Ravenous (Taint of the Gods #1)

57. RIEKA

57

RIEKA

R hydian hadn’t been the same since we left Henry with Jonah. That was what Lily had called her son, after Rhydian and her father. She had tried to explain her reasonings for leaving him at Gerhold Hall to Rhydian—to be with other children and breath fresh air, to run when no one was chasing him, to live without fighting to survive. Gerhold could give him that. Jonah would see to it. Kris would see to it. Henry was born without a collar, and Lily wanted to keep it that way.

Rhydian didn’t object. Henry was Lily’s son. She was doing what she believed was best for her child. But he didn’t deny that he could see that the alternative was worse. Regardless of Eydis’s presence in The Gardens , Lily grew up without a mother. Rhydian had not.

He had added Jae’s face to his wall of the lost the day we returned. And as if he couldn’t break my heart anymore with his grief, the next day there was a black charcoal wolf beside it.

For Tiny. He held me for what seemed like a day as my grief attempted to consume me, stroking my hair, kissing my head whispering words of comfort I could never tell myself. He held me until my tears finally dried and I could smile at my brother's portrait. It would be a rare moment of solitude between us in the weeks to come.

Rhydian turned inward after that day, to his thoughts and his notes, intent more than ever on finding the answer to the other part of the collar code. He didn’t cut me out, but he didn’t let me in either. I’d theorised what the message on the console had meant—whose bio-organic component was required—but we’d all come to the same conclusion. The gods had designed the collars, so it must not only be their language that unlocked the collars but their cells as well. And we were never getting those.

I even gave the collar I had collected from my first hunt to Emil to see if there was anything he could discover about them, and after seeing the magnificent wings he had built for Saska, I thought it was worth trying. But all he managed to do was burn a hole in The Engineering Room floor when his tampering set it off.

The only solution was to find a loophole. I took it upon myself to read everything they had on Gods’ Tongue on the train. But after two weeks of scouring every book and note, every scrap of paper on the train on the topic, even an annotation by the first Imaris heir to reside on the train, claiming the gods had desecrated his home to punish his family, I’d found nothing other than a reinvigorated hatred for the gods.

Knowing I couldn’t give up, I changed tactics and decided to go through the entire library. I didn’t care how long it took. Even if the answer lay in the index page, or an off-hand comment scribed in the margin of some unrelated book, I was going to find a way to unlock the collars.

Rhydian had stopped sleeping in our bunk which had made my nightmares so much worse. I’d resorted to spending almost every night in his office, falling asleep at his desk whilst he slept in his armchair, just to stave off the dreams. The nights I did dream, I’d awaken to find him asleep, not by my side, but on his mother’s bench in The Gardens , his head on her lap.

I’d tried to distract myself from my failure by visiting MedCom with my bunkmates. Hentirion still hadn’t woken up yet. Sal, who was now aware of his T'eiryash status, claimed his body was still behaving like it should given how much power his blessing had exerted. She still expected him to wake, which was a relief. Now whenever I visited I would read to him. From anything I could get my hands on. But in particular, the work he was writing about me, about us. So much of it was simply musings, and though I wasn’t sure if he would have approved, as I read I left little annotations in the margins where I thought of something he might find amusing or what I thought needed further clarification or correction. Reading had been something my mother had done whenever I was sick and it had always helped me. I didn’t know if it was helping him though. Whenever I tried to reach his mind I found silence, as if I was trying to converse with a stone wall. But I kept reading to him anyway.

Farox had healed well. The morning Sal gave him the all-clear, he returned to training with Saska and S’vara in The Fight Hall . We may have been done with the train, but The Core still forced us to participate in the Hunt. Their new favoured location was The Old Capital. They drew one hunt every day for a week after the raid on the factory, but when we only lost fifty passengers during that time, they cut our rations in half, and then only called one hunt a week for the rest of Frostfall, forcing the Runners to go on extra supply runs.

The only reprieve we seemed to have was on Ebonmas. Turned out the darkest and coldest day of the year was the one day Kensilla couldn't be bothered to torture us, and the residents spent it drinking, gift giving, and lighting candles to prevent the God Aubryn from boarding the train and kidnapping those rude enough not to offer him a warm hearth in Frostfall. But come the dawn and The Hunt was the first thing on anyone's minds.

Tira had even started coming to training classes since her antlers had finally regrown, in part due to Frostfall's arrival, allowing her to return to a more human state. She had been wanting to learn how to defend herself without brandishing them as a weapon, and since there were no longer any children left on the train to have school classes aside from herself, she thought it was a useful waste of her time. She wasn’t a very good fighter. Frankly the only reason she probably survived this long was because she was fast on her feet. That and pure dumb luck.

But she had grown so bored with our company, and without Frey and the other children around to entertain her. She begged me to let her read some of Rhydian’s books. He had such a large collection of children’s books in the office library that the idea of refusing her felt cruel. She’d stay with me in his office when I worked, until one day Rhydian walked in on me teaching her to read. He volunteered that night to take over and let me get some sleep. When I woke up a few hours later they were still going. It turned out to be as good a distraction for him as it was for me.

For a while, I thought his behaviour was because of his revelation to his friends. He’d been isolating himself so much that I thought he was avoiding them. I’d called a small meeting with the Runners in Rhydian’s immediate circle to discuss the issue. But there wasn’t one. They asked questions out of curiosity, but whether Rhydian was a Hemopath or Human made no difference to them. Rhydian hadn’t changed. Just their knowledge about him had. I had been so relieved for him and when Rhydian had smiled and hugged his friends, I thought it was a path forward.

But I found him an hour later back in his library, scouring through another pile of books.

He’d even started going out on supply runs, completely ignoring the council travel ban for him. The council in the end gave up trying to keep him on board. With the influx of new passengers our stores were running low, and with nearly half of the new arrivals failing to return from their Hunts, their supply caches were not making it back to the train.

He would only be gone a day or two, and more times than not he returned with supplies. But he was also returning injured. I had half a mind to accuse him of seeking fights with the Hunters instead of avoiding them. Rhydian so often smelled of blood that one might have assumed he was bathing in it. When we made love, there was always a new wound that made him flinch when I touched him.

I was scared to touch him.

He was so exhausted that his taint wasn’t healing him properly.

On his last supply run, the chill of Frostfall at its peak, Rhydian had returned with a cut four inches long right across his shoulder. And it hadn’t healed the next day. Wade, who had been back for a week since his banishment had ended and had been sparring with me each morning to take my mind off of everything, had offered to go with Rhydian on the next run.

“You would do that for me after how I treated you?”

He’d smiled at me, the harsh lines of his face vanished, replaced with warmth and sincerity. “You eased Salryah’s burden when no one else could. I should like to do the same for you.”

He departed the train with Rhydian the next day and that night I used the blood shard to track him. I couldn’t leave the train with it so I tried something else, something I only ever heard rumours about.

I scryed for him. I dangled the blood shard over a map in the hopes it would show me his location. After the shard had swung like a pendulum, it finally stopped and pulled taut in my hand where it hovered over a location on the map.

Rhydian was at Gerhold Hall.

The air filled with a wail.

The wolf growled at me from over the basket, the wicker crushed under her feet, the picnic blanket torn.

A heavy weight fell in my arms and I looked down.

His starlit eyes widened as my name was coughed up through blood-stained lips.

My hand was inside of him, inside his chest cavity, his heart pulsing in my palm.

He blinked and cocked his head to the side like a curious animal

“You’re going to have to say my name eventually.”