CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I was Rickard’s student for almost seven years. He flew to Wychstar every week for two days, and we crammed in as many lessons as we could. I don’t know how he explained those absences to the war council on Kali, but he always came.
For four of those years, I was happy. He told me stories about Kali and the star system. He made me see the world in brand new ways. He found the best parts of me and amplified them, and he found my weaknesses and tried to teach me how to use them. He loved me like I had been his own child and better than my own parents had. He understood how much I wanted to be like Alexi, as good as Alexi, how much I wanted to show my family I was worthy of them.
And it was he who first told me I didn’t need them to be worthy. That I didn’t have to define myself by my mother or father or brothers. You are more than Alexi’s sister, Esmae.
Then, when Alexi, Bear, and our mother were exiled, Amba stepped in. She told me only disaster would come of my lessons and that they had to stop immediately. I understand now what she was afraid of, now that she’s told me about the vision of my death, but at the time it made no sense. She spoke to Rickard. Whatever she said, he promised her that he would stop teaching me.
I couldn’t bear it. Without Rickard, my tenuous link to Kali and my family was gone. Without Rickard, Rickard was gone.
I was convinced, utterly convinced, that home and love and family would only be possible for me if I was better than I was—less me, more Alexi. My lessons were the only way I knew how to chart a path across the stars back to my family.
And so I did the unforgivable. After everything Rickard gave me, I repaid him with a lie.
I waited until Amba said she’d be spending some time on Anga, the celestial planet where she rules the great beasts and forges the gods’ divine weapons. Time passes differently there, and what was only weeks there could be months in our time. Once she was gone, I contacted Rickard over one of Rama’s tech screens. I told him I had pleaded with Amba and she had relented. She had released him from his promise to her.
He didn’t doubt me. Rickard never lied, and he believed his students never would either. Certainly not to him.
Amba was gone almost three years, an unprecedented absence. I got three more years with Rickard.
Then came the day it all went up in flames.
I went to see him without the slightest expectation of what was to come. He looked at me, so calm and steady. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me, Esmae?”
Perhaps he would have been less harsh if I had confessed.
I shook my head and I watched as his eyes turned to fire. “You tricked me into breaking my word. Amba is a war goddess and I am a warrior. I owe her loyalty, I owe her truth. You made me break my promise. You lied to me. Not once, not twice, but every day I’ve laid eyes on you for the past three years.”
His voice rumbled like thunder and I shivered all the way down to my bones as I felt the crack of a curse. And then I remembered the old saying: The gods’ favorites can wreak havoc with just a handful of words.
“You stole knowledge you weren’t entitled to, so when you need it most, that knowledge will fail you. When you are at your most helpless, you will forget every lesson I ever gave you.”
I told him how sorry I was. I begged him to take it back.
As he left Wychstar for good, Rickard looked back at me one last time. “I understand why you did it, Esmae. I understand it was not out of malice or greed. You will always have a place in my heart.”
And he’s always had a place in mine.
“That day you won Titania wasn’t the day the curse came to pass,” Max says. His eyes are kind. “That would have been an ideal time for the curse to take effect.”
I shake my head. “It must not have been the time of my greatest need.”
“So then it’s still to come.”
A duel. A broken arrow. Blood on the grass. “I suppose so.”
“I can’t believe he did that,” Max says. He can’t reconcile the Rickard who cursed me with the one he’s known all his life.
“He loves us,” I explain. “And that’s as irrefutable as the existence of the sun. But so is the fact that he’ll never break his word. His promises will always come first.”
There’s not much either of us can say after that.