Chapter 40 #2
‘Let me be clear.’ I signed naudiz and ansuz again, just to make sure the spell would hold, and then a longer sequence that included berkana and ing.
Birth and earth. A seedling clawed its way out of the skin of his forearm, growing rapidly into a clinging vine that I observed with unsettling detachment.
‘We could be done with this quickly. You tell me what I need to know, and I’ll kill you without further unpleasantness.
Alternatively, you don’t tell me, and in that case you’ll be dying for a long, long time. Any preference?’
He was sobbing on the floor now, a broken mess of a man – cowering from me even as the vines broke out of his other hand, his neck, his shoulder.
And of course I shouldn’t feel sorry for him.
He was a servant of Lesceron Garnot; he was a man who sneered at women.
I’d rather have chewed on nails than put myself alone in a dark alley with him.
But he was also dying, shaking with fright, entirely on his own in a dank, dark cell, and even through the numbness of my mind at work, I knew very few people in the world deserved a fate like that.
I made it short.
It was the least I could do.
‘I’ll allow you to speak now,’ I said, taking care not to let my voice waver. No time for weakness – villainous witches didn’t look sorry. ‘Make sure your words are the ones I need to hear. Where is the girl?’
Gebo, ansuz.
A ragged, sobbing exhale shivered through the cell. But even if his voice had returned, the guard seemed to have lost the capacity for coherent speech, crying quietly instead, hunched over his hand as vines and cracks of red ice spiderwebbing across the skin.
‘Kador.’ Naudiz, mannaz, hagalaz – just a quick intervention to dull the pain. ‘The girl. What cell is she in?’
‘Not … Isn’t …’ He was forcing out the words between wheezes of air. ‘She … no longer … here.’
‘What?’ Durlain snapped.
I gestured at him to move back – a thoughtless, ungentle gesture, but he stiffened, then retreated as I turned back to the guard. ‘Where is she, Kador?’
‘Up,’ he gasped. ‘Berthelam said she needed a better place. Not cold. Not wet. So they took her … they took her …’
We stood frozen, Durlain and I. Staring at him in numb, mutual silence. Waiting for a dying man to gather his dying breaths.
‘Royal wing,’ Kador keened. ‘She’s in the royal wing. Just … please. Please.’
I knew that plea, too.
I killed him with a flick of my fingers.
The memories were more sickening than the poison fog.
I barely even registered the sharks, the Maw, the grime and sweat gathering on my skin as we made our way back to the palace in grim silence.
The guilt and sickness hit harder than it had in years, as if I was that seventeen-year-old girl again, killing a man for the very first time – the look in Kador’s eyes sticking to layers of me even the fumes couldn’t reach.
I’d run, for fuck’s sake.
I’d left that life, tried so, so hard to forget all about Aranc’s witchling bird and everything she’d done to the world …
and now she was back. Now I’d shown that monster beneath my skin to Durlain, too, and I wasn’t quite sure how he could still stand to look at me – which he did.
Every other second, and I wished he’d fucking stop.
Neither of us had spoken by the time we reached the little door.
Only when we’d slipped inside, covered in unspeakable foulness, did Durlain say, ‘There’s a bathroom around the corner here.’
Of course he’d taken note of fucking bathrooms around corners.
I staggered after him with a rage I couldn’t fully make sense of – why couldn’t I be that sort of useful, making plans, finding places to hide?
Why did I have to move around the world the way I did, all knives and magic that could turn so very ugly, killing people too broken to even plead for mercy?
The bathroom was much too grand and spacious for a place solely intended to take a piss in, and somehow that made everything worse.
Durlain locked the door behind us, filled the sink with hot water, pulled a pile of towels from some small cabinet. Then said, ‘Come here, Thraga.’
I turned mechanically, not realising what he was about to do until coarse, wet cloth brushed firmly down the side of my face and took the oily residue of the outside air with it. Durlain Averre, washing me. I gasped, and it came out rather like a sob.
‘It’s alright,’ he said quietly, wiping my forehead, my other cheek. ‘I promise it is.’
It was not alright.
‘I … I’m sorry you had to watch that.’ There. Grammar, Thraga. A whole damn sentence, even if my voice was high and squeaky and didn’t sound remotely like my own. ‘That must have been very unpleasant for you – I didn’t want to—’
The towel stilled. ‘For me.’
‘Well.’ I sniffed and smelled sulphur. ‘Someone tortured you to death once.’
He seemed to consider that for a moment.
Then sighed and went on wiping me clean, my face and my neck, then my hands, my hair, my ruined clothes. The water in the sink had turned the colour of bile when he was done; he pulled the plug, opened the tap again, and chucked the towel into the farthest corner of the dark, sparkling room.
‘You do realise this is not news to me?’ he finally said, wetting a second towel to wash his own rune-distorted face. ‘I knew Aranc had you pass on his messages from the start. Should I be surprised you’re as good at it as you are at everything else you do?’
But he didn’t know.
Fuck. He really didn’t know, and he’d washed me, and why, why hadn’t I just told him everything about my time at Estien from the start?
