It was strange, the feeling coursing through her veins like molten lava, like glacial ice, like everything she had ever felt all at once; she wanted to weep, or scream, or beat herself bloody against the nearest wall, until either her body or the wall gave up fighting the good fight. The bards talked of heartache like a romantic thing, a passing malady, but none of them had ever been able to adequately convey the fact that it literally felt like something was breaking in her chest, making every ragged breath a struggle, every word a losing battle. Tears streamed down her face and blurred her vision, but she paid them no heed, storming through the keep like a woman possessed, searching, hunting both for someone that she wanted and someone that she knew she would not find.
Conlan was gone, just like that, and he would not return; he had made that abundantly clear, and her throat was still hoarse - from the shouting, of course. She refused to acknowledge the tears. And if Azabeth had not been completely blameless in his leaving, still she knew exactly who had prompted such a violent sundering, who had whispered twisted half-truths into her lover's ears and poisoned him against her.
Lelahai.
Az was going to kill her. No, she was going to maim her and leave her bleeding and ruined on the flagstones.
She blew past the guard on Lelahai's door like a storm of vengeance, her eyes staring right through the shrinking lad as if she did not see him, for she could not afford to truly look at him and see the specter of Conlan in his youthful face.
Her adoptive sister was in her bedroom, seated at her vanity in a white dressing-gown, her arms up and her fingers plaiting her long and silken ash-blonde hair. The memories of the room threatened to overwhelm Azabeth, threatened to have her on her knees and begging for mercy from the pain - but before they could overcome her, she saw Lelahai's face in the mirror, a smug sneer twisting her aristocratic features, eyes narrowed to satisfied sapphire slits.
"You," snarled Azabeth, and Lelahai let her arms fall with her hair half-braided, turning on her seat, hands folded primly in her lap.
"Yes. Me," she smiled, so sure of herself, so proud of her work. "I see that young Delaine has had a talk with you. I take it it did not go well? How tragic." She painted a mockery of sorrow for an instant on her face, and Azabeth could have gouged out her pretty blue eyes then and there.
"What have you done, Lelahai?" growled Az, prowling forward, her hands twitching and curled into bloodless claws. Lelahai's smile widened a touch, the arlessa's birth-daughter unafraid of her sister, arrogant in her fearlessness.
"Nothing that you did not engineer yourself, sister," said Lelahai, rising from the settee. "I merely told the boy the truth. Doesn't he deserve that from you? The truth?"
"You had no right!" spat the redhead, heated.
"I had every right," answered the blonde, her smile pretty and bright and cruel, like shards of broken glass in sunlight. "After all, he was originally assigned to me, was he not? And you chose him to spite me - no other reason. Well, 'Beth," and the hated nickname ground against her open heart-wounds like sandpaper, "since you were hardly going to alienate your little toy, I thought I would do him a kindness and set the record straight."
"I cared for him, you bitch," hissed Azabeth, and Lelahai's fine brows rose, her voice arch.
"Oh? Before or after you offered yourself to him, like a two-copper whore? And I hear a disconcerting lack of denial from you on my original point." Azabeth's silence was telling, the redhead's hands becoming white-clenched fists. "You never told him, did you? Your real purpose and interest. The entirety of what was between you was founded on lies, dear sister. You can hardly blame me for exposing them to light."
How she hated Lelahai in that moment, anger reducing her to incoherent quiet, unable even to defend herself had she the will to do so. How the fury burned in her chest, rising up against sorrow, threatening to devour everything she had worked so hard to achieve. Azabeth swallowed hard and dipped her head, at war with her temper, every lesson she had ever heard echoing in her ears, discipline, restraint, choose your battles, don't give her the satisfaction of seeing you angry, but Lelahai did not know when to leave well enough alone. She padded to the side a step, circling, a sneer slanted across the lower half of her face, predatory triumph glittering in her eyes. "How does it feel, to be denied what you wanted? We were raised as equals, you and I, but you must face facts: you are outclassed, when it comes to me." A cruel, cruel smile as she paused ever so briefly on bare feet. "And if I cannot have what I wish for, you cannot, either."
Lelahai, always so secure in her superiority. She was prettier, smarter, more cunning, better bred - she did not hesitate to rub it in Azabeth's face at every opportunity, that she knew who her father was - but Az was fast, far more so than Lelahai, and smarter did not mean circumspect.
Azabeth lunged, and Lelahai screamed.
Everything ran red, sped up, adrenaline humming through her veins and playing hob with her perceptions. She did not remember drawing the dagger from its hiding place in her sleeve, but suddenly it was in her hand and her fist was tangled in Lelahai's blonde hair, the other girl shrieking like a banshee, pinned under her knee and flailing madly, acting on instinct, all her lessons in defense forgotten. Then there was blood and a hank of hair in her suddenly-free hand, and Az was howling like a rabid wolf, all grief and fury, Lelahai biting her leg and clawing at her limbs but Az did not feel the pain, too far gone into the madness-place. Someone scrabbled at her shoulders once, struggling for a grip to haul her off of Lelahai, and Az whirled and struck the young guardsman in the face with a fist, making him stagger back with a bloodied nose, back and away, out of her sphere of awareness. At some point she shook her sister like a hunting Mabari shakes a rabbit, harsh and vicious and meaning to snap her neck -
- and then suddenly there was Black Matthew with his deep-chested bellow and his blackened hands, holding her knife-hand captive, prying them apart, Az kicking and screeching bloody murder the entire way. He was obscenely strong, and she could not free the dagger, but she pulled an elbow backwards, hard, and caught him in the gut (he made an "oof!" sound, as if she had smacked him in the belly with a sack of potatoes) and that tiny opening was enough to twist like a snake, out of his grasp, away and out the door and down the hall, and if she ran fast enough maybe she would outrun the rising bile in her throat -
"Azabeth!" she heard Black Matthew call after her, weakly; but no one stopped her in the corridors, and the world blurred again to nothing, nothing but pain and cold and the need to run until she couldn't run any longer.