CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
Ravenna's name makes me struggle against the cords that tie my wrists to the iron ring, but they hold me tightly.
“Stop,” Lady Emin commands, and there was an echo of Ravenna’s power in her words. Maybe she is not as skilled as her daughter was when it comes to commanding people's minds, but there is some fragment of that skill in her, even so. I find myself stilling in response to her words.
She stares at me again, his eyes seeming like bottomless pits now. I feel as though I'm getting lost in those eyes, losing the sense of who I am and what I'm doing here.
“I wonder, did my daughter ever do this to you?” she asks, sitting back on the couch almost casually. “I know she liked to pick out new gladiators as her pets. Did she ever control your mind?”
“Yes,” I reply, the words coming out automatically. I can feel her control in me. It is not as subtle as Ravenna’s, and I get the feeling it is linked to her eyes. I force myself to look away, feeling that control break, if only for a moment.
“You worked it out then,” she says. “Not that it makes a lot of difference. You are quite helpless anyway. I could do anything I wanted with you. I'm sure I will, in time, if only because the guards seem to expect it. But, for now, I want to start by talking. I want you to understand why this is happening to you.”
I laugh bitterly. “This is happening because the emperor wants to find a way to hurt me.”
“You think this is all about you?” Lady Emin says. “As if you are someone important, someone worth the emperor caring about. Do you know how little he charged me to be your patron?”
“No,” I admit.
“Less than half of what it would have cost for a brand new gladiator, unproven in the colosseum. That is how little he thinks of you.”
Or how much he wanted Lady Emin to be the one to come here. I try to work out what the emperor’s aim is in doing this. Is it just because this is a way to hurt menow he feels I am not worth anything to him? Or is he also trying to mend fences with a noble family, all but giving me to themfor their revenge?
“Although I will admit I would have paid considerably more if required,” Lady Emin says. “My fortune was rising thanks to my daughter and… what is a little more coinon top of the investments I've already made in hurting you?”
That makes me look at her. “What investments?”
“Can't you guess?” She smiles to herself. “I knew you would be stupid, since you’re common born, and not even of the city, but I hadn't guessed quite how stupid. Lyra, the beast whisperer from… where was it? Seatide?”
There's something about the way she says the name of my village that makes me certain she knows exactly where I come from. Why would she bother to know that unless… I take a guess. A horrible, terrible guess.
“You're the one behind the bandit attacks on my village,” I say.
Her smile widens. “Ah, eventually, even the fools can get it. Good, it would be so much less satisfying if I had to come out and tell you everything. Not that they were really bandits, you understand. Paid men are much more reliable than such thugs.”
She paid mercenaries to go to my village and snatch people away. To kill young women.
“Why?” I demand. “Why hurt them?”
“Because they mean something to you,” she replies, as if it is the most obvious thing in the world. She stretches like a cat. “I have made something of a study of all the ways to hurt someone. Some of them are physical, and I'm sure we'll get to those in time, even if I can't do anything too permanent to you here. Some of them I can achieve with the use of my gifts, paltry as they are compared to my daughter’s. And some… some are just about knowing where to apply appropriate pressure in people's lives.”
She sounds so satisfied with herself for having hurt me, for having killed some of the people of my village. Hatred wells up in me, and that only seems tofeed her satisfaction, as if she is drinking it like a fine wine.
“You took someone important from me,” Lady Emin says. “My daughter was precious to me, and not just because I'm her mother. She was going to be the way that my family rose still further within the empire. When she put her plan to me at first, I was against it. I knew her father would not have wanted ithad he still been alive. I did not want to risk her safety. But she showed me that she was powerful enough to stay safe in the colosseum. To control events.”
Ravenna was certainly powerful. She made her way through the games easily, partly because her powers allowed her to control her opponents long enough to kill them, partly because she managed to control even Lord Darius, picking up the fights she wanted. She manipulated the whole games from within, giving information to her noble friends, making them money and accruing favors.
“Then she ran into you,” Lady Emin says. “The beast whisperer. The one everybody was paying attention to. My daughter was supposed to be a champion. She was meant to show herself to the world, to make her power clear, and then to have her choice of the finest matches in the empire. She could have had high office, been the wife of a powerful man, controlled whole webs of noble obligation.”
“You sound as though that would have made you proud,” I say. I can't imagine why anybody would be proud of that. Ravenna’s manipulations used to make me uncomfortablejust thinking about them. And then she tried to make me a part of them.
“Of course it would,” Lady Emin says. “From the moment I knew what her talent was, I taught her to be more with it. I started off as barely more than a commoner. But I married the right manonce he looked deeply enough into my eyes. And then, when his fortune became more interesting than he was, he died.”
