Part 7 of the The World Can’t Wait series

UG finished Blood Ties on a Tuesday, or what he assumed was a Tuesday, days having become somewhat theoretical since he’d started it.

The wedding didn’t happen. He’d known it was coming for days, had turned it over from every angle, catering and flowers and the specific joy of watching two people who’d earned a happy ending finally get one, and none of that prepared him for the actual scene: the vicar had just reached the part about holding one’s peace when something answered on cue, an army pouring through a rift straight into the middle of the ceremony, led by the same eredar lord Turalyon, Alleria, and Arator had spent the whole book hunting. Sarothar, the book called him. UG had assumed, right up until that page, that he was simply a recurring nuisance the family would eventually get round to dealing with. He had not expected the nuisance to crash an actual wedding.

UG sat up so fast he nearly lost the book off his knee.

What followed wasn’t so much a fight as two people losing themselves trying to win one. Turalyon and Alleria both went further into their own Light than UG had realised either of them had, blazing and furious and considerably more dangerous to themselves than to Sarothar, who slipped back out through his own rift while they were still busy nearly destroying each other in the course of trying to destroy him. It was Arator who actually ended it, dragging both his parents back from wherever they’d gone before either of them did something permanent.

UG sat there, unable to quite believe what he was looking at. Alleria, by every account UG could piece together from the page, took what she’d seen in Turalyon considerably worse than any demon she’d faced in that whole thousand years. She gave him back the ring that same night. No wedding after all, not because anyone objected out loud, but because she’d looked at the man she was about to marry and seen, for a few seconds, exactly what he was capable of becoming.

Arator, reading between the lines, was furious with her for it, in the specific way a boy is furious with a parent who’s just done the thing he’d always secretly feared she’d do again.

UG felt, reading it, a small and unearned rush of relief. No wedding. No flowers he’d never get to ask about. No further guilt about not having gone to see Alonsus Faol yet, because now there was, apparently, a rather more pressing reason to go: the book’s final pages made it clear, in a way UG hadn’t seen coming, that Alonsus Faol wanted him to go and see Arator. In person. At Faol’s own instruction, no less, which UG found faintly alarming, given he’d never so much as met the man’s son and had no idea what one said to a boy who’d just talked both his parents back from the edge of turning into something unrecognisable.

Kids, he thought, closing the book at last. Little sods, half of them, whatever their age, however much good they’d just done. He’d have to go and see this one, apparently, and find out just what sort of a little cunt he was.

It was only on the very last page, the publisher’s note tucked in small print beneath the final line, that UG understood what he’d actually been reading. Not a romance. Not a fantasy, embellished for the shelves. A true account. Recent. Turalyon and Alleria’s wedding, interrupted exactly as written, Sarothar’s army exactly as written, all of it happening somewhere not very far away at all, while UG had been treating it as bedtime reading.

“Durrr,” he said, out loud, to nobody.

He sat with that for a while.

The Lightbloom experiments would have to wait. There was no working out doses or ratios or anything else, no getting round Lichmyface for the next batch of barrels, until the man himself showed his face again, or didn’t, whichever way it went. UG didn’t mind waiting on that front. He’d long since made his peace with the missing jaw, and with whatever quiet, hopeless effort Lichmyface still put in from time to time to hide it, angling his head a certain way, keeping to shadow when he could. UG had never said anything. He wasn’t daft. Some things a man worked out on his own and never mentioned, and this was one of them.

He put his boots on. Properly, this time.

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More in the The World Can’t Wait series

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