Yeah, if anyone deserved to crack, it was Cael.
Right now, he needed help pulling himself together.
Unfortunately, Rayne wasn’t in the best mental state considering what happened to Eno and his own choices when it came to Safa. Drayce didn’t appear to be much better.
Sitting on a rock at the water’s edge, Eno pulled the bag off his shoulder and dug through it for the soap. While he could move his right arm, there was little in the way of strength in it. It was mostly dead weight for now. He was determined to change that when they got home. He believed with some physical therapy, he could get some use back in it, but he wasn’t delusional enough to think that he’d ever hold a sword in his right hand again. Those days were over.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Caelan strip, leaving the blood-soaked clothes on the ground before he waded into water. When it lapped at his pale thighs, Caelan dropped to his knees so that it reached near his slender shoulders.
The king splashed water on his face and ducked under the surface, scrubbing at his hair with both hands. At least he didn’t need Eno to tell him that much. Around him, the water turned a sickening shade of pink as it was swept down toward the cliff and away from sight.
When he turned to face Eno, the worst of the dried blood was gone and he looked more like the person he’d known for the past decade. Eno tossed him the rough bar of soap. “Talk,” he ordered.
Caelan caught it with a flash of one hand, snagging it right out of the air. He held it in front of him as if he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. The emotions bubbled to the surface slowly, digging furrows across his brow and twisting up his full lips into an ugly snarl. “I’m an idiot,” he finally admitted after more than a minute of glaring at the soap in his hand.
“Why?”
“It was how she talked about Hidden Falls. I thought it meant something to her,” Caelan began in a low voice. There was no question in Eno’s mind that he was talking about the Goddess of the Hunt. Caelan started scrubbing his body with the soap, using enough force to turn his pale skin pink. “I thought maybe it reminded her of her own tribe before she became a goddess. She sounded so fond of it. I was sure she wouldn’t attack the village because of that. How could she command Safa to attack? If we were the real target, she could have waited and sent Safa after us when we left Hidden Falls.”
“She’s the mad goddess, Cael. You can’t rely on logic with her. Maybe she did it to hurt you. Maybe she did care about these people, and she felt that she had to destroy the village to get rid of a potential weakness.” Eno tossed his left hand up in the air. “Maybe she did it because the moon told her to. We’ll never know.”
“And that’s supposed to make it better?” Caelan snapped.
Eno shook his head and dropped his hand to his knee. “Would it make it easier to swallow if this was a power move? If you knew for certain that she had these people slaughtered to hurt you?”
Caelan glared at him for a second and mumbled a low, “No,” as he scrubbed at his hair.
“No so-called logical reason will ever make it better or more understandable. It just is, and it fucking sucks.”
Caelan’s hands slowed in his soapy hair. The bubbles were tinted pink around his clenched fingers. “I killed all those beasts in the Ordas. Anything living near the village. I kept…I kept thinking that she’d eventually come out and attack me. But she didn’t care about Hidden Falls or the animals that answer her commands or even Safa. She fucking bonded with Safa and she sent her to die!”
“Is it any different than what the other gods have done to you?”
Caelan stiffened and ducked under the water, rinsing the soap from his hair. Eno clenched his teeth in frustration. In his mind, the gods had used and abused Caelan from the second he bonded with Kaes in Caspagir. It didn’t matter if they had a good reason. They’d made this mess with Zyros; they should be the ones cleaning it up. Unfortunately, their concept of cleaning it up included snagging the Guardian of the Godstone.
The king surfaced, quickly shoving his too-long hair back and wiping his face. The chill of the water seemed to have failed to cool Caelan’s temper. His expression remained dark and twisted.
“Our lives are a joke to them. Regardless of Zyros’s reasons for going on Tula’s stupid quest for power, it was a game for Tula and the others. I’m just a pawn for them, too. A weapon they’ve created so I can die in place of them.”