Beautiful Lies

Aris’s cottage smelled the way it always had: parchment, dried herbs, and the particular mustiness of a man who valued books over fresh air. Eri lowered herself into the chair she had claimed as a child, the one with the cracked armrest and the view of his cluttered shelves.

“Now will you show me?” she said.

“Show you what?”

“Aris.”

He almost smiled.

The night Gregor came, she had asked to see what was in the jar. She had asked four times. Aris had refused four times. The thing lost a little of its light whenever the lid came off, he’d said, and he was not going to spend what was left of it on her curiosity. So she had announced that she would go and fetch samples of her own, and they had both pretended that was the reason.

“You took six jars with you,” Aris said now. “You have come home with none, and you have not mentioned them once.”

“They’re at the bottom of a cave.”

“You didn’t go for samples.”

“I went for samples.”

“You went because someone described a thing to you, and you could not bear that you hadn’t seen it for yourself.” There was no heat in it. “It is the best thing about you. It is also going to get you killed.”

She had no answer ready for that, so she didn’t give one. “Is it still alive?”

“Barely, last I looked.”

“Good. You said it fades whenever it’s opened. I want to watch it happen. I want to see what kills it.”

He went down to the cellar. He came back up with a ceramic jar and set it down, not in front of her, but at the far end of the table, beneath the window, where the moonlight lay across the wood in a pale stripe. He did it without comment. Aris never did anything without a reason, and he never told you the reason if there was a chance you’d find it yourself.

Even through the clay she imagined she could see it. That faint silver pulse.

She opened the jar.

The moss pulsed once in her palm, weak and desperate. Then the light went out of it like something bleeding. Brown. Dry. It crumbled between her fingers.

She had watched this already today, all the way up the shaft, one fern at a time. The closer to the surface, the faster they died. As if something up here was waiting for them.

“It’s the same,” she said quietly. “Days in a sealed jar in the dark, and it lives. Seconds out here, and it’s dead.” She looked up. “It isn’t the cave that keeps them alive. It’s what the cave keeps off them.”

“And what is that?”

“I don’t know. Something up here. The deeper I went, the healthier everything was. Huge. Bright. Not surviving, Aris. Thriving. And the moment I brought it up…” She tipped her hand, and the dust slid off.

Aris said nothing. His eyes had drifted to the window. Beyond the glass, faint against the dark, the rainbow shimmered and whipped between the moon and the rooftops, the way it always did.

“The rainbows are beautiful,” Eri heard herself say. The words came fast. Defensive. “They are the only beautiful thing we have in this place.”

Aris turned back to her. Raised an eyebrow.

Silence.

“What?” There was an edge in it that she didn’t bother to file down.

He watched her a moment longer. “Nothing,” he said quietly.

Her hands had curled into fists. She made them open.

She didn’t know why she had said it. Nobody had accused the rainbows of anything. The words had simply come out, the way a knee jumps when it’s struck. Like something that had been put there.

Aris pulled a battered journal off the shelf. “Forty years I have watched crops fail. There is no bad season in Kraeta. No frost, no drought, never a day too hot. It is growing weather every day of the year, and every year, everything comes up stunted anyway.” He turned pages. “I sent seed overseas once, to friends. I thought it might do better in other ground.”

“Did it?”

“It sprouted. Then it died. Every last one.” He looked at her over the journal. “Seed from here can’t live there. Your plants from below can’t live up here. What do those two things share?”

She worked it through. The cave. The surface. The dust on her palm.

“It’s not the soil,” she said slowly. “It’s the place. Whatever is doing this, it’s on the surface, and it’s here.” And then the rest of it fell into line. “The wasting sickness. Everyone knows you can’t leave Kraeta without sickening. And outsiders who come here sicken too. They adapt or they go.”

“And if they stay long enough to survive it,” Aris said, “their bodies learn Kraeta. After that, they can never leave either.”

“Just like the seed.” She could see the whole shape of it now. “It’s the same thing. Whatever is killing the plants is doing it to us.”

“And has been,” Aris said, “for a very long time.”

Eri stood. Her legs held. Something else didn’t feel steady. That moment by the window, the words that had come without her, sat in her chest like a bruise.

“Dawn’s early,” she said. “I should go.”

Aris nodded. She had her hand on the door when he spoke again.

“Tell your father you’re home.”

“No.”

“Eri.”

“Don’t, Aris. Not tonight.”

“It is never tonight.” He leaned back in his chair, but his eyes had gone sharp. “He will want to know you’re safe.”

“Then you tell him. I’ve had more coherent conversations with a barnacle.”

“That man is not a barnacle. He is your father.”

“Then he’s had my whole life to mention it.”

“And what would you know about it?”

“I know the good days are the worst ones.”

Aris said nothing.

“When I was little I thought it was me. I thought there was some right way to be, and if I could find it, he’d stay. Because some days he did, Aris. Some days I’d walk in and he would look up and actually see me. He’d ask what I was reading. Once he laughed at something I said, a real laugh, and I carried it around with me for a week.” She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the dead moss on the table. “And then the next morning it would be like talking to a wall that someone had built overnight. Every single time. It took me years to notice that part. The cold never came out of nowhere. It came right after. The better the day was, the worse the week that followed it.”

She brushed the dust off her palm.

“So I worked out that the wanting was the problem. Not him. Me, wanting it. If I don’t go to him on the good days, there’s nothing for him to take back. I haven’t let him give me anything in a long time. It’s easier.” A pause. “It really is easier.”

“Eri…”

“So no. I won’t be going up to tell him I’m home. He wouldn’t know what to do with it. If he even cares.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

It stopped her. Aris wasn’t dry anymore, and he wasn’t patient. The gentle old scholar had stepped out of the room, and the man left in his place was someone she had only met a handful of times in her life, always when she had been at her very worst.

“You noticed all of that. Every piece of it, and you were right about every piece. And in all those years it never once occurred to you to ask why a man would do such a thing? That there might be a reason?” He got to his feet slowly, like a man lifting something. “There are things moving in this kingdom that you know nothing about. Burdens your father carries alone.”

“Then why doesn’t he…”

“Because he can’t.”

It was barely above a whisper, and it cut deeper than shouting.

He checked himself then. She saw it happen: the look of a man who has said one sentence more than he meant to. When he went on, his voice had changed. Softer. Older.

“Rhen. Your mother. She was the kindest person I ever knew. The whole kingdom loved her, and not because she was queen. Because she made people feel seen.” He looked away. “When she left, something broke. In the kingdom. In your father. In me.” A pause. “I had a chance at a family once. A long time ago. I chose to be useful here instead.” The shrug that followed didn’t quite land. “Some choices you make so young, you don’t notice you’re making them forever.”

He met her eyes again. “You were too small to remember who she was. I remember. And I know what it cost him to lose her.”

For the first time in her life, he looked old.

“Someday you’ll understand why he is the way he is. Not today. Not while you’re still so sure that your pain is the only pain in the room.”

She stood in the doorway with her face burning.

“I…”

“Go home, Eri. Sleep. I’d tell you to be careful tomorrow, but I’d be wasting breath, so I’ll say this. Come back to us.” He turned to his desk. “And while you’re lying in the dark tonight, ask yourself what else you might not know.”

She left without another word.

The castle stood over her, black against a sky that was never fully dark. High above the courtyard, her father’s study window glowed.

She looked at it for longer than she meant to.

Then she went the other way.