Chapter 8 #3
He spread his arms wide. “Why would it matter to me if you were?” Lowered them to his sides again. Spat a laugh that sounded more like accusation than amusement. “In fact, this makes sense. All those secret trysts over the years—”
“It’s not like that!” Tears clogged her throat, stung her eyes.
She tried to turn away before he could see them, tried to obey the unwritten rule of life Below, a life carved out by this man before her and the four soul-brothers who followed, long before the first female joined them.
No crying. No emotional manipulation. Nothing soft, nothing weak.
Clearly she failed, because when he said her name, there was apology in it. Regret. Not over his anger, no doubt, just over her reaction to it.
His fingers landed on her shoulder a moment later. “All right. I’m sorry.”
But he wasn’t. Couldn’t be. He hated the king, she knew he did, so why would he be sorry about his reaction to finding her with him? He was only sorry that, yet again, in one more thing, she wasn’t strong enough to be one of his people.
Maybe it was time to explain why. Maybe…maybe it was time to ask for help. She gathered what breath she could past the rock in her throat and let her knees buckle. Let the basalt of the floor welcome her.
Dae lowered himself gracefully down beside her. Waited.
She’d never told him her story—never told any of them, even Ember, though she’d wondered if the only other woman like them had a story similar to hers.
Wondered if the king…but Ember had been a revolutionary, she’d made no secret about that.
She and her husband had been condemned together for their crimes.
He had been dead before the lava swallowed him whole. She had swum to the rocky ledge, confused but unharmed, where Daemon and his brethren had met her with her new truth.
Elianne’s gaze dropped to Dae’s shoulder, where a few strands of hair had snagged on his leathers.
“I was not thrown into the volcano in punishment, like the rest of you. I…” She knew the story, had lived the story, had replayed it in her mind hundreds of times.
So why didn’t the words want to come? She had to squeeze her eyes shut, measure another breath in… out…in.
In a move as shocking as the king’s kiss, Dae picked up her hand where it rested against her knee and held her fingers tenderly in his. “Take your time.”
She could withstand his gruff moods, his demands to be better, his constant irritation with her—earned, granted, by her own constant snapping at him. But gentleness? That could be her undoing. She swallowed, tried again.
“I was unwell.” Not the most accurate choice of word, but the simplest explanation.
The only one she could make herself say.
“There was a team of doctors in the dome from the capital—inoculation time. My case was troubling enough that my healer referred me to them.” She focused on the water trickling by in its channel, reflecting the light from the slow-moving lava on the opposite wall.
“I thought I was lucky, that they had time to see me. But they took blood from me—standard, they said. For a normal battery of tests to help them understand what was wrong with me.”
Dae’s fingers tightened around hers, and she could feel the heat of his Cursed mark on his palm—the circle of flames, white against his skin. “Like the Test?”
“I didn’t think so—why would it be? There had been no call for one.
No Fjorders selected for a Blessed Union at the time.
The king had been married for almost three decades already, and to my best friend’s cousin, no less.
I knew Andresa when I was a girl, though I scarcely remembered her.
She’d babysat us a few times. I thought they were just normal tests, for illness.
For answers. They kept me in their hospital while they ran them, and then… ”
She could still see the doctor’s face. How it had gone from easy, indifferent care to pinched concern when he walked back into her little curtained room.
She’d been alone when he came—it was spring, planting season, and no one could stay with her while she waited.
She hadn’t minded, not until that moment.
“I thought, when the doctor came in, that he was going to tell me I was dying. The look on his face…” She shook her head, the fear still so close to the surface, no matter how many times over how many years she’d forced it down.
“He told me there was an anomaly in my blood. That he needed to do another test. I expected a needle, but that’s not what he pulled out. ”
Dae sucked in a breath. “A flint blade. Like the others in that, I assume.”
She nodded and made herself meet his gaze.
“A flint blade, a drop of blood in a basin of water, and he watched it as if all the answers to the universe swirled inside it.” She turned her right hand, the one he wasn’t holding, over revealing her own Cursed mark.
A double ring of white, flames dancing between the two edges.
Just like his. Just like Ember’s and Logi’s and Eldrid’s.
The same, exactly the same—so how could the king claim she was anything but a daemon, if they were?
Dae’s thumb moved over her knuckle, back again. “Not the answers to the universe. But the answers to you. He was priming your blood for the Awakening of the Curse. Just as they do the Blessing, but with flint instead of titanium. It’s what our blood responds to.”
She’d pieced that much together over the years, thanks to the stories the others told, to their matching marks.
“He explained nothing to me. Didn’t even—didn’t even let me tell my family goodbye.
I didn’t understand the fire that swept through me, the mark emerging on my palm.
Before I could do more than scream, he got out a needle and put me to sleep.
When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was.
I was cold, so cold and alone and frightened and… empty.”
No explanations. No family huddled by her bedside, love in their eyes. No hands warm around hers, like Dae’s was now. No hope for the future.
Just pain and emptiness.
Dae’s larynx bobbed. “Reykstoll?”
She nodded. “I don’t know how long I was held in that cold room. Weeks, I think. They kept me sedated so long the whole world blurred into nothing. And then one day, I woke up and the king was there. At my side.”
Somehow, without moving a muscle, Dae’s whole being went taut.
When he didn’t interrupt, she pushed herself on.
“He said I had a new kind of Blessing. One he’d been waiting for, though he didn’t explain how or why.
He said I had to go somewhere to learn how to use it.
To train. That it would take me many years, but that was good, because it would be many years before the world was ready for me.
He said that someday I would be beside him as queen, but not while Andresa still lived. ”
Dae’s jaw clenched.
