Chapter 38 The Ruin of House Black #2
“On your knees, war god.” The smugness in Harlow’s tone is palpable. “Or I shoot and she burns down to the bone. There will be nothing left for you to heal. To mourn.”
It’s an echo of Rhyland’s own words when he told me of his first lover's demise. How Ireus didn’t leave a trace of her. How does Harlow know? It might be the one phrase that could stop him.
I watch as the strongest man I’ve ever met falls on his knees, crumbling like a mountain turned to dust. Something in me breaks at the sight of it. But the broken spaces begin to fill with an anger, both brilliant and ruinous. Above, the cavestone groans. Saltwater leaks through, ever faster.
From the corner of my eye, Rowan shoots a nervous glance upward and shrinks further into the shadows beside Cyprian who’s fiddling with a vial of something. Godsbane, from Elaris. Fuck, fuck, fuck!
Are you happy? I want to scream at her. Pleased with the price of your betrayal?
But I can’t get the words out. My throat is raw from screaming and thirst. The gag muffles everything.
“What now, Bastard?” Rhyland’s barely contained rage slips through his clenched teeth.
“You want my life for hers? Take it. I’ll take it myself, here, now.
But you’ll let her go first. You want Solomon?
I gifted him to the Mad Queen, but if he’s your price for Avalon I will lay the castle bare and bring him to you. Name it now.”
Harlow laughs from deep in his stomach. “You’re in no position to negotiate. And if you think I want to see my brother freed, you haven’t been paying attention.”
Something in Rhyland’s expression clicks. An understanding, one that’s lost on me. “You’re a good actor, Black, I’ll give you that. You had your brother fooled, didn’t you? Thinking you were nothing but a sniveling, arrogant halfwit.”
In Solomon’s defense, he had me fooled, too. Harlow played the part of a harebrained idiot well.
There’s a scathing coil to Harlow’s mouth. “He never could see me for anything but my father’s mistake. Never believed in me or my ideas at all.”
“So you tricked him,” Rhyland presses. “Went behind his back.”
“Cyprian played spy for both of us, loyal to me alone. He fed Solomon the information I allowed, yet gave me the rest—your true plan of deceit at Red Water Cove. That you’d know it was a fake and kill my brother who I desperately wanted out of the way.
Couldn’t do it myself, of course. I needed witnesses—a villain to blame or else my father, that damnedable old fuck, would have realized my hand in it and killed me himself.
A few key details were left out, unfortunately.
Your position on the cliffs. The explosives in the chest. The raid on the Black estate where your crew emptied the entirety of Solomon’s treasury. ”
“All decided last minute,” Cyprian pipes up in his own defense. As if it matters.
I’m not fully listening anymore. My stare has drifted to the cave walls, to the crude and hastily drawn runes.
They match the ones burned into Rhyland’s arms. They must bind his natural magick for sunlight, but there’s no sign of Laguz, the sea rune engraved on my chest. Or Kenaz, the rune that might bind my everflame, both powers of which a fraction I know the Pirate now possesses, too.
My eyes brush the cave ceiling, the water coming through the cracks and hollows.
Then to Cyprian who’s coating a short blade with the tincture from the glass vial.
Salt and sea, she calls to me.
I’ll tell her no, I’ll make her go.
The sea is fear, the sea is death
And I’ll not yield my final breath.
Máma used to sing me to sleep with that morbid little tune. I can hear it sung like an echo in her voice. Sorry, Máma, but I would yield it now, every precious bit of air, for you, for Rhyland…or maybe simply to see Harlow choke and bloat under the waves.
Movement dances in the corner of my eye. At once, I see it all play out as though time has grown swollen and thick, slowing.
“NO!”
The word rips from my throat, raw and desperate.
It isn’t just a denial of my own fear, but a visceral reaction at the idea of what’s to come.
Rhyland, kneeling, broken. Harlow, smug and cruel, but lost to his victory.
And in the shadowed corner, Cyprian’s movements, once subtle, now sharp and deliberate, catch my full attention.
The vial’s nearly empty, its contents glistening on the short, wicked blade he holds.
It shimmers with an unnatural darkness—the godsbane.
The sight of it, the deliberate, cold precision of his actions, sends a fresh wave of dread through me.
It’s not a threat of pain, like the torch.
It’s something final, irrevocable. Something that would extinguish Rhyland’s light forever.
Cyprian’s eyes, fixed on Rhyland’s bowed form, hold startling focus.
The air in the cave grows leaden with intent while the runes on the wall pulse a deeper, more menacing shade of red, as if feeding off the impending violence.
He leaps from the rock shelf, knifepoint slashing down towards the pirate.
My Pirate.
Mine. Mine. Mine.
I see it, his death, what it would cost me.
What it would take from me—a price that’s far too heavy to pay.
Fear be damned, magick stifling potion be damned.
Something in me pulls just like the night of the storm.
Something furious, life-preserving and undeniable.
Rhyland and I lock eyes, a look that all but unmakes me.
I don’t fight the surge of power, but instead surrender to it.
The far wall and ceiling groan under a pressure that’s just too much to hold back anymore. The stone caves, and chaos follows.