Chapter 53
P yrok watches on from the booth seat opposite me—reclined, hands clasped behind his head, an ever-present smirk on his face I certainly don’t appreciate.
I leave the thin metal sharpening tool standing atop the linchpin embedded in my cuff, willing it to stay .
“This is it,” I murmur, attention honed as I move … my hand … slowly … away …
“You think?”
“Gut feeling.” I grasp the rock I stole from the Loff’s bouldered shore and lift it above the rod, count to three, then slam it down—
The rod skitters across the stone like a fucking arrow.
Sighing, I thump the rock on the table, scrambling for the tool to the tune of Pyrok’s deep belly laugh.
The asshole.
“Glad somebody’s finding this amusing.” I reset the scene, trying to get the cuff perfectly level so the pin will stand on end.
Still laughing, Pyrok wipes a tear from the corner of his eye. “Thirty-seven.”
“Shut up.”
Feeling the hairs on the back of my neck lift, I slash a stare around the space to see if anyone else is taking enjoyment from my erupting well of frustration.
The cozy, domed building consists of three levels, the outer rim segmented into plush leather booths—one of which we’re currently occupying—with a delightful view across the Loff I wish I could fully appreciate.
Cuff free.
A circular bar dominates the center of the room, surrounded by stools mostly occupied with chatting patrons snacking on meat skewers, sipping from tall glasses of foggy liquid, or guzzling mugs of Molten Mead. Upon my surveillance, I catch two folk looking my way, perusing my cuff, passing whispered words to each other.
Waving with my shackled hand, I flash them an exaggerated grin that drops straight off my face the moment I set my attention back on the task at hand.
Essi would’ve had this off in a heartbeat.
“Vruhn hit a nerve?” Pyrok asks, and I flick my lashes up to glare at him. He shrugs. “Your mood plummeted. Significantly.”
Such a nice way to say I’m being a bitch.
“Several,” I mutter, turning my attention back to leveling my cuff. Think I’ll pay a busker to collect my package when it’s ready so I don’t have to face the Mindweft again. Lately, folk are taking far too much interest in my life—past, present, and future.
I’m sick of it.
Kholu this. Offspring that. Let me peer into your mind and help excavate your past grievances—
No fucking thank you.
“I hear you and Veya got off on the wrong foot,” Pyrok muses, then nabs a honey-glazed nut from one of the three terracotta bowls of snacks he ordered with our first round of mead, tossing it in the air. Catching it with his mouth.
“I hadn’t eaten in a while,” I say, setting the rod atop the pin, trying to release my hold without it toppling. “She ate fruit in front of me.”
“Ahh.”
I pull my pinching hand away, slow …
Steady …
“I think you’d like her if you got to know her.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it,” I respond, not bothering to mention that I don’t intend to stay here long enough to find out. Nice city, happy folk. I admit I was wrong. But I’ve still got a hankering to punch my fist through Rekk Zharos’s chest and rip out his heart, the urge itching at my bones like a swarm of frost flies.
I pick up the stone, raise the thing, then slam it down. The rod scatters across the table to the rhythm of my sharp-tongued curses while Pyrok chuckles himself into an impending grave.
“A little help?” I growl, waving my cuffed hand at him while reaching for the rod.
With a shake of his head, he picks up his drink and drains it to the dregs. “That thing is on there for a reason, I’m sure,” he says, wiping his lips with the back of his sun-brushed arm.
“Might have something to do with the fact that I bit off the tip of Rekk Zharos’s finger,” I mutter, frowning when the sky releases a heady rumble that seems to shake the air.
I glance out the open window to my right, scouring the picturesque Loff ruffled by the wind. Since this establishment sits amongst the bouldered shore on the eastern hook of Dhomm, we have a perfect view of the swooping city. Of the western point that keeps drawing my eye—appearing desolate of civilization, completely clothed in rust-colored jungle. “What’s there?”
Silence.
I look at Pyrok, who’s now staring at me like I sprouted an extra head.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he says, releasing a full-body shiver likely attributed to the finger story.
I get it. I felt the same at first, but I’ve since bonded with the thought.
