“How can you say that?” Heat seared through my veins. I clenched my hands into fists. My fingernails felt sharper than tiger claws as they pierced into my skin. My father may have done terrible things, but he wouldn’t have done that. He couldn’t have. Not the man who raised me, the one who tended to my wounds.
“The same man who cuts off well access to control the people wouldn’t kill his own wife to avoid making himself look weak for having another daughter?” he said.
“He didn’t have a daughter. He had a son.”
Cion straightened. “It was a girl.”
I shook my head. “You’re lying.”
“My aunt was the midwife called in to assist at the birth.” His eyebrow arched up.
My mind reeled, trying to make sense of his claim, weighing it against the truth I’d staked so much upon. All I could muster was, “You’re trying to turn me against my father.”
“Isn’t that why you’re here?” he said. He gestured around us. “You’ve already betrayed your father.”
My hand twitched toward my sword as the rest of my body went stone cold. No. I hadn’t betrayed him—I’d been finding a way to impress him. I was going to show him the desert chose me. I was going to loosen Rodric’s hold over him and prove my worth because he and I were in this together. My father loved me. Didn’t he?
But then why had he chosen Rodric?
Cion’s eyes tracked the movement of my hand, but he made no move for his own sword. “My aunt had gone out to the balcony to dry some of the sheets used in childbirth. Through the curtain, she saw your father suffocate your mother before doing the same to your sister.” There was no deception in his voice, only pain. His eyes drifted toward the children at his feet. “I wasn’t a Desert Boy back then. I was just a child. But I saw the look on my aunt’s face when she rushed down from the palace. She still clutched the bloody sheets to her chest like she was holding on to the last shreds of her sanity. She hid in our house, afraid to speak about what she’d seen. My parents had sent me to bed, but I heard every word, every description of how the king had wrapped his hands around his wife’s neck and pressed his thumbs into the flesh of her throat as she lay weak and bleeding, unable to fight against him.
“I can still hear the sobs my aunt let out when she described the way your father smothered your sister. He picked her up like she was a snake that might bite him. I recall my aunt had run so quickly from the palace she’d made her bad foot worse. My aunt’s wails had lasted the entire night, but I never learned if they were from the pain in her foot or from what she’d seen. Because the next morning, she was gone. The Desert Boys had come in the night and spirited her away. For weeks afterward, the captain of the guard would harass my father, thinking he knew my aunt’s location. Eventually, one night, just as the Desert Boys had taken my aunt, the guards took my father. I never saw him again.”
“No.” My stomach tightened. I tried to swallow, but my throat was too dry. “You’re lying.” He had to be. My father wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t have done that.
“You can ask my aunt—my Bala—when we get back to the hideout. The woman you met your first day, that’s her. She came back to help Tania make the crossing in case she goes into labor. She’ll tell you . . .” Cion reached out to me.
I moved away. “Don’t touch me,” I growled.
I needed time to think. To find the lie in his words.
Tiny children slept all around us. I looked at all their miniscule forms as heat pressed in around me, making my skin sticky and unbearable. I paced the room, running my fingers through my hair. The room was too hot to think.
The children’s faces blurred together as I spun past, faster and faster. Who could kill such a small, innocent, defenseless creature?
I froze. Out of Cion and my father, who was more likely to kill a child?
I looked from Cion to the babies. We were here helping them, saving them.
No. I shook my head. Cion wouldn’t have cared about a royal baby. He wouldn’t have wanted another ruler on the throne like my father because . . .
I didn’t want to finish that thought. I clamped my eyes shut, hoping it would go away. It didn’t. They didn’t want another ruler on the throne like my father because he was cruel. Because maybe he had it in him to kill his own daughter to cover up a perceived weakness. Because there are no weaknesses in the monarchy. Isn’t that what he’d told me over and over again as a child?
I took ragged breaths. It was such an old belief that not fathering sons made you weak. Could my father really still put faith in it? Could he really have killed my mother and his own child? I cast around for some reason, some flaw in Cion’s explanation that would signal he was making this all up, but I just kept coming back to my childhood.
