Chapter Thirty-Two The Villainess Steals Treasure #2
A low, terrible sound rose. For a moment, Rae dismissed the sound as nothing but ghouls moaning in the abyss. Until she realized the sound was closer than that, though still apart. It was the sound of ghouls moaning beyond the city walls.
Which were still standing.
“The walls of Themesvar are thick.” Rae worked it out. “Like sea walls, built to stand for centuries against the heat and smoke of the abyss. Nobody was going to notice if the walls you built were thicker still.”
He laughed at the note of wonder in her voice, sounding as pleased with himself as she was pleased with him. “Exactly, my lady. Two walls. The raiders believe for a moment, when the first wall falls, that they’ve broken through. Between the walls, I hid a little surprise.”
There came the screams, only a little later than Rae had expected. On the other side of the wall.
“You walled up your dead soldiers.”
“My dead won’t starve. They won’t perish. They could wait encased in stone for a thousand years, until someone broke a wall down. And then they would rise, and eat.”
Thick, clotted screams rising on the night air, people screaming through mouthfuls of blood.
But these weren’t their people, Rae reminded herself.
This was the enemy. The raiders had attacked the capital.
The raiders would have died when the Emperor conquered Tagar.
They would have died anyway, like the maidens who fell during the Queen’s Trials. It didn’t matter.
It was still a relief to see the light, like a tiny sun, of the Edge of Anguish. Somewhere in the dark Count Merac wielded his golden axe, and the screams died down as the tide of battle turned.
“The raiders will take down my dead,” the Emperor predicted. “I’ll take some of the raiders back and raise them up as my own. The stalemate will continue. The raiders’ plan to end it has failed.”
Caught between horror and relief, on a stone floor in the god’s arms, Rae began to laugh. “Fancy meeting a god-emperor like you in a place like this. Outside my bedroom.”
Had he intended to come in, and finish what they began in that alley? The thrill, half fear, was cut off by more sober thoughts. Surely not: the Emperor had been lying on the floor, not trying to climb into her bed.
“I sleep here every night.”
Why, to stop her escaping? The demand she’d made in the alley, Am I not free to leave? echoed in her bones. If you struck a bargain with a monster in a castle, you had to pretend you were a guest or a bride or a storyteller for a thousand nights. Anything but a captive.
But perhaps a captive was exactly what she was.
Since Rae actually was trying to sneak out of the castle, perhaps she should be under guard. But not by him.
“If I ruled the kingdom, I wouldn’t sleep on stone floors every night. As I believe I’ve made clear, if I ruled the kingdom, I would go to the treasury and swim in gold like Scrooge McDuck.”
“Ah yes,” said Key. “Your lover.”
Rae opened her mouth to hotly deny these allegations, then saw the gleam of Key’s teeth in the dark. Seeing Key’s teeth bared was seeing a blade bared, a bright threat, but somehow it cheered Rae up.
“Why do you sleep here every night, Your Imperial Mystery?”
“I slept here before. When I was your guard.”
He had? Why? Rae didn’t ask, because as soon as her mind formed the question, the answer was clear. To protect her. And what had she done for him in return?
“You’re not my guard any more, you’re the monarch. You’ve got the royal chambers. I’ve seen the royal bed, and the royal feather mattress the size of a football field.”
In the night-grey pause that followed, Rae felt an icy drop of horror slip down her spine.
Rae had seen the royal bed, and Octavian in it, but she hadn’t joined him there. Not that anybody in the whole world would believe her.
After the pause, Key replied: “I don’t like feather mattresses, they’re too soft. Like lakes that drag you down into sleep and hold you there, and then you can’t get out of the nightmares. I’ve never slept easy a day in my life.”
“The nightmares?”
Key waved a hand, moonlight gleaming red on the armoured claws. “Everyone has nightmares. The blade coming down, the altar, the fall, the dead on their thrones. Sleep is like anything else: you need to be able to escape fast.”
So spoke the man flung into a fathomless abyss with his throat cut, the man who escaped from where there was no return. Rae wasn’t sure everyone had those nightmares.
“Do you still think you’re remembering past lives? Have you remembered being the God-Child?”
“No more than I remember blowing out the sun like a candle. I dreamed that, too. I’ve decided that they are only dreams, nothing more, because how could I have done that? You were coming to the door before the attack on the walls began.”
“I heard you call out,” Rae whispered.
