Inkmistress (Of Fire and Stars 0.5)(73)

Hal and I bowed and were escorted out. I left the throne room with sweaty palms, my heart racing. Hal walked ahead of me so quickly that I could barely keep up.

“Wait! We need to talk,” I said. I needed him to weigh in on my plan. I wanted to discuss what had happened between us the night before.

He sighed, and walked faster. “I’m tired.”

“Like the Sixth Hell you are,” I said. It was only midafternoon. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing!” he said, but he didn’t look at me. I followed, trying to figure out how to confront him. It would have helped if I’d had any idea what was wrong. All I knew was that by the time we entered the hallway that housed our chambers, I couldn’t bear everything that lay unspoken between us any longer.

“Come into my room,” I said, still searching for the right words.

“Why?” He folded his arms.

“Please,” I said. After what we’d just been through and the risk I’d just taken, I was too exhausted to argue with him.

“Fine.” He marched into my room and I followed, closing the door behind us. He took a seat at the vanity beside the bed, looking comically gangly atop the ornate stool where I’d sat to have my hair done that morning.

“I need your advice. I don’t want this to just be about me. I want this to be about what’s right for the kingdom,” I said.

“It looks like it’s going to dragon dung either way,” Hal said. “Maybe we should get out of here while we can. Head for Havemont or Mynaria. Some of my demigod siblings seem to think that’s a good idea—a few of them have left for Havemont already.”

I quashed the anger threatening to rise.

“Could you try to be helpful even for a minute? Is that too much to ask?” Running away wouldn’t solve anything, not when the fate of people we cared about hung in the balance. Not when the entire kingdom could be at stake.

“I didn’t bring you here so you could sacrifice yourself to the king. So he could bleed you out worse than my sister did,” Hal said.

“I have no intention of allowing him to do that,” I said. “Nismae said to ask the shadow god where Atheon is. If I make myself useful to the king, I can get him to ask the shadow god for me. I can still find the Fatestone and rewrite everything.”

“You’re out of your mind. You’ve just pledged yourself to his service. That gives you no leverage at all.” Hal’s voice rose.

“What other choice do I have left? I have to at least try.” I threw up my hands in frustration. “Ina can’t be reasoned with. The king has a plan, and honestly, I’m a little more comfortable helping someone who isn’t going to stab me out of nowhere—especially if it means there is a chance I can stop the battle from ever happening in the first place. If you have a better idea, speak up now or stand by my side.”

Hal hung his head, massaging his temples with his hands. “I don’t have any ideas. All I can think about is what will happen if you rewrite the past.”

“You mean, when I fix things to prevent the king from killing Nismae and Ina or our kingdom from going up in flames?” I asked, not bothering to rein in my sarcasm.

“You don’t understand!” Hal leaped to his feet. “Yes, I want those things, but I don’t want a world to exist in which I didn’t meet you!”

I stared at the floor, the frustration shocked out of me.

“Have you thought through that possibility?” he asked. “I suppose you have, if you’re so certain this is what you should do. Maybe you even have some half-baked plan about how we might stop everyone who lied to us from doing so in the first place. Restore harmony, birds, butterflies, all that nonsense. Make the world all perfect and pure the way you think it should be.” He gestured broadly, rolling his eyes.

A fresh surge of anger made me rise to my feet. “Stop it. I never said that!”

“Stop what? I’m telling the truth. You have this rosy vision of what the world should be, and it just isn’t like that. You can’t make everything perfect. That isn’t how the world works. Where there is light, there must be darkness. Goodness only exists in contrast with evil. Until you accept that, life is only going to disappoint you.”

“Life has already disappointed me,” I said bitterly, trying to flex my injured hand. The fingers barely moved.

“So what are you going to do about it?” He stepped closer. “What are you going to do about the fact that life is terrible and unfair?”

“I need the Fatestone. If I can get the Fatestone, I will have the power to decide.” The more I thought about it, the more certain I was. I didn’t know exactly what the version of the past was that I wanted to write, or how to mitigate collateral damage, but I knew I could change the past to create a better present than the one I lived in now, even if evil and darkness still existed in the world.

“Giving your blood to the king was really the only way to do that?” he said darkly. “And now you’re definitely going to write a new past?”

“Stop pushing me. I don’t have everything figured out yet,” I said. I had done the best I could under the circumstances.

He stepped nearer, almost as close as he’d been to me last night. “I need to know. Your fate is tangled up with mine now. At least until you rewrite the past.”