VI.

i want your psycho

your vertigo stick

want you in my rear window, baby you’re sick

i want your love

love love love

i want your love 

Roran pretends to be sane.

He pretends everything’s fine, because it’s what his staff needs to hear, and it’s what his kids need to hear too. But everything is not fine. His wife lies dying, and his mistress has fled the castle in the company of the only healer with enough power to save her. It’s not bribing the physician exactly, but it’s damn close.

Birgit has sent her message loud and clear: if your wife dies, we can be together in the daytime. No more sneaking around.

She’s right. If Katrina doesn’t recover, he’ll be available to marry again after a suitable mourning period. His children will have a strong, no-nonsense stepmother who would never indulge their weaknesses—a stepmother who’d make them into fine, upright leaders of society.

But he cannot—will not—just let Katrina die. They may not love each other anymore, but he doesn’t hate her either, not enough to kill her. And to his conscience, it will be murder if he does not fight her illness with all the kingdom’s power.

He sends messengers out to all the skilled magicians he knows. The half-elf hedgewitch in Narda, old Gertrude’s onetime student who now lives in Dauth, even the elusive Elva Starbrow. He’s sick to think that he didn’t think of summoning Angela until Birgit spirited her away.

But he doesn’t send a messenger after them. He doesn’t want Birgit to know she’s winning.

***

“Papa, is Mama going to die?”

Cadoc asks the question from his own sickbed. The rat’s bite has given him one of the dreaded diseases, or at least he thinks so; the healers told Roran that the boy has worried himself ill in sympathy to his mother’s more grave condition. His symptoms are only a fever and a lack of appetite—thankfully, not infection.

“No, Mama’s not going to die,” Roran says bracingly. “And neither are you, young scamp, so don’t even think about it.”

“But Papa,” Cara asks solemnly, “how do you know?”

The other three faces looking at him across Cadoc’s cot are all asking the same question. Roran sighs.

“I know because the best healers in the whole world are arriving as we speak,” he says. “They’re going to fix your mama, and she’s going to get better and we’ll all be fine again.”

And maybe we’ll even try to be a family again.

Mira climbs across Cadoc’s legs to nestle in Roran’s lap. “For real, Papa?” she lisps.

“Of course. You just be my brave princess, and you’ll have your mama back before you know it.”

Cadoc’s nursemaid interrupts at that point. “All right, all right, back to the nursery with all of you,” she orders. “Your brother needs rest. Your Majesty, if you wouldn’t mind—”

“Of course.” Roran sets Mira back on her feet and stands up. “Feel better, Cade,” he murmurs, ruffling the boy’s close-cropped curls.

Leaving the room with the rest of his children pressing close to his sides, he feels a strong glow of protective, paternal love. The fact that his marriage was failing was no excuse for the way he ignored these children—each with their own flaws, yes, but every one of them young and bright and full of infinite potential. And each of them irrevocably his own.

Caught in this rush of sentimental emotion, he kneels and draws the three youngest to him in a wide, squashy hug. “I love you all,” he admits, the words as much a surprise to his own ears as they are to his kids’. “I love you so, so much.”

Cara, after only a slight hesitation, joins the hug by wrapping her arms around Roran’s shoulders from behind.

He’s not sure he ever actually hears them say the words back, but for the first time he feels them, in the deepest part of his heart. And that’s enough.

***

Elva Starbrow arrives that very day.

This is a surprise to Roran, who knew it’d be a long shot if his message even reached her. To have her be the first arrival is unexpected, but he chooses to consider it a blessing.

The girl once called Witch Child is about twelve years of age, or at least that’s what most people say. But in physical appearance she is a grown woman of eighteen, strange and deadly beautiful. Though her black hair, carelessly chopped above her shoulders, looks like she took a knife to it in the dark, it’s impossible to ruin the effect of her gaunt figure, tough and wiry, and the angelic face with those mesmerizing purple eyes. An overhanging chunk of hair doesn’t quite cover up the silver-white star on her forehead, a memento of the curse that caused her to grow up before her time.

Trailing in her wake is what’s left of the man who was once Thorn’s Rider. When his dragon was killed in the battle against Galbatorix, Murtagh survived—but went mad in the process. No one saw him again for several years, until suddenly reports and rumors were flying around that he’d been sighted in the company of the Witch Child. They were a package deal from then on. Murtagh was back in his right mind, or as near to it as he would ever be, and as for Elva—well, it was arguable whether she was ever in her right mind.

Roran is, frankly, terrified to meet them.

“Thank you for coming,” he says graciously, when they’re shown into the sickroom. “You don’t know how indebted we are to you.”

