Chapter 3 #2
“Are you all right, Dae?” She never called him Daemon, though everyone else did.
He could still remember the day she’d lifted her chin, looked him in the eye, and said, “You’re not.
None of us are. I don’t know what we are, but we are not daemons.
I will not call you such a thing. I’ll just call you…
Dae.” Day—a measure they didn’t have, down here.
A turning of the sun he hadn’t seen in too long.
He shook off the thoughts, the reflection. Shook off, too, the yearning her touch inspired. Forced himself to smile. “Only mourning the loss of our supplies.”
Her fingers fell from his, and he told himself to be glad. She glanced over at the crevasse that had opened, and he could tell from the degree of her frown what she was thinking. Even before she said it. “The Giver is making his will known. We must not leave.”
His throat closed like a tube of magma cooled too fast. So many years he’d toiled down here, doing exactly what first one tyrant and then the next ordered him to do.
Thinking, praying it would serve as penance in the eyes of their angry deity.
Thinking, praying he could work away whatever sin he’d committed as a young man, to condemn him to this fiery hell.
Thinking, praying he could earn salvation.
Of course she still thought the same. She’d been down here so much less time than him, less even than the others. They’d all had to work through it on their own, a process likely to stretch into eternity.
She still believed this was the will of the Giver, that they be here. Even if she dismissed the idea that they were all daemons.
Not the rest of them. He and Logi and Eldrid and Ember had decided shortly after Elianne joined them that they couldn’t stay here forever, to die here and be fed to the volcano like they’d been forced to do with Brandr’s body.
They’d save the food provided for their fallen comrade.
They’d walk barefoot sometimes to save the footwear they were given, saving it for a real journey.
They’d wear their fire-resistant leathers long past their better days to save that allotment too.
And then, they’d find a way out. They’d carve a lava tube into the frozen wastelands, perhaps. Or burrow down, then come up on the sea floor and beg help from the first mer they found. Or they’d dig all the way under the Frozen Sea and emerge in Ellas, if they could go so far.
Elianne insisted they were fools to dream of escape.
And now she nodded to the place where their shelves had once been, their supplies stored.
All eaten, now, by the insatiable lava. Their food, their clothes, the tools they’d fashioned from bits and pieces of the little the tyrant provided, even the ink and needles they’d been granted for their tattoos.
“You see what our hubris has done? Now we have nothing, not even for today. Instead of escape, we’ll be lucky to survive until the king comes again. ”
Daemon pushed to his feet, fast enough that a hank of fair hair whipped him across the mouth.
He flipped it away, wondering if it was time to abandon the strip of blond down the center of his head and shave it all off again.
“Don’t call him that.” He didn’t mean to issue the command. Again. But it had become habit.
As had her response. The way she too stood, nearly as tall as he was. The way she squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. The way her braids, like burnished flame, bounced as she shook her head. “Isidor is the king. We may not like him, but he is still our Giver-given ruler.”
“Not mine.” He spun away from her and stomped toward the newly-opened abyss, hoping that in his haste he’d overlooked a few surviving shelves.
Nothing. The entire wall had collapsed into the flow beneath their chamber. Years of saving, of scrimping, of going without, gone in a flash.
Frustration had him pulling the magma up far more quickly than usual, wicking the fire from it in a blast that heated the room, shaping it into a new wall, new shelves with a slash of his hand.
Then he spun back to the woman he didn’t want to love.
“We start again. Perhaps the Giver is testing our resolve—we will show him we are earnest.”
Elianne narrowed her eyes. She was always at her strongest when she was telling him he was wrong. The rest of the time she might sway and second-guess, but somehow when it came to questioning him, his motives, his goals, his plan, she never wavered.
He was wrong. Always. Whatever it was he said, he was wrong. That had become her bedrock.
Flames, it shouldn’t make him want to kiss her. To see if that could be something they could agree on.
“This is not a test, Dae. This is proof that your plan was against his divine will. And speaking against his chosen king is blasphemy.”
A huff of laughter slipped out, but there was no amusement in it. “The tyrant doesn’t even believe in the Giver.”
“Of course he does. He simply serves him quietly.”
Daemon told his fingers to stay uncurled. His face to remain neutral. His breathing to steady. “Well, I suppose you know him better than the rest of us. When next you sneak off to the ice wall to meet him, tell him we lost our supply of food and need more.”
