56. Sybilla
Chapter 56
Sybilla
I paced the space, memorizing every crack in the stucco. Krait had only been gone minutes when a knock came at the flat’s door. Warily, I tried to look through the keyhole but then heard a familiar voice.
“Queen Sybilla? I was sent from Luz. I’m here with your tonics.”
Thank the Sources.
I flung open the door. The man who had seen me through the worst of my health and had been a constant in my life for so long was on the flat’s doorstep.
I breathed a sigh of relief to see him, then I exclaimed, “Healer Mortag!”
My healer offered a smile and an outstretched arm. Two guards stepped between us. One said, “He has been searched for weapons, my Queen. We escorted him here, but shall remove him if necessary.”
My heart sank, as I realized that he’d likely been questioned and interrogated to get to me.
“All is well,” I assured them and then turned to Mortag. “Come in, come in.”
The guards stepped aside.
“How did you get here?”
Mortag kissed the top of my hand and followed me inside.
He looked just as he always had—a neat cream-colored robe with bronze buttons down the front, dusty brown hair cut short, and a sharp nose. Healer Mortag was an immortal without Source magic. He’d been my mother’s healer and her mother’s before her. He’d mentioned once that he’d been alive to see the Great Wars.
“Sit, sit.” I motioned toward one of the sofas. “It is good to see a familiar face. What happened to you during the battle of Luz?”
“Ah. I was just fine. I got summoned to deal with some family matters in Eros,” he said and reached into his robe pocket. “But I stopped in Luz on my way here and brought your favorite.” Mortag pulled out a small wooden box full of tea bags, which were stained bright blue. My heart warmed, and I took the tea box from him with a giddy smile as he sat.
Eager to drink the earthy, floral nectar, I said, “I’ll go fetch some water. Make yourself at home.”
I left the flat with a kettle to gather water from the spigot outside. The sun had set. Glancing around, I found the street completely empty—no market carts, no guards. Where had the two who had brought Mortag gone?
My brow furrowed. It worried me that something more dire might be happening at the prison and I was relegated here.
A lump formed in my throat. My visitor, at least, made for a pleasant distraction from the absence of my husband.
When I stepped back into the flat, Healer Mortag had risen and now faced a window. He looked out at the street below.
“Tea?” I asked him.
Mortag waved a hand. “No, I brought that especially for you. I know how it clears your mind.”
I pursed my lips as the kettle hissed. After searching no fewer than six cupboard doors, I finally found a cup to pour water into. As the tea steeped, the water twisted in blue cloudy wisps, and I drew in a deep waft of the sweet, earthy scent. Perfection.
“You are a long way from home, my Queen. And to be married, I’ve heard?” Mortag asked. His tone was laced with surprise and what one might construe as judgment.
“Guilty,” I admitted. “I am married already. It is what’s right for Luz—this alliance, this marriage. I think you’d like him. It is a good match.”
“Your mother thought her marriage a politically gainful one, too. And Death found her quite easily.”
I wasn’t sure when Healer Mortag had developed the nerve to speak to me in such a way, and my awareness heightened. My teeth ground together. “Yes, well...she was foolish to trust my father.”
My healer hummed and said, “Drink your tea. It will ease your nerves.”
As I drew nearer to him, I instinctually lifted the cup to take a sip. Upon noticing something familiar on the sleeve button of Mortag’s cream robe, the tea sloshed in my mouth.
The deathmark.
He still faced away from me. All the hairs on my arms stood as I lifted the cup to my lips, backwashed the tea into it, and set my cup down on the windowsill beside his arm, trying not to let my hands shake.
“You...” Healer Mortag’s voice turned darker as he said, “You have skirted Death your entire life, haven’t you, Isleen? Don’t you find that odd?”
I faltered, taking one step away from him. “That is not my name,” I reasoned. “Healer Mortag, you know that I am Sybilla. You’ve cared for me since I was a girl.”
