Jenna Helland - The Fanged Crown

“Cardew had a map that he consulted obsessively and wouldn’t let anyone else see. I glanced at it once when he was sleeping. It was a map of the isle, and there were a series of sites that he’d marked, maybe eleven or twelve in all, all around the area. They were the hidden ruins that he’d come to search, but I didn’t know it until later. There was something in the ruins that Cardew was determined to find, and he spent his days with a select group of men systematically searching the jungle.

“But that was harder than he expected. The jungle likes her secrets, and most days they simply wandered in the wilderness with nothing to show but rashes and scratches. Cardew hardly spoke to me, just gave me orders for what I was supposed to have the men do the next day. Each morning when I woke up he was gone, and he would arrive back just as the sun was setting. You have to understand, there was nowhere for me to go. There were no ships, there was no contact with outsiders, and to be honest, I wanted to know what he was up to.

“One day I followed them to the ruins on the north end of the valley beyond the waterfall. I guess one of the guards told Cardew that I had left the colony, because after that, he kept a guard with me at all times. It was unbearable. Then one day he arrived back to the camp early and called me into the house. He said that he had found something very important and showed me a parchment with a spell for opening a portal. He told me to make the portal and have it ready for us to go through the next day.

“But I was unwilling to do the magic. The spell had been translated into Common, but it was obviously something very old and powerful, perhaps something that he had found in the ruins. I decided that the portal was the reason he had brought me down to Chult in the first place. I was supposed to open it for him. But I’d seen enough to know that once I did it, I would have served my purpose and would no longer be useful to him. I was afraid what would happen to me if I complied.

“The next day Cardew arrived back at the camp bloody and alone. When I told him I hadn’t finished the spell, he went into a rage. In our years as husband and wife, he had never laid his hands on me, but he hit me so hard I blacked out. When I woke up, he was gone.

“I’ve been here ever since, trying to figure out what he was doing and find a way home. The machine you saw must have been part of his plan. I was intent on destroying it, and that’s when you found me.”

Liel seemed exhausted after she told her story, and by an unspoken understanding, none of the men pressed her for more information. The rain stopped, and Harp fell asleep listening to a steady wind rustling the leaves. A few hours later, Harp heard Liel stir, pad softly across the floor of the hut, and go outside.

“Can I join you?” he asked, pulling the door shut behind them so the others wouldn’t be disturbed by their voices. He laid his cloak over her shoulders.

“Of course.” She pulled the cloak close around her body as if she had been cold. “I changed my mind about Tethyr. I want to go back.”

“To Darromar and the court?” Harp asked in surprise.

“No, to the Wealdath,” she explained. “I want to see the forest.”

So some things had changed, Harp thought. The Liel he’d known would never have described the Wealdath as part of Tethyr. But it was to be expected that marrying a statesman and being in the Court of the Crimson Leaf would have changed the way she saw the world.

“What about Cardew?” Harp asked.

“Let him do what he will,” she said softly. “Who am I to stop him?”

Harp watched her profile as she talked. Her face was tipped up to the clear, dark sky where the space between the stars looked more deep blue than pure black. Liel hadn’t aged a day, which was not surprising considering her elf blood. She was beautiful to him in a way no one else had ever been, and he found something beautiful in most women.

He wanted to reach out and touch her jaw, to brush his fingers along the delicate vine-and-leaf pattern the way he had so many times before. Instead, he asked her the question he’d been waiting to ask for years.

“Why did you tell Cardew about us?” he asked.

“I didn’t tell him. He just knew.”

Harp wasn’t sure what to say to that. He’d long forgiven Liel for telling Cardew about their relationship. She couldn’t have known how Cardew would retaliate against his rival. But the news that Liel had never told their secret to Cardew at all was a surprise. Harp wanted to believe her, but he wasn’t sure that he did.

“Did you know where they sent me?”

“No, I didn’t. When I left the Wealdath, my father promised to find you and free you, wherever you were. Months later, he wrote to me and told me it was done. I asked where you were, but he never told me.”

“Were you happy with Cardew?” Harp asked. “In the beginning at least?”

“Yes,” she replied. “But it didn’t last long.”

“It never does,” Harp agreed. Liel shifted beside him, and he sensed a change in her body, like an animal that glimpsed a predator and was preparing to flee.

“How could you turn yourself in like that?” she demanded suddenly. “You knew you would go to prison. You knew you would lose Kitto and me.”

“It was the right thing to do,” Harp said. “They were attacking elves indiscriminately, just for hiding us. They were using me as an excuse for the violence.”

“Why didn’t you just run away? Disappear into the North or go inland with Kitto? Once you’d got far enough, they never would have found you.”

“But they might have found you,” Harp said.

“Stop it,” Liel said abruptly. “You’re lying to me now, just the way you did then.”

“I never lied to you.” Harp’s head was beginning to ache, and his brain felt sluggish.

“It was all a lie. From the very beginning. You used me.”

Harp took a deep breath, unsure of why the conversation had suddenly veered in the direction it had. “I’ve wanted to apologize for something for a long time. I shouldn’t have said that you were marrying Cardew for power and influence. I knew you better than that. I wasn’t careful with my words. But I never lied to you.”

Liel was quiet for a moment. “That was the breaking point?”

“Wasn’t it?” Harp was shocked at the lack of emotion behind Liel’s question. It had been the moment that had snapped them in two, the thing that had felt irreversible. It was as if he had triggered her memory, but none of the emotion about the argument itself.

“I guess it was,” she finally said. “I remember.”

“I never forgot,” he said, disconcerted by her nonchalant manner.

“After we left the Marderward with Kitto, we were in that little boat for two days before we got to Gwynneth Isle,” she continued. “And you were barely conscious. I’m not sure how we managed to get all the way to the island.”

Between the lashes and Predeau’s beating, Harp had been in bad shape when they left the Marderward . By the second day aboard the little skiff, he’d developed a high fever, and his wounds were inflamed with an infection that Liel couldn’t heal. Those days were a blur for him. He remembered being frantic to keep Kitto and Liel near him, as if he would lose them forever if they were separated for even an instant. When they reached the safe haven, their host mistook Liel and Kitto as his wife and son.

Liel stared at the sky again. “What happened, Harp? You were there, and then, just like that, you weren’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“We were close. And then you just retreated from me.”

“We talked about it being over from the moment it started,” Harp reminded her. “I wasn’t sure how you felt.”