Intermission Scene VI
The room stills when Jude rises to his feet, face conniving as a jackal and gold spilling across his eyes.
Eleni shrieks an order to halt when one of their hunters reaches for a weapon.
Dorian—or, rather, Jude disguised as Dorian—watches in amusement as Eleni treads carefully forward, hands raised in surrender. “Where is Dorian? This doesn’t have to end in blood.”
Jude raises an eyebrow, looking pointedly down at me bound in my chair and then back at Eleni. “It doesn’t?” He lifts a hand, runs it absent-mindedly over his missing ear. “This,” he announces, twirling a finger at the room, “is really rude. I’ll have an apology. Who’s first? You?”
His eyes fall on the muscular woman behind Eleni, whose hand curls around her dagger. “I’d sooner cut out my tongue.”
“Do it, then.”
My eyes flip up to Jude as my mouth falls open to tell him to stop, but I’m not fast enough. Not before the woman’s tongue falls to the floor. She starts moaning incoherently, sending Dorian’s people scattering toward the walls where weapons hang or to their belts for Eleutheraen gold daggers.
“I said hold,” Eleni shouts through her teeth, then turns back to Jude. “Where is Dorian?”
All at once, his disguise melds and shifts, face morphing until he’s Jude again.
Blood is splattered from his sleeves to his forehead.
“Well, don’t look so sad.” Jude pouts, rubbing his chin. There’s blood crusted under his fingernails. “You’ll see his face again.” A wry grin slides over his mouth. “I left it hanging just outside.”
The air drains from the room. Eleni’s expression clears, blank as paper.
But something more vibrant than gold washes over her eyes.
I want to say it’s the hardness of anger or the guttural pangs of disbelief, but when she opens her mouth and utters a sentence in an old language I don’t understand, it’s with a darkness that sounds more like heartbreak.
Jude replies in the same tongue—old Syrenian, I would guess—then lets out a mean laugh.
It’s a rich and selfish sound, the sort when you laugh for yourself and don’t bother to check if anyone else found it funny.
The sound is beautiful when you’re in on the joke and cutting as steel when you’re not.
His words, whatever they were, sink into the room, into the minds of men and women with no marks to defend against his Compulsion. Weapons drop, clattering loudly to the ground.
Eleni hisses something back, and he doesn’t react, a cold glint in his eyes, probably enjoying the attention as Craft pulses bright in his veins.
He raises his chin, utters another word.
A curious blankness paints the faces around me. I watch as each set of hands, unburdened by weapons, slowly pulls a torch from the wall instead.
Eleni is gripping her hands into fists so tightly, I see blood. Fighting Jude’s Compulsion? How? She looks to the Player and whispers a word in that old tongue again. The pleading way she speaks it makes me think it’s “please.”
Jude balances a glare down at me, then back at Eleni, making a little hmm sound in the back of his throat. And then: “Kneel.”
The room goes deathly still, the air gone. The woman glowers at Jude, just barely letting her gaze slide to her hunters clutching torches—and those horribly blank expressions.
With eyes like chips of ice, she bares her teeth, lowers herself onto a knee—
“Not to me,” Jude snaps, that twisted smile faltering. “Come now, I’m getting bored.”
I throw a reasonably horrified look in his direction, now tugging on my chains so hard, I’m surprised the chair doesn’t snap. No, I almost shout. Not to me. I’m not one of them. I’m not like him.
If Eleni went any stiffer, she’d shatter. Her expression full of hate, she pivots toward me, leans down, and slowly, slowly bows her head. But her gaze never leaves mine—a gaze that wishes me a slow and painful death.
Why is he doing this?
Around her, the hunters hold their torches patiently, awaiting further instruction.
“Wait,” I breathe.
Eleni shuts her eyes, as if to shield herself.
Jude speaks another word.
“Jude,” I interrupt. “Don’t—”
One by one, the hunters press the torches into their chests.
I can’t watch, heart thundering in my ears as the room fills with screams, the reek of smoke and burning hair, and one instrument in the chorus that doesn’t fit: the pattering of hurried footsteps on their way out.
When I dare to open my eyes, Eleni is making her escape through that narrow hall. I barely register Jude saying something that sounds like, “Hold still.”
My throat fills with smoke as something collides with the back of my chair.
The wood splinters, and the chains release me. I catapult forward out the door after Jude, desperate to escape, my ears unable to take the screams any longer as the stench of burning flesh reaches my nose.
What I decide is worse, though, as we flee the burning house, isn’t the screams themselves. But the way they start to quiet, one by one.
The silence follows us out, clinging to my clothes like smoke. Only when the cold hits my skin do I realize we’ve made it outside. Alive.
It’s dark. The snow has stopped falling and blankets the ground. There are violent disruptions in the white, though—places where the snow is flattened and disheveled.
Dawn is on her way, judging by where the moon has drifted to make room for the horizon. Aside from this, there’s nothing. Only a burning, desolate house in a quiet forest.
And blood, staining the fresh snow at our feet, a violent streak of color slashed across a white canvas. Wherever Jude dragged Dorian, I’m sure the darkened crimson trail toward the back of the house will lead me to whatever is left of him.
A thick branch, snapped from a nearby tree and discarded on the ground, drips red at one jagged end.
There’s a vial buried in the snow at my feet.
It’s empty.
There’s no sign of the large man who followed Dorian and, to my horror, no sign of the young boy who called Dorian outside, either.
“Did y-you— The boy at the door,” I stutter. “You didn’t—”
“I was the boy.”
I breathe a small sigh of relief at that, while Jude walks from the flames with little more remorse than he’d depart his dressing room.
But the air is heavy with horror as I follow.
My shoes find their way around the blood, my stomach turning when I notice something small on the ground, illuminated by thin rays of fading moonlight.
There, in the snow, lies Dorian’s other ear.