Page 81 of Heart’s Rescue

“Because it looks like you were trying to assassinate the king!” he snaps.

“What?”

Aloserin shakes his head and paces back to the window, tap, tap, tap. This time it doesn’t take quite so much effort to turn my head and follow him.

“The last monster from the Worlds Above killed three people,” Aloserin says, and his voice sounds like he’s trying very hard not to give me the slap I so richly deserve, “and he almost killed your brother. The first monster stole Captain Orryen’s heart. Yet here you are, breaching our innermost defenses in the middle of the night with yet another monster from that voids-forsaken world.” He turns and fixes me with disturbingly dark eyes. “Why, Rowan?”

I try to shrug. My shoulders kind of respond.

“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” I say.

“Look.” Aloserin lifts his hand and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I don’t want to lock you up. For one, I honestly don’t want to deal with you ever again. For another, your brother is counting on you to take care of him, and I think you’ve already cost your brother enough.”

“The hell are you talking about?” I growl.

Anger spikes in my chest, mixing with the churning fear over what’s happened to Arryn; it’s not a pleasant combination.

“You’re the one who’s cost Phaedron everything,” I snap. “You and your stupid Royal Guard with its hereditary positions. That’s the one thing Phaedron’s ever wanted, and he’d be damn good at it too. But here you sit with your thumbs up your asses saying he’s too low-born to do the thing he’s spent his whole life training to do!”

Aloserin’s expression shifts, moving from anger to something I like a hell of a lot less. Something that looks dangerously like pity.

“You don’t get it,” Aloserin says.

“Get what?” I snarl.

“Why Phaedron couldn’t join the Royal Guard.”

“That’s because of you!” I yell. “Because you and Orryen turned us down, over and over again. Because you’re freaking morons too stupid to recognize talent when you see it.”

Aloserin brings his hand to his chin and cups it while he watches me. “You can’t think of any other reason?” he asks. “Any reason at all why we wouldn’t want to offer Phaedron Evenworth access to all the royal secrets? Any security liabilities he has that might force our hand?”

“Screw you,” I snap. My pulse is beating hot and heavy in my skull; my magic simmers just beneath these nicely redone floors. “Phaedron is golden. He’d never abuse that kind of knowledge.”

“I know,” Aloserin says. He’s watching me with hard, black eyes. “He wouldn’t.”

Something inside me snaps like ice. My vision goes blurry again, and I twist my neck to turn my head away. Because Acting Captain of the Royal Guard Aloserin is the very last person in the Lands Below I want to see me cry.

Because it’s me. I’m the security liability.

Voids, it’s so obvious now. Phaedron is golden. He obeys every damn letter of every damn law in the kingdom; I had to spin every flavor of lie in the Lands Below to get him to break into the king’s inner towers with me. To this day, I think he believes it was a secret mission from King Galan himself.

And I call him a sucker. I used him to break into the king’s inner towers just because I could. Because I was bored. And Phaedron can’t lie to me. He’s too trusting; I know he’d open up about all the exciting new details of his job. And then I’d take that knowledge and go poking around in all sorts of places where I’m absolutely not welcome. Because that’s the kind of terrible person I am.

I’m the reason Phaedron never got that position in the Royal Guard. I’m the reason we don’t live in the Crystal City right now. Aloserin clears his throat, and it sounds like he’s at least had the decency to walk back to the window.

“At first, I assumed you and the woman were trying to rescue the monster who’d almost killed Phaedron,” he said, “although I couldn’t imagine why. But you know the layout of this castle, and you were nowhere near the guest tower.”

Aloserin coughs discreetly. I take a deep breath. Get your life together, he’d said.

Fine. How hard could that be?

I turn back to face Aloserin, and I find I prefer his simmering irritation and outright rage to his pity. Pity feels awful.

“Why?” he asks.

I swallow. Again. “Where is she?” I ask.

“Safe,” he answers.