Her shoulders edged back. “I don’t know what—”
“Don’t lie to me, Elianne.” The words didn’t come out like an accusation, at least. But they sounded tired to his own ears. No, worse. Resigned. “You think I can’t feel the tremor of your footsteps in the lava under the passage? That I can’t sense the stream of it you call to light your way?”
She went rigid as rock, her perfect face a perfect mask. “Even you aren’t so well-attuned as that.”
He’d always let her think so—let them all think so. To keep them from feeling inferior. But it wasn’t that he was innately better at what they did. It was just that he’d had so much longer to practice. Longer to flex the muscles of whatever this Curse was.
He pivoted, unable to stand the torment of watching her deny her little trysts any longer. “If you signal him some way, do so. We need food and water as soon as we can get it. I’m going to find the others. Make sure everyone’s all right.”
“Dae.”
He ignored her, striding into the eastern tunnel that his friends had gone down earlier when a vent in one of the other volcanoes had demanded attention.
Hopefully, they’d made enough progress that they’d been out of the range of whatever had caused the quake.
Hopefully they wouldn’t have to mend or create a tunnel to return.
Hopefully, they hadn’t yet drunk the water they’d taken with them.
“Dae, I haven’t done anything—”
He slashed a hand through the air, opened a fissure, called up the magma and formed a quick, thin wall between them. Even through it, he could hear her exasperated huff, and the sound made his lips twitch into a smile.
She’d break through it, of course. She could do so in moments if she used her fists and feet, as thin as it was. But her training would probably kick in, and she’d take it as one of the many challenges they gave each other. She’d use her power to destroy it, to melt it down.
She was still slow enough that it would give him time to get away. Put some distance between them. Distance he needed just now.
He didn’t want to hear her excuses. Didn’t want to hear whatever reasons she had for conspiring with their enemy, their oppressor, the man who held them here, slaves to him.
Maybe she met him to try to reason with him. Secure their freedom. Lobby for more provisions.
He snorted at his own wishful thinking. That was what he’d thought, the first time he’d sensed her leaving her chamber during one of their sleep cycles and making her way to the ice wall, where he could sense another presence if he focused enough.
She’d been the one to make the supply run just before.
Perhaps she and the tyrant who’d so recently condemned her to eternal burning had struck up a conversation.
The second time, the third, he’d known it was something else. He just wasn’t brave enough to ask what. Nor to ask how, or why.
How did she even know when to meet him? Her senses weren’t developed enough to sense him coming—even Daemon couldn’t sense him until he was already at the wall, until he shot ice into the lava flow to signal he was there.
A shout, that. One any of them could hear. But how did he whisper so that only she could?
It didn’t matter. And just now, he only hoped she did have a way to call to their slave master.
Without water, they wouldn’t last long down here.
They could melt the ice wall, perhaps—if they could find a way to collect it, that would give them enough to buy a bit of time.
Otherwise, they’d have no choice but to do one of the things they were absolutely forbidden.
They’d have to either break into an underground spring or go to the surface. Either way the tyrant would know, of course. Sense them as surely as they sensed him when he sent his ice into the lava. And he would punish them for it. Punish all the thanes for it.
A debate for another time.
Once he was certain Elianne wasn’t following him, Daemon paused. Let his eyes close. Drew in a long breath.
They had no way of measuring time down here. No sun, no moon to track the days. No light beyond the lava, darkness everywhere else. No days, no months, no years. Just one endless night. The only person they saw from the outside was the tyrant, who changed so little that he provided no gauge either.
When a new person was thrown into the volcano, if they survived the first moments without burning in their innocence, the rest of them would hurry to help, to reassure, and they would get a few pieces of information.
How long since the current tyrant had ascended to the throne? How long since whatever national events the previously-newest member of their little tribe could recall?
The questions usually netted them a few answers.
Enough to know that Eldrid had been down here at least a hundred years.
Daemon, so far as he could guess, at least a hundred fifty, perhaps more.
But they didn’t know how long it had been since Elianne had joined them.
Ten years? Twenty, fifty? He always asked Isidor, when he was the one to meet him for supplies.
Isidor never answered.
Perhaps Elianne would have better luck, were she to ask. He had to assume she hadn’t, that she hadn’t been keeping the information from them every time they talked of such things.
Whatever the tyrant wanted from her, it didn’t include the trade of knowledge, he had to assume. Knowledge was the sharpest weapon those Above possessed, the thing they were most deprived of Below.
Knowledge meant freedom.
And freedom was the one thing the Cursed would never be given.