She realized it was true as she said it, that it was his cry that had woken her from a dead sleep and sent her to the door. And she realized as metal claws traced her surcoat, not a garment for sleeping in but for escaping the palace, that the truth must seem like a lie.
All he said was, “I’m glad you came out.”
“You’re glad I stepped on you?”
Key nodded. “I sleep here every night, but in the morning I was planning to talk with you. Tomorrow I intend to choose Lady Glacia as the winner of the second round of the Queen’s Trials. I want you to understand why.”
This information chased away Rae’s worry about nightmares. So the story was proceeding exactly according to plan. The hero found himself unexpectedly drawn to the new heroine, wanting to elevate her above all other women. Rae’s plot had worked perfectly. She should feel elated.
For some reason, she almost hadn’t believed this would happen. Even though that was how the rules of the story worked, and she knew the rules.
You could never be his true love.
Some people were born to be loved. Some were not. The goddess had told her. The story had told her. Her whole life had told her, before she ever walked into Eyam. Why was she such a fool, to still get shocked by the inevitable?
“You don’t need to say anything,” Rae said in a level voice. “I understand. You’re doing the right thing.”
“Oh.” Key seemed mildly taken aback. “All right.”
“I’m glad,” Rae lied. “Choosing Glacia is what a hero would do. Thank you.”
It was heroic he’d come to tell her, trying to be careful of her heart even though his heart had changed.
Nobody else had ever told her they were leaving.
The only thing they ever told her, father and lover and friends and team, was that it was her own fault, for being unfair, angry, bitter, untrusting.
You’re so difficult, her father told her frequently, until he was so tired of her that she didn’t have a father any more.
Marlowe’s voice echoed in her mind, putting Rae’s agony on trial.
So everyone could judge Rae for feeling it.
You’re so difficult to love. That was the silent part of the sentence, the part they didn’t say. But Rae understood.
Key scoffed, sounding highly doubtful. “Don’t count any heroics before they’re committed.”
“Not for being heroic. For coming back.”
No matter if he were dead or ruined, twisted shade or mad god. No matter if it were all her fault, if it were the one great sin of which she could never wash herself clean, she was grateful, and this was her last chance to say it.
She studied his shadowed profile. “I’ve never said that before. Thank you for coming back. Wrong or not.”
The Emperor appeared to reach a decision. “I don’t want your gratitude.”
“What do you want?”
The gauntlet appeared in Rae’s line of vision. A hand offered to her, claws as sharp as knives and red at the edges, its shadow falling across her face like the bars of a cage. Open in invitation.
Key said, “Come, my lady. Let me grant one of your wicked whims.”
A heroine would say no. You were meant to say no when offered power, to prove you deserved it.
Rae reached out in the shadows and took his hand, every time. She always would. But he wouldn’t be offering it much longer.
The Emperor led his lady by the hand into the Room of Golden Wonder. She surveyed the heaps of treasure with no equanimity whatsoever.
Because there were literal heaps of treasure. Piled against the walls like a golden snowdrift; rubies sitting like fat cherries on gold sundaes, sceptres and crowns and gem-encrusted armour in haphazard arrays like a great golden jumble sale.
Rae kicked off her ruby slippers in the sliding drifts of cold coins, felt gold pieces cool against her bare feet, and twirled. She scooped up a handful of gold coins and tossed them over her head. One almost hit her in the eye.
“Heavier than you’d think. But still really fun! This is a disgusting, obscene amount of gold.”
Key brushed a bright coin from the dark waves of her hair. “A disgusting, obscene amount of gold looks good on you.”
More than anyone could ever spend. And what good was it? All his gold hadn’t saved Octavian. Still, Rae couldn’t help thinking of her mother’s mortgage, of all the peace and security this could buy someone, while it would mean less than nothing to a king.
“Does all this money make you think of your dad?”
At least her mother and her sister were safe from exhaustion and starvation. The man who adopted Key had died from fever and overwork, and Key had to scrimp and save and kill to try and buy him a tombstone, to keep his only family in the ground.
“Yeah,” Key murmured, a gleam in his eyes like wildly waving red flags she wished to investigate. “If he saw all this, my father would get so anxious he might fall over, working out how to give it away, who to help first. A sweet man. But, oh my gods, so annoying.”
Rae laughed, and Key with her. He had a face made for laughter.
Key tossed a coin over his shoulder, not looking to see where it landed. “When the Cobra comes back, he’ll tell me what to do with all this.”