“It’s walled off.” He jerks his thumb toward the point. “A hushling lives there.”
I frown. “Really?”
“Wanna go investigate?”
I cast another glance toward the point.
Sort of.
“I want this cuff off more,” I grind out, and Pyrok pushes to a stand.
“Another drink for the long battle ahead?”
“Absolutely.” I drain my glass—the mead a rich conglomeration of smoked chezberries, hobs, and burning wood. Not too sweet or bitter. Undoubtedly the most delicious drink I’ve ever tasted. “I’ll pay you back with the change I got for trading the stolen candlestick,” I say, sliding the empty glass into his hand.
“You sure you don’t want a glass of water? It doesn’t taste like dirt here, and your cheeks are pretty flush—”
“Mead,” I murmur, turning my attention back to the cuff, lining up the rod. I doubt my purchased items will be ready before tomorrow’s rise, meaning I’ll probably be escorted back to the Imperial Stronghold for the oncoming slumber. “Please.”
The only way I’m sleeping beneath the same ceiling as his Imperial Highness without saying or doing something stupid is if I’m so utterly smashed I’m too comatose to lift my body off the pallet. I’m not usually one to drown my sorrows, but I see no point fighting the tide that obviously wants to dunk me beneath a pall of mindless oblivion.
I’m just steadying the rod again when movement outside catches my eye, my seat allowing me the perfect view of the domed lookout perched atop the mountain far above. Of the many massive hutch holes burrowed into the swooping cliff.
Twice now I’ve seen the same adolescent Sabersythe leaping from a rocky plateau cut within the bulging Stronghold—the beast’s only adornment a leather saddle blanket, perhaps getting it used to the feel of something draped upon its back.
Though interesting to watch it swoop through the sky in a giddy dance, frolicking about like it’s burning with a belly full of energy it doesn’t know what to do with, it’s not what I’ve been looking for. Sabersythes aren’t typically used for carter crossings since they can’t travel much farther south than The Fade for risk of freezing to death. They can’t stand the snow any more than a Moonplume can stand the sun—and I don’t want to go toward the sun.
I want to go away from it.
Thankfully, most major cities have a reserve of charmed, generally placid Moltenmaws trained enough to cart paying passengers to their chosen destination, escorted by the one who charmed the beast. And that Moltenmaw right there—now bursting into view from behind the mountain range, skimming through the sky as the wind ruffles its pink and red plumage, a double saddle cushioned between its feathered wings …
That’s my ticket out of here.
The massive beast lowers onto a plateau, throwing its head around to gnaw at an itch beneath its wing as Pyrok pulls the booth’s curtains closed, then settles into the seat opposite me.
“Tell me,” I murmur, pointing out the window with my rod, “is that the carter hutch?”
“Thinking of going somewhere, Moonbeam?”
My head whips around, heart plopping into my guts at the sight of Kaan reclined in the booth—hair pulled back, loose bits hanging around his fiercely beautiful face. He’s dressed in a black leather tunic that fits his frame like a second skin, stitched together with thick thread, the lines accentuating the broad scope of his powerful chest. What little sleeves the garment has are cut off across his wide shoulders, his scarred arms crossed as he watches me from beneath an arched brow.
I suck a breath into suddenly parched lungs, filling them with his molten scent that makes my heart rally.
“Hmm?” he coaxes, and I realize I’ve been sitting here staring at him, cheeks aflame, dry mouth empty of words, marinating in the stiff waves of tension undulating between us.
“I …”
Creators, it’s like he stole my tongue.
Where did Pyrok scurry off to? A big, tipsy buffer between myself and this male would be really nice right now.
“I’ve got all slumber,” Kaan rumbles, and I swear his deep, raspy voice was designed by the Creators themselves to disable me. To tamper with my insides, rearrange me into a mindless idiot. “The rest of my life, actually.”
Fuck.
“I’ve seen some of your city,” I manage to blurt—not at all what I intended to say, but that thread of conversation was going in dangerous directions.
His other brow bumps up. “And?”
“Not what I expected.”
The corner of his mouth curls into a half smile that makes me want to squirm in my seat, picturing his face between my thighs, right here on this table for everyone to hear me scream.