My father had barely tolerated me when I was little. It was only after my mother and sibling had been killed that he finally paid attention to me, turning me into a fighter. He’d thrown himself into training me. Because I was the only way to prove his reign was not weak.
I could still remember him standing before me, telling me the Desert Boys had killed my mother and brother. His hand had rested heavily on my shoulder. “You must not cry. Your strength will define you from this moment. You must not show weakness. You must be strong enough to help me find and kill the Desert Boys, and you must be strong enough to win in the arena, to secure our legacy.”
I had nodded numbly. But my father’s words spread through my body faster than scorpion poison. That was when I vowed I’d be so strong that no one could ever take someone from me again. In the middle of the desert, my heart had turned to ice. My father would never again have to tell me to be strong. I would be strong for my mother. I’d keep my promise to her. I’d be strong enough to fight back, to protect her people.
But if what Cion said was true, all those years I spent training to make my father proud meant nothing. I meant nothing to him. I was just his last chance at keeping his legacy alive. That’s why my father hadn’t killed me too. It would taint his own rule to lose both his children. Kings had been murdered far too often after failing to produce heirs or because they’d lost their heir to the desert. The traitor always justified their actions by saying if the desert had taken the king’s children, it must not want their line to rule. They would’ve come after my father next if I’d died, claiming the desert had already cut off his line. That’s the only reason he would’ve kept me.
No bruise or cut I’d received in the arena hurt more than this realization. And the more I thought about it, the more Cion’s words took hold in my mind.
How could the Desert Boys have gotten into the palace unseen? Why weren’t any guards hurt in the attack? Why would they only kill a woman and her child?
I sat down by the makeshift cribs as the certainty of it rushed through me. My stomach leapt into my throat. I fought to keep from throwing up.
I looked up at Cion.
How could I have been so blind? How could I have not seen what had been right in front of me?
I hadn’t wanted to. I trusted my father. I was going to make him proud because it was up to me to replace everything we’d lost.
But only I had lost something, something my father had taken from me.
And this whole time I’d thought Rodric was poisoning my father against me. But he didn’t have to. My father already had that venom inside him. He was just better at concealing it.
“I didn’t know,” I finally said to Cion. Tears slid down my cheeks from some reserve I didn’t know I had. I tried to wipe them away before Cion saw.
His knelt down in front of me and gently clasped my chin, turning my gaze toward him. “We Desert Boys have a saying about tears,” he said. “We say that crying is good, natural. It’s returning the water you’ve taken from the earth.”
I turned away. “Emotions make you weak, and the weak don’t survive.”
“Is that something your father taught you too?”
I nodded, not trusting my voice. Not trusting anything anymore.
Cion shook his head. “It is our emotions that give us strength. They are what drive us to make ourselves stronger.”
I prayed he was right, because a storm of emotions was blowing through me. Disbelief. Anger. Hatred. They spun around and around, each fighting to overpower the other.
“Stay here,” he said softly. “I’ll come back for you after the raid. It’ll give you time to think about things. I’ll have Insa check in on you.” He rose to leave.
Too numb to respond, I stared down at the tiny baby next to me. It still hadn’t woken up. Maybe it never would. Maybe it would die like everyone else. Like Yeri. Like my mother. Like my sister.
Unless I helped it.
Unless I changed everything.
I may not have been able to save my mother and sister, but I could save these children. This was no longer about having made that promise to my mother. It was what I wanted, what I needed to do.
“Wait,” I called out to Cion.
He turned back, one hand on the curtain to the next room.
I wiped away the last of my tears. I would shed no more for my father.
I was done being left behind and kept out of decisions by the man who killed my mother. I didn’t want his strength anymore. It was time I found my own.
“I’m coming,” I said. “These people need our help, and I’m not going to sit by while they slowly die of thirst.”
I couldn’t stand back anymore and let my father drain the life out of these people—my people—like he’d done my mother and sister. I climbed to my feet and stood before Cion, forcing him to look at me, to see the fire burning in my eyes.
Cion studied me for a moment.
I clenched my jaw and stared him down, daring him to tell me no.
Finally, he nodded. “Then let’s get going. The well’s this way.”