Chapter 2069: Adala’s Last Letter

Jocelynn looked up and instantly wished she hadn’t.

For a moment, her mind refused to understand what her eyes were showing her.

Adala hung from the rafters. Very still. The silver threads in her dark hair caught the light and glimmered faintly. They were the only thing in the room that seemed to move.

The cord from the bed curtains had been knotted around the beam above her. Thick, braided silk in Lothian blue, the same cord Jocelynn had seen tying back curtains in a hundred rooms of this manor, and it had bitten so deep into Adala’s throat that the skin bulged around it.

Her head hung at an angle no living neck could hold. Her face, already battered, had swollen further and darkened to a dusky purple beneath Owain’s bruises, and her split lips had gone the color of a plum. Her left eye was still swollen shut. The right was open. Bloodshot and bulging, the white shot through with red, it stared down at the overturned stool as though she were still searching for it.

Below the cord, her throat was a ruin of scratches. Long, raw furrows torn into her own skin, and Jocelynn saw the blood crusted beneath her broken fingernails and understood.

At the end, Adala seemed to have changed her mind and struggled to save herself... But the decision had come too late.

Jocelynn’s shawl lay on the end of the bed, folded into a neat square, its corners matched with Iron Kingdom precision. One of Adala’s slippers lay on the floor beside the stool. The other still clung to her foot, her toes pointed down toward the boards, a handspan above where the stool should have been.

Above, the beam creaked again, softly, as if it were tired.

The smell rose up to meet her, now that she knew what it was. The foulness of death’s final indignity, soaking the hem of Adala’s gown and dripping onto the boards beneath her. And under it, faint and sweet, the rosewater Adala dabbed behind her ears every morning.

And beneath that, the smell of the dungeons. Wet stone and rotting straw and old blood, still clinging to the ruined marigold silk.

Jocelynn’s stomach heaved. She clapped a hand over her mouth and doubled over, retching, but nothing came up except a thin, bitter thread of bile. She stumbled backward until her shoulders struck the doorframe, and the cold wood was the only thing holding her up.

Jocelynn didn’t scream. She couldn’t. The scream was too big to fit in her throat.

On the desk beneath the window lay a single folded letter, sealed with a blob of plain wax. On the front, in Adala’s sharp, elegant hand, a single name was written.

Charlotte.

The ink had run at the tail of the final letter, smeared into a soft grey blot, as though a drop of water had fallen on it before it dried.

Jocelynn didn’t open it. She couldn’t make her hands move.

She thought of Charlotte, far away in Otker Barony, reading her father’s dreary ledgers for entertainment and going on ’adventures’ to fix the ’mistakes’ she found. She imagined Charlotte breaking that plain wax seal and reading whatever Adala might have written there, in her last hour, to the person she treasured most.

In her mind’s eye, Jocelynn could see Charlotte’s round face crumpling with the letter pressed to her chest, and she could all but hear the broken, wailing sound she would make.

Jocelynn had never even asked her about Charlotte. Not really. She’d been too busy smiling at Owain. But somewhere in the back of her mind, a different image lurked... An image of two young ladies wrapped in each other’s arms and gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes, confessing to a love that their families and the Church would never allow...

Adala and Charlotte... She remembered. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Nothing was supposed to have turned out like this...

Jocelynn sank to her knees on the cold floor, and the scream finally found its way out of her, and it didn’t stop. It tore at her throat until her voice cracked and broke and went ragged, until it was barely a voice at all, and still it kept coming. Something cold and wet soaked through her nightgown at the knees, and she knew what it was, and she didn’t move.

"No," she sobbed. "No, no, no, this isn’t the life I wanted! None of this! I never wanted any of this! It’s wrong! It’s all wrong!"

"Is it?"

The voice came from the shadows in the corner of the room. Slow. Patient. Calm.

The Olive Seed stepped into the light. Its smooth, silver-grey face was turned up toward the rafters, toward the still shape hanging there, and it regarded Adala for a long moment with its dark, empty hollows.

"She was so clever," it said. "So brave. She defied her own father before an entire court, you know. In another life." It turned its wooden face toward Jocelynn. "In this one, she came to serve you. Because you were safe. Because you were her friend. Because you could protect her from the men of the march. All of them but one..."

"Stop," Jocelynn begged.

She pressed her hands over her face, but the stench was in her nose and her mouth and her hair, and there was no shutting it out.

"Every life you touch in this world, Jocelynn, he touches too. Samira. Hugo. Adala." The Seed crouched beside her on the floor, close enough that she could smell the faint, green scent of olive wood. "Your sons."

"I didn’t do this," Jocelynn sobbed. "He did this. He did..." Her eyes kept dragging back up to Adala’s face. She couldn’t stop them.

"And who put him here?" the Seed asked. "Who whispered in his ear, so that he would have no wife but you? Every door in this manor is open to him because you opened the first one."

"Stop it!" Jocelynn shouted.

"Oh, Jocey," the Olive Seed said, in Ashlynn’s voice. In her sister’s warm, gentle, loving voice, exactly the way Ashlynn used to say it when Jocelynn was small and had skinned her knee. "You poor thing. Would you like to leave?"

Jocelynn stared at it through her tears.

"Yes," she whispered. "Yes. Please. Anything. Just take me away from here."

The Olive Seed smiled with her sister’s mouth.

"Then let’s go back to the beginning," it said.

"No, wait," Jocelynn gasped, as the room began to dissolve around her. "Not there. Not there, please, anywhere but..."

The Olive Seed only smiled.

"Where else would we go?" it asked. "Everything you see here began in that room. If you want to escape it, you’ll have to start there."