leaned backward and stared at the ceiling instead, wondering for hours if she would regret what she had said.

And when she finally fell asleep, it was hardly minutes before a terrible pain woke her up.

She saw Melitas standing over her with a knife.