Meaning that she killed him.
“But thatonly took me so far. Ravenna could have taken our family to the gates of the imperial palace. Until you killed her.”
“She was plotting to kill me,” I retort, even though I know it won't do any good. “Her plan was to-”
“To ensure that she fought you in the final of the champions trials, having suitably discredited you first,” Lady Emin says. She examines long, lacquered fingernails. “You say that as if I don't know. The trouble is you didn't have the decency to die when you should have done. It would have saved everyone a lot of pain. I wouldn't have had to send people to your village. I wouldn’t have had to pay someone to tamper with that dampener you wear. I wouldn't have had to locatethe one assassin, for human beast whisperers were a natural target.”
“You sent Callus?”
She laughs then. “Do you think he just showed up by himself? That he simply chose to be here? That no one helped him to get insidewithout anyone realizing what he was?” She sighs. “It would have been cleaner had he succeeded. Although I suppose it robs me of a certain amount of satisfaction. I'm going to hurt you now. And if you try to stop me in any way, I'm sure the guards will be happy to help me.”
She stands, taking a thick wooden cane from the couch on which she's sitting. She beats me then, hitting me again and again with surprising force, hard enough that I can feel the bruises rising almost from the start of it. I try not to cry outbecause I don't want to give her that satisfaction, but I can't hold back after a while.
But that's the least of it. She knocks me down and looks into my eyes, forcing me to see exactly what she wants.
She plunders my memories for the worst moments, show me the moment when I was taken by the soldiers, the times I have been hurt in the colosseum, the times I have felt the lowest. She shows me the deaths of my friends.
Worse, she twists the memories. She takes moments that should be happy memories for me, and she changes them. She takes the memory of lying beside Alaric, and she twists him into a beast from nightmare, tearing me apart with claws. I try to tell myself that it's just an image, a dream, but it feels so real that I scream with it.
She shows me Alaric dying, even though I have no memory of that. She shows him executed for his crimes in a dozen different ways. She shows Rowan cut down on the sands, killed by Vex, even though I know that Rowan was the one who won the battle. She shows me these memories over and over until I can barely remember what is real and what is not.
She shows me the memory of my mother standing on a chair when I was a girl, frightened of the mice when I could not understand why she should be. Lady Emin gives a justification to that fear, because she shows a string of hungry mice and ratsrunning up the legs of the chairin a swarm so vast that someone might disappear into it. I see them biting my mother, clinging to her as they gnaw at her flesh. I see her pulled down by them, into that vast swarm, her screams blending with my own as the rats turn their attention to me.
On and on it goes, her power less controlling than her daughter’s but no less vicious for all that. I want to reach out with my powers to stop her. I want to summon a shadow cat to my side to kill her. I want to do it, but I know I can't. Lady Elara’s admonition rings in my skull. I cannot show the world that I still have my powers, I cannot let anyone see what Selene Ravenscroft has done for me.
If I summon a beast here, everyone will know that I have killed a noble. I will be executed for it, probably without even a trial. Whatever power I have, I am helpless here. I might be a beast whisperer, might have as much power as any beast whisperer alive, but all I can do is lieon the cold floor of the chamber, crying out as Ravenna's mothermanipulates my every fear.
I tried to find solace in some of my old memories. I tried to remember the incident with the mice the way it really happened, but she won't let me. Instead I spread my consciousness out among the actual mice of the fortress, trying to find a place to hide from her. I'm not sure it's enough.
I don't know how long it is before she leaves me weeping on the floor of the chamber, hurtboth physically and mentally. Lady Emin goes to the door and pauses, looking back at me with contempt.
“I think I'm going to enjoy being your patron. I'm going to break you, Lyra. I'm going to summon you to my villa, of course, and there I will have far more inventive ways to hurt you. Perhaps I will evenhave the men I have sent to your village bring some of their captives to meso you can watch them die in front of you. I will take everything you hold dear. It won't be enough to make up for you taking my daughter from me. But I'm still going to do it.”
She leaves me there lying on the floor, and a part of me just wants to lie there and weep, wrapped up in the pain she has inflicted on me. But her last words draw something else up through me. I cannot let her hurt more people. I cannot let her kill more of the people of my village.
My mind reaches out to the mice the way I did that day when I was a little girl. But I am not a little girl anymore. I am not someone who is purely peaceful, capable only of kindness. I am not the healermy mother wanted me to be.
I am a beast whisperer and, as Lady Emin heads out into the night in her carriage, the rats and mice of Ironhold go scurrying after her.