“Are you giving me a compliment, Prisoner Seventy-Three?”
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
“I most certainly will,” he says, and I roll my eyes, reaching for the fresh mug of mead Pyrok must’ve told him I’d asked for before feeding me to this proverbial Sabersythe—the untrustworthy asshole. I’m just wrapping my fingers around the mug when Kaan’s hand whips out.
Grips mine.
Flattens it against the table.
In another swift motion, he has the sharpening tool poised against the linchpin, the rock in his other hand, and begins tapping it with shrill, tender hits that sweep a hush over the establishment.
My brows rise, and I picture everyone looking toward our closed-curtain booth as the pin slides free.
Kaan sets the tools down while I pull back my arm, cleave the iron free, then toss it through the window, watching it splash into the Loff. I close my eyes and rub my wrist, tightening that mental sound snare on all the other clamorous clatter I have no interest in listening to right now.
Probably ever.
A smile graces my lips while I relish in the melody of Clode’s fluttering giggle …
Welcome back, you crazy bitch.
“Awful trusting of you.”
“I trust my folk, and I’m eighty percent certain you won’t kill me now that I’ve saved your life twice.”
I open my eyes, smile gone as I look into his intense ember orbs. “Depends.”
“On?”
I grip hold of my mead and drag it close to my chest. “Your kingdom may be lush and full of smiling, happy folk, but I doubt you’ve experienced life under your brother’s reign. Are you complicit in the way he snatches children from their mahs at the tender age of nine?” I ask, cocking my head to the side.
All the color seeps from his eyes, leaving cold, sooty coals.
“A whisper of power and they’re immediately snatched from screaming parents and replaced with a bucket of bloodstone. Conscribed. Carted off to Drelgad where they learn how to speak murdering words, practicing on small, fluffy creatures. Ripping out that delicate part of a youngling’s heart that can never be replaced—turning them into true, tortured monsters.”
“Raeve—”
“Did you know,” I say, gesturing to the hole I sliced into the shell of my own ear, “that younglings confirmed as a null are held down and clipped? That this becomes a marker for vulturous folk who target them, coaxing them into Undercity battle pits with vacant promises of enough bloodstone to feed their families. Discounted folk otherwise forced to live in the Undercity. Where the air is too thick. Where there is no sun, and every slumber is a gamble on whether or not this is the time that you get woken—immobilized by a hushling squatting on your chest, gently slurping your brain through your nostrils.”
The wind begins to gust, tilling into a violent swirl that snaps at the curtain, Clode echoing my rage with a roiling song of sharp words and high-pitched squeals.
“Or worse,” I rasp with a clash of thunder, “that some skeevy, more powerful fuck might take liberties in the dark where innocence goes to die—all because your dear brother cares only about his plump, powerful army and how many charmed Moltenmaws he has in his military hutch.”
I lift my mead and drain half the mug in three deep gulps, wiping my mouth with the back of my arm. “If you are complicit with that ,” I say as the wind churns my hair into whipping tendrils of black, much of the light sponging away, “then yes, I will find the courage to kill you despite your smiling city, this strange chemistry between us, and the fact that you’ve saved my life twice.”
Our stares hold while the air continues to wrestle with our atmosphere, the silence thicker than water. So much so that I think the establishment may have abruptly emptied.
“This strange chemistry, you say?” he asks, the intensity of his gaze sizzling a hole in my soul that makes it hard to breathe.
I shrug.
He reaches across the table, fingers brushing against mine as he grabs hold of the mug. I let my own hand loosen, and he brings the vessel to his lips, drawing from the opposite side while he studies me over the rim.
The ball in his throat rolls.
Again.
Again.
He sets the drink down with a heavy thump. “It has taken many phases to secure The Burn and build an armada almost strong enough to rival my kin, who’d already dug their talons deep within the stone and obsidian thrones by the time I found incentive to take the bronze. A war with Cadok or Tyroth will be catastrophic, but it’s only a matter of time. My brothers deserve the same mercy my pah received, and it will be served,” he says, voice thick with a daunting tone that casts a chill across my skin. “But it will be costly.”
