Silver Secrets

Chapter 33: Mel

I don't realise I'm sobbing until I try to breathe and my throat chokes up. Are these my tears, or Aster's?

"Mel!" Rowan shakes me gently by the shoulders, the panic clear in his voice. "What's wrong?"

I cover his hands with my trembling ones. "I'm all right." I try to say it firmly, but it ends in another sob. "I'm all right."

Rowan pulls me into his lap, and I collapse against his shoulder, twining my arms around his neck.

All this time, it was Aster. Aster and Captain Holanan, working together. There never was an earthquake. The psychics didn't die in some random natural disaster. It was mass murder, at the hands of one of their own, on the orders of the King. This King who was supposed to have been protecting me all this time.

My whole life has been a lie.

Rowan lets me sit there in his lap until my tears have dried up. When I finally take a deep, calming breath, he leans back and brushes the last of my tears away with his thumbs. "Is there something we need to talk about?" he says at last, my face cupped in his hands.

I sniff, wiping my nose on my sleeve. "Yeah. A few things."

Wordlessly, Rowan gets up and fumbles around in the dark for a few moments, before there's the fizz of a flame, and the room is illuminated by a candle in a nook in the wall. In a way, the dancing shadows are worse than the pitch blackness of the night. They're too ghostly.

Rowan returns to my side and slips his arm around my waist. "Start from the beginning," he suggests. "What just happened?"

I sigh. "I just saw some of Aster's memories, from years ago. I had them when I woke up earlier, but I only just went though them."

"You had some of Aster's memories in your head," Rowan says flatly.

"I know how it sounds, but..." I trail off as it dawns on me. "She put them there. She said she was looking at how much power I had. Remember when she did that thing and we both sort of collapsed?"

Rowan nods, pressing his lips together. I'm sure he remembers that day only too well.

"She must have planted them in my head then." She always said the mind was like a house. The thought that she trespassed that far into my mind and left her memories there fills me with rage. "Rowan, she wanted me to find those memories. It was practically a confession."

"A confession to what?"

"Murder."

Rowan goes very still. "You said there was no earthquake. Aster did that? She murdered an entire village?"

"Captain Holanan did, but she helped. She blocked everyone's powers, so he and his men could kill them." She practically confessed even while we were staying with her—she said magic could be blocked, that it was very difficult. Why didn't I realise something was wrong then? I start braiding my loose hair, just for something to do with my hands, because it's the only way I can stop them clenching into fists. I grew up as a servant with no family to speak of, in a city that hated me and everyone like me. It's Aster's fault. All of it. "I think she's more powerful than either of us realised."

Rowan sighs and leans back on his hands. "I'll say. What do you want to do about it?"

"What do you mean?"

"If what Aster showed you is true, people should know about it. This was obviously a cover-up. What else might the King be hiding?"

I consider this for a moment, but then I decide I don't care. "Doesn't matter. People don't care how the psychics died, just as long as they did." Rowan looks about to protest, but I cut him off before he can. "But I do want to talk to Aster."