‘Dur …’
He must have seen something in my face; a shadow drew across his stranger’s features as he began wiping slime off his horns. ‘As much as I hate to ask this – can it wait? We’re still very much running out of time.’
Shit. We were.
I let my back sag against the wall, sank into a crouch, and mumbled, ‘It can wait. What do we do?’
‘Depends.’ He was washing the cuffs on his sleeve, with careful, measured precision. ‘Our first option is to call it a day and leave, of course. You once again didn’t sign up for this.’
‘Fuck off,’ I said numbly. ‘You just washed my face, you self-sacrificing little shit. I’m not going anywhere. Do you have a plan?’
Even beneath the distortion of my magic, the expression on his face was achingly familiar – a spark of exasperated amusement breaking through the tightness of over-stretched nerves. ‘We might have to go see Aunt Thionne.’
I blinked.
He didn’t elaborate, grabbing another towel and kneeling to bring his boots back to a somewhat presentable state.
‘You actually do have an— Oh. Your mother’s sister?’ I paused, waiting for him to reply, and received nothing but a nod. ‘Hell. Why didn’t we ask her for help from the very start, if that’s apparently an option?’
‘We’re not asking her for help,’ he said flatly, rising with an appraising glance at his partly restored appearance. ‘She’s slavishly loyal to Lesceron and hates me with a passion. I killed her beloved sister, you see.’
‘You— What?’ My voice slammed against the low ceiling. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. Did she tell you—’
‘Don’t worry about it.’ He didn’t look at me as he spoke. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Oh, so she told you while you were a child?’ I said shrilly. ‘Yes, that definitely makes it better. You didn’t, Dur. You fucking didn’t, and—’
He closed his eye, a look of what almost looked like pain crossing his features. ‘Could we leave that be for now?’
I slammed my mouth shut.
‘Thank you.’ A thin smile. ‘As I was saying, we’re not going to ask her for help.
She won’t give it; she’d have been useless for the dungeons.
But if she finds out I’m alive again, I’m rather sure she will have us sent to her rooms so she can give me a two-hour dressing-down before handing me over to Lesceron, which means—’
‘We’ll be in the royal wing,’ I finished.
A flick of his hands that seemed to say, voila.
I squinted at him. ‘Are you saying I get to knock her out while she’s calling you a murderer?’
‘I wasn’t precisely saying that,’ he said with a mirthless twitch of a smile, ‘but if you insist …’
‘Oh, I do. I absolutely do.’ It was suddenly easy to get to my feet again – the sense of tainted skin still there, but fainter now, balanced out by the fury fizzing violently through my veins. ‘And stop scrubbing buttons – you’re presentable enough, and we don’t have time. Let’s go.’
Durlain didn’t precisely know the way to the royal wing.
That didn’t quite matter, though, because it was easy to find; all we had to do was pick the most luxurious-looking door at every corridor we walked through.
Simple bronze sconces made way for crystal chandeliers as we moved deeper into the palace.
The dark walls became more and more covered in portraits and elaborate tapestries, guards and servants appeared with increasing frequency, whereas everyone else’s numbers dwindled until only the occasional silk-wrapped noble passed us by every now and then.
‘Need to put on my usual eyepatch,’ Durlain muttered beside me as we passed an empty sitting room covered in dark blue velvet. ‘We can’t bluff through anyway, the guards know every member of the family. And Thionne will need to see my face.’
So I stood guard at the door of the room, back towards him, as he changed; I knew he wouldn’t want me or anyone else to steal glances at his uncovered face. It was a relief to see him emerge looking like himself again, even if it also felt a lot like sauntering bare-skinned into a scorpion pit.
‘Almost there now,’ he said in a hushed voice as we walked on to where the corridor split in two before us.
‘I recognise this part – we passed through here on our way to Lesceron. These are the guest quarters, and the entrance to the royal segment of the palace is around the corner after this turn. Once we’re in—’
A door opened, somewhere close.
A male voice shattered the stifling silence.
Durlain froze beside me. Actually froze, like a rabbit who’s heard a twig snap, eye widening so abruptly I thought for a moment he’d faint.
I grabbed reflexively for Ehwaz. ‘Dur?’
His hand shot out – gripped my wrist with bruising force as he staggered a step back, then froze again, eye darting frantically around.
I saw what he saw. A row of doors, too many to try them all and hope we’d find one of them unlocked; a straight corridor, too long to make a run for it.
The voice and accompanying footsteps were yards away.
A cheerful, amiable voice, not the sort one would expect to scare the living wits out of Durlain of all people – unless …
Oh.
Oh, no.
The man stepped around the corner, speaking to the tall fireborn woman by his side … and the pieces fell into place with a heart-stopping bang.
Because I’d never met the fellow in my life, but I knew that voice, cheery and charming and just a fraction sheepish.
I knew the dimpling smile on his open face.
I’d seen all of them before in a humble inn miles and weeks away from here, placating even proud Seidrinn loyalists, plastered on features that weren’t his own …
Durlain’s fingers dug with forceful panic into my wrist.
The two fireborn nobles stopped mid-stride, blinking at us as if two walking sharks had shown up in their midst.
‘Why, Durlain,’ Ancelet Averre said, befuddled. ‘I thought you were dead?’