Chapter 36 The Traitor’s Reckoning
Down from grace, the weak and the willing descend.
Bits of light creep into my vision. My eyes crack open, just a sliver, but the brightness is like daggers—slicing, cutting, burning. The tearing starts, warm salty rivers along my cheeks. There’s the smell of sharp copper—my blood—dripping down my face to pool onto the front of my shirt.
Something digs into my wrists. I blink up, find them tethered together over my head, trapped in solid chains strung from a cavernous ceiling.
I’m dangled here, the tips of my toes just barely brushing the ground, which is wet with grimy standing water.
The roof of my mouth feels dry and cracked, like sandpaper left under a baking sun. Every shift brings flaring pain.
But remembering is a greater agony.
Cyprian’s sneer. Rowan slipping quietly beside Harlow, unable to look at me.
I want to feel angry. Want the heat of the emotion to ignite the chains—warm them until they melt into pools of nothing. But instead there’s an empty, cold hollow so vast and desolate that’s waiting on this other side of waking.
How long? How long had she played me for? The pain brightens until it’s so intense I can’t bear it.
“H—” I try and fail to form the word in my mouth. Swallow, and then try again. “Hello?”
“Thought Lorn might’ve killed you.”
It’s Harlow. His silver slick voice cleaves the air.
It hurts, but I force my eyes open wider for a glimpse of the room and the man that’s determined to be the bane of my existence. The root, the source, of my mistrust in people.
“Welcome back.”
“Where are we?” I gasp out.
“Beneath the shipping depot. Caves run all over the underside of Umbra, you know. Not like our Underworld back home—not nearly as fun—but like little worker ants, they’ve mined their way under the city.
Under the ocean itself. Can’t you smell it above us?
Thousands and thousands of pounds of water could come bursting through to drown you at any moment.
” Pure delight melds into his expression.
A rush of terror cascades into me. The chains rattle overhead when I shift.
My bare feet slip over the slick stone. There’s a metal ladder bolted into the side of the wall.
We’re in an underground cave, and I’ve been stripped down to nothing but my blouse and underthings.
Everything's been taken. The cloak won't help me. The crown piece—fuck, the crown piece!
Before I can even cast a wild glance around for my trousers, Harlow lifts his hand. The sapphire glints sharply, set within broken obsidian.
“Looking for this?” His breath stirs the chilly air as he wiggles something out from the leather pouch strung around his neck.
“Excuse the strip search. I should really thank you. One piece—well that’s a feat in itself.
But two. Gods curse me for ever underestimating you, Little Fury.
” He withdraws another fragment of curved, shattered obsidian.
The fiery ruby within captures the low light from the mounted torches.
“No,” I manage. “No, no, no, no, no. That’s not supposed to be here.” Great heaving breaths rip from my chest. There’s sharp pressure, like someone is sitting on me. Like the world is collapsing in on itself.
“Are you surprised? Rowan’s truly been an invaluable resource.
What a fun little game of chase we played.
As you realize now, she was mine from the start.
A perfect spy. She watched you meet with the old woman in the Barrows.
Beat you back to your pathetic inn room.
Told you what you needed to know about the exchange to light a fire under you, to ensure you made it down to the cove quickly, then hid in the foliage, watched you bury what you went in for.
Came sprinting in like the frightened doe who needed saving.
Shame I had to break her ribs to really sell it. Sacrifices, as they say.”
Hate curdles inside of me, a keen and awful amount.
“Why?” I won’t let my voice shake, but every word is a struggle from my parched mouth. Overhead, saltwater drips from the cavern ceiling, stings my eyes so bad my vision’s gone blurry.
“Perhaps it’s time you accept that you’re an awful judge of character.
That the people around you see you as nothing but a vessel to be used and manipulated.
” He comes forward, carefully strokes my cheek with a long, dirty finger.
“The truth is painful, but it can be freeing. No one loves you, Avalon. No one even cares for you. You’re alone in this world, as you will be in the next. ”
I want to scream that he’s wrong, but the fight has abandoned me.
And the choices I’ve made are finally catching up.