Elva ignores him. She floats to Katrina’s bed—barefoot, he notices—and leans over her, fingers hovering just above the queen’s skin. “Ohhh, it’s bad,” she says quietly, and her dry voice makes it sound like sarcasm. “She might yet live, but not without help. Mur, come.”

Murtagh goes to her, a dog on command. He puts his hand to her forehead—nails cracked and dirty, he doesn’t look like much of a healer. “Infection,” he says, his tone suggesting that he is past caring. “The poison is near to her heart.”

“Can you heal her?” Roran begs.

Murtagh turns stony eyes on him. “I can,” he confirms.

“The question,” Elva says, “is whether he will.”

“If it’s payment you ask, I assure you you’ll have whatever you wish. Up to half my kingdom, isn’t that tradition?” But as Roran meets that queer gaze, he knows it’s not compensation they want of him.

“Why do you want her healed?” Elva says, barely above a whisper. “I know your secrets, Stronghammer. I know all the pain you’re hiding in here—” she lays a cool hand in the center of his chest—“but I want you to voice it. Why should you not let your wife die? You do not love her.”

“I—” Roran looks over at Katrina’s sleeping form, tossing and moaning in the throes of fever. How lucid is she? Could she hear if he confessed his infidelity?

“Is it a sense of propriety, perhaps?” Elva prompts. “Would your adoring subjects be critical if they knew their King let his wife die apurpose?”

“No,” Roran says. “That’s not it. Not all of it, anyway.”

“Then what?” Elva presses, her lips curling back to reveal white teeth. “Why do you save her?”

“Because I love my children,” Roran blurts, “and it would destroy them to lose her.”

“Liar.” She draws her hand back as if he’s dirty. “Oh, yes, that may be a factor. But that is not the true reason.”

“I can’t let her win,” Roran whispers.

Elva pauses, eyes glittering.

It’s Murtagh who breaks the silence. “Her?”

“Birgit Mardrasdaughter,” he says. In for a copper, in for a noble, as the saying went. “My—my lover. It’s her last act of revenge against me—to destroy my marriage completely. When she found out Katrina was dying, she stole my only competent healer and fled. She means for me to let Katrina die so that we can be married.”

“And why not?” Elva asks, leaning in too close. “It’s so convenient. The illness was an accident, and neither of you will be blamed if she dies—why not let fate run its course, and be married to the woman you love?”

“I can’t,” Roran says miserably. “I’m afraid.”

He realizes vaguely that he is now weeping, and curses this weird girl who has so completely unmanned him.

“Afraid?”

“I don’t trust her,” he says. Hardly knows what he’s saying now—it’s pouring straight from his heart to his lips. “I don’t even think I love her, gods, I—I like the way she listens to me, and the way she defies everyone, and I respect her, and she’s glorious in bed… but I can’t, I couldn’t truly love her. She’s too dangerous. She’s my worst enemy—she knows how to play me like a deck of cards and she’ll use it. I could never marry her. To live with her, watching my back every second, it’d—gods, it would kill me before my time… even if she didn’t stab me in the back one night.”

Elva’s face is shining with triumph.

“And what of your wife?” she asks.

“I think I can mend it with her,” Roran babbles. “I—I want to, I want to make it right. We used to be in love, we used to be happy. I want to go back to that.”

Elva puts a finger to her lips, silencing him. Without a word, Murtagh turns to the bed and puts his hand over the queen’s brow. He whispers the spell and stands rigid for a few tense moments before relaxing and taking his hand away.

“Her blood is clean,” he says, “and the wound closed.”

“Thank you,” says Roran, although he’s not sure he should be thanking them for making him cry like this. “What will you have as a reward?”

“She wakes,” says Elva, who has gone back to ignoring him.

Roran goes to Katrina’s side. Her eyelids are fluttering, and as he watches, she yawns as though waking from a restful sleep.

“How do you feel, Trina?” he asks tenderly.

She sits up slowly, looking up into his eyes.

Then she slaps him, with all her strength.

“Betrayed,” she says. “I feel betrayed, you adulterous bastard.” And without waiting for an answer, she struggles out of bed and flees to her dressing closet, slamming the door behind her.

Roran utters a foul word. It seems Katrina was not as asleep as he had thought during that conversation.

Hearing quiet laughter, he looks up at the doorway. Murtagh and Elva are grinning at each other—that scene having no doubt been of their orchestration.

“You asked what reward we would have,” Elva says, her voice as merry as he’s ever heard it. “I believe that was our reward. Thank you kindly, Your Majesty.”

And with that, the two of them are gone.

 (half psychotic sick hypnotic

got my blueprint it’s symphonic)