Silence reigns while I chew on his words.
“You don’t mean gold …”
“I mean innocents ,” he growls, and my blood turns to ice.
“Hire an assassin. Eliminate them without flair rather than a violent overthrow. I volunteer. Heartily. I’ll even do it for free.”
Then dance on their fucking corpses.
The tic in Kaan’s jaw pulses, a line forming between his brows. “There is no honor in this in our culture. A battle is either waged with brute force or between two Oahs upon a nullifying battlefield—though my brothers would never agree to that. Not since Rygun and I became Daga-Mórrk.”
My eyes widen, brows rise as my heart skips a beat.
Another.
That explains the weald.
The strength.
The—
“You’re—”
“Most importantly,” he interrupts, “they hold a strong, steady alliance forged in the womb that is unshakable. Dangerous. Deadly .”
I hear the silent message threaded between the rumbled statement. To attempt to take on the weight of either kingdom would mean war with both .
“A battle would puncture our world and scatter the skies with many more moons,” he says, dropping his voice to a haunting grind, his next words a sizzled swipe at my nerves. “It would pour flames across flesh. Drown many. Suffocate more. As you pointed out, a great number of those conscripted in The Shade’s and The Fade’s armadas are still younglings who should be running around barefoot, laughing and enjoying life. Less fluent than seasoned warriors, they would be the first to die—”
“ Stop .”
The word belts out of me so fast it scrapes the back of my throat, a strangled breath pouring into my lungs.
I break from his gaze. Gather the embers of his scorching declarations and cart them into my frosty expanse, shoving them down a hole in the ice where I don’t have to look at them.
Attention stabbed at the table, I keep shoving …
Shoving.
He leans forward, elbows resting against the stone, finger sliding beneath my chin and tilting my head, forcing me to meet his softening stare. “War is messy, Moonbeam. Even when it’s raised for the right reasons, no one truly wins until eons have passed, memories have faded, and all the hurt and loss starts to blur—”
“I understand,” I grind out. “You can stop.”
My eyes scream the word my mouth doesn’t shape.
Please.
The moment stretches while he searches my eyes with an intensity that threatens to dig beneath my skin and skim across my hardened heart.
“I’m not going to kill you, if that’s what you’re waiting for.”
The corner of his mouth kicks up again, and it’s like staring into the eye of a storm. So hauntingly beautiful you almost forget you’re in danger.
Almost.
“I’m honored. Let me know if you change your mind.”
Doubtful. I’ve actually decided his death might be one of the greatest losses this world could suffer. Not that I’m going to tell him that, of course. This … whatever between us will grow into a ravenous beast unless I starve it to death—I’m certain.
“Hungry, Raeve?” There’s a tender hopefulness in his warm gaze that grates. “Would you like to share a meal with me?”
Clearing my throat, I pull away from his touch. “No. I don’t think I should,” I murmur, reaching for his málmr, feeling the air stiffen as I lift it over my head. “Thank you for lending me this. I very much appreciate what you did for me in the crater.”
I don’t go into more detail. Certainly don’t speak of the Fate Herder or the Sól’s odd foretellings, not wanting to open that messy topic up for inspection as I untangle the loop of leather from my hair, the world a rumbling roar outside. I dangle the precious pendant between us, looking up into hard eyes that still the beat of my heart.
He makes no move to take the málmr. He doesn’t even look at it.
“It was not lent, Raeve.”
The words land slow and hard, lacking the softness of his previous sentence, casting my skin in little bumps.
I shove my hand closer to his chest. “This means things I can’t give you.”
He watches me with the honed regard of someone inching toward a wild dragon, head tilting. “What do you think I want?”
I break from his stare and look through the window, seeing a tumor of gray clouds rolling toward the bay, light scribbling across the surface to the tune of crackling thunder.
A warm heart.
Offspring to carry on his heritage.
At the very least, someone who gets along with his swaggering sister.
I swallow, refusing to meet his gaze as I settle the málmr on the table and stand, shouldering my satchel. I edge from the booth and push free of the fluttering curtains.
Around him … sometimes words just feel inadequate.