Elianne averted her face. “It made no sense. I thought I was delirious still, that the whole exchange was nothing but a bizarre nightmare. I’d never even glimpsed the king from a distance, certainly had no aspirations for a crown or throne. I thought I’d wake up, home in my own bed. Instead…”
“He finished Awakening the curse with his blood and tossed you down the throat of Mt. Helviti. To us. To train you for him, so that when the time was right, he could use you for his purposes.”
His tone didn’t sound as judgmental as she expected—not of her, anyway.
She settled her gaze on his face again, though she couldn’t make herself lift it above his mouth.
“Until that first time you sent me to fetch our rations from him, I honestly thought I’d imagined the entire thing.
It couldn’t be real, it made no sense. But there he was, just as he’d been.
Saying the same impossible things. Only now, he added something new.
That somehow, though we clearly partake of the same power, the rest of you were daemons, but I was not.
I was something else, something holy instead of something evil.
Because, he said, my magic was Awakened through noble means instead of as part of a criminal trial. ”
Dae snorted. “That’s the requirement now, is it? What sets good apart from evil?”
He’d told her—told them all—plenty about his early days in the lava tubes. But never about the trial that landed him here. Never about his own Awakening.
How had the old king known to slice him with flint instead of metal? Whose blood had mixed with his after the Blade had primed the magic? The king himself, as his son had done with her in that room? Another Blessed, like the others? “Were you—”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m not the one the king apparently means to marry.”
The utter ridiculousness of the suggestion brought an unexpected smile to her face. “I don’t know why—you’re quite the catch. Think of the dowry you’d bring, master of the daemons.” She waved a hand toward the mountain and fully expected the joke to fall flat.
But his mouth quirked up. Not evenly, but somehow the lopsided version of his smile was even more inviting than the full one. “I assume he’s after heirs with dual magic, like the Daryatleans can boast.”
A reminder of the demands that had never made any sense. And which she’d just as soon ignore for a few minutes more. “You were still Above when the Daryatleans’ children were Awakened, then?”
“Just. The news sent a shockwave through all of Fjordlandi—likely through all the world, I’d think.
From what I recall, Daryatla’s alliance with the mer was solid enough at that time that Queen Electra wouldn’t have deemed it a threat, but Ellas and Soltierra?
” He shook his head. “I always thought that was probably why Isidor’s father, Axel, reacted as he did to me—because I was clearly not his ally, and therefore I was a threat. The worst possible kind.”
She waited, hoping he’d say more.
His eyes refocused, though, losing that fog of memory. “Are you in love with him?”
“Isidor?” She jerked her hand free of his. “How could you even suggest such a thing? I owe him my loyalty because he is my Giver-given king, but my heart? You think I haven’t seen what he is? What he does? How he controls our entire land, not to mention us?”
“But you’re not like us.” He drew a knee up, propped his arm on it. “He means to take you away from here as soon as his consort dies.”
“She just did.” The words emerged as a whisper, frail and fearful. “The quake—it was terror-made. An attack on the royal residence. It killed Andresa, Einar, and Krystiana. Only Valkyrja is left.”
The youngest princess had been but a child when Elianne had last walked the surface.
Krystiana had been a bad-tempered adolescent, already bullying the country with blizzards that went well beyond the cloud-cover and snow needed to hold in what warmth the sun gave.
Einar had been the perfect Heir, staid and steady and a hope to them all for a future that might not be quite so strict. Or unequal.
Then they heard what he’d done in the Ice Prison, and hope had done what it always did in Fjordlandi—died of frostbite.
“Convenient for him. The consort standing between the two of you, as well as his two strongest heirs, gone in a single stroke. Leaving only a weakling in the way of the progeny he means for you to give him.”
“I won’t.” She pushed to her feet, not even touching his not-so-veiled suggestion that it was the king who had planted that explosive, not the leader of the Red Hands.
An accusation she almost wanted to believe, if it meant it wasn’t one of their own, a thane, who had done something so heartless.
Though she doubted it. Isidor had been angry—too angry to have been the one responsible.
That didn’t make him any less a monster.
“I won’t be some broodmare for a tyrant.
I thought I had more time to plan, but I don’t, so I’m going to do what I swore I never would.
I’m asking you for help, Dae. I didn’t want to involve you, didn’t want you to be responsible in any way, but I can’t do it alone. Not unless I…”
He stared at her for a moment, there where he sat. Then he too launched to his feet, fury blazing once more in his eyes. This time two hands landed on her shoulders, one on each, and he gave her a little shake, more emphasis than force. “You will not. You will not throw yourself into the flow.”
It would be the quickest way to end things, if it came down to it.
They’d all discussed it as a possible eventuality.
It would be better than the unthinkable of killing each other.
Better than the torture of dying of thirst. For them, sinking into the lava stream was like stepping into a warm bath.
They did it all the time for that purpose, burning away impurities rather than rinsing them.
Even their hair could withstand it, somehow.
But they still had to breathe. The lava would suffocate them eventually, and they’d drown in it, much like an Awakened or a mer who didn’t reach the surface of the sea before their breath failed.
Regardless, it wasn’t her choice. “I don’t want to die.
I want to escape him. Perhaps you could say I was lost to the flow, but I could make my way to the surface?
I wouldn’t dare show my face under a dome, I know that, but there are people out there in the wastes, aren’t there?
The outcasts, the people who still live like the ancient-among-ancients, surviving on fish and wearing furs and building houses out of snow and ice. ”
His breath gushed out. “You’d melt a hole through the ice and end up in the sea. There’s no land out that far in most places, aside from where the Great Forest looms—and that’s its own wild danger.”
Hopeless then. Like everything else. But she fastened on a wobbling smile. “Then let’s hope there are some mer who’ve gained a taste for cold water who can come to my rescue.”
Otherwise, she had thirty-six days to live. Because she would not trade her soul to the king.