My vision goes entirely fuzzy—blood loss and the gods damned potion, whatever amount I didn’t manage to choke back up, is absolutely draining me.
The joints at my shoulders ache from being stretched and the tips of my fingers have gone numb and cold.
“You have your crown pieces,” I manage. “Why keep me alive?”
“A quick mercy kill, is that what you expect?” His cold laughter bounces along the rough stone.
“I promised to make you suffer, Little Fury. Don’t you remember?
More than just the emotional torture of losing a friend.
Of being betrayed. We’re just getting started, you and I…
but before we get to all of that, there’s something you need to do. Something I’ll need you whole for.”
There isn’t enough spit to gather into my mouth and hack at him, but I still try. “Fuck you. I won’t.”
“You will. The Nightingale’s crew is dead.
And Rhyland, your husband now I hear—well, he’s more vulnerable than any god’s ever found himself.
None the wiser to the true rat on his crew, who will say he was spared their fate chasing after you.
You who broke the wards and fled, but not before spiking the ale with poison from the old surgeon’s infirmary.
It’ll be rather simple for Cyprian to slip godsbane into his next meal, or lace the tip of his dagger with it and nick him.
Poor man wouldn’t stand a single chance in the colosseum with that toxin burning through his blood, and every godling having him marked for death…
I’d say his chances are looking bleaker by the moment. ”
A twinge of horror—as if I could feel any more shock, surprise, grief.
There were more than fifty men and women on that ship.
The Pirate only took a handful with him to the queen’s dinner.
Are the rest really dead? And he’ll believe that I…
that I caused it? I shouldn’t care. Not about any of it.
Certainly not for the fate of Rhyland Crow.
Just because Cyprian and Rowan lied to me, betrayed me, doesn’t make Rhyland innocent.
It doesn’t prove that he ever cared, or that he didn’t use me to get what he wants on purpose but, still, the idea of him falling.
Being hurt in any way…it cracks me wide open.
Gods be damned, I still love him. But fuck if I’ll let Harlow Black realize that.
“What do you want?” This hiss rips wildly through the air, and I run my eyes again over what I can see of the cave. There must be a way out.
“Well,” he grins, “I hear that you have just the thing I need to beat the Mad Queen’s final challenge.
The little talent that made you so…valuable when I took you from Aurorae.
Strange, how these things work out, isn’t it?
I would have sold you and your mother to the highest bidder for a pretty stack of eyrir if not for my ship going down.
You’d have been lost to me, maybe a world away, and the possibility of me—the Bastard Black—holding the finished Midnight crown wouldn’t exist.”
I manage to leer at him. “You're mad. You think I can win the crown piece for you?”
“I’m through underestimating you, Little Fury. I’m starting to believe there’s no limit to what you can achieve. And according to Cyprian, you all but planned to win it for yourself rather than coming here and escaping like a whipped cur.”
I might hate the navigator more than just about anyone at this point. He had everyone fooled.
Harlow sighs before dragging his finger up to tap my forehead three times in an annoying patter. “I’ll give you a day to think it over. Let it marinate, settle into that thick skull of yours. Try not to bleed out in the meantime.”
He tucks the crown pieces away into that dangling black satchel round his neck then turns to make for the ladder, climbing to the top where a square door waits. There’s a slam and a cranking of metal against metal…and then silence.
I drift in and out. For how long, I can’t be sure.
There’s no way to mark time, no windows, no light.
The torches burn out and I’m plunged into frigid darkness with only the steady drip of salt water from above, the icy feel of it lapping at my toes.
Iron biting my wrists raw. But eventually the pain there fades.
The pull in my shoulders dulls. It can’t be a good thing, to be losing sensation.
To not feel the cold or the sting any longer.
I’m alone with my thoughts, hardly lucid enough to pick through all of what’s happened.
How does one stomach something like this?
Narrow it down into small, digestible bites, find some sort of reason, or sense to it all?
Certainly there is. For Rowan’s betrayal and my shit lot in life.
But I can’t see it, not now, not here, wrapped in darkness. Soaked in blood and brine.