Healer Mortag laughed—a horrid sound that filled my ears with smoky terror, like his essence was seeping into my mind. When he looked at me, his eyes were a terrible shade of murky green—Caym’s envoy.
Fuck. Think, Sybilla, think.
I glanced down at the cup of blue liquid on the sill and felt nauseous. A family recipe. My mother had loved it, her mother...daughters of Isleen.
What the fuck had he been doing with the tea?
Then it hit me—how easily my power had started to come to me while in the Sahlms, how scrambled my mind had felt for the first few weeks here. It felt like a punch to my stomach.
He had been suppressing my power for my entire life.
I caught sight of the moon through the window behind him. It was a deep shade of gray, nearly devoid of color with only a silver lining.
We were supposed to have years. This could not be happening so soon.
Mortag hunched, and I watched as the brown in his eyes returned. His mouth agape, he stared at me with dread written across his features. “I’m sorry, my Queen. Please, run…”
My heart pounded. “We can fight him, Mortag. I will help you…”
“It is a shame that you fell in love with my nephew.” A dark, grating voice came from the door of the flat.
I hadn’t heard anyone enter over the blood throbbing in my ears. A man in a heavy gray robe stepped into the room, the top half of his face obscured by the shadows of a hood. Barden followed behind him.
Emmerick, Barden, Mortag…The three envoys. But this was a fourth threat.
My eyes widened at the sight of my cousin—his hair ruffled, cheeks red and eyes bloodshot.
The gray-clad man continued, “We could do marvelous things together. But time and time again, you always choose him .” The way the man’s lips had shaped the word “marvelous” would haunt me until the end. With blackened fingertips, he drew back his cloak hood.
That same sense of inevitable doom I’d felt the night Asterie and I had used the moonstone together struck me .
Caym.
His eyes were a piercing shade of green that seemed to smoke with amber from within. He combed back golden locks with one hand. If it didn’t feel like I was about to be rotted from the inside out, then his sharp features might be considered handsome.
“Ah. I cannot kill you...I won’t kill you. Not when you hold such beautiful power. We will be unstoppable, Isleen.”
Barden and Mortag now stared at me with hungry expressions, like wolves set on prey. He was influencing both of them. Isolde’s powers had been restored.
You are on borrowed time, Lymrasi had said. I’d been so damned foolish.
“ Cousin, Mortag, you need to push him out. This isn’t you.” Panic sank in, and I drew a hand to my throat.
“Oh—it has always been me. Watching you, waiting for when our paths would cross under this black moon,” Caym said. “I once wished to see you dead for your ancestors’ betrayals. But now…I see what we may accomplish together. Come with me willingly, and I will not harm them…”
He waved a hand at Barden and Mortag and my heart pounded. His voice was like venom in my veins, alluring in a horrific way. I almost faltered, almost approached him.
He’d done this to Firose.
I’d seen it in her memories—his lure, his ability to sink into people. He had his sights on me next.
“So now you wish to see me leashed to you instead?” I spat back, my sense of self-preservation giving way to anger. He’d hurt so many—killed so many. “I’d rather be dead.”
Barden and Mortag stood still, but their arms went limp at their sides. Caym looked murderous, nostrils flaring. “I warned you. When the Origins released this body from that tomb below Helos, these pawns were a means for me to regain strength through. They are useless to me. They’ll make better use as Death. So we start here until you bend to me…”
Caym let a sinister smile cross his face as he cracked his neck and outstretched a hand toward my cousin. The putrid smell of dark magic roiled as a ghastly amber smoke swept around Barden. It robbed him of breath, then of color, then of skin. His pocket watch fell from his hand—it landed face up, revealing the deathmark carved into its gold body.
I gasped out in horror as my cousin’s muscles decayed until there was nothing but dust on the tile. I threw a hand over my mouth, stifling a scream.
There were no guards to hear me.
Caym’s eyes closed with a satiated shudder as though he’d just taken the first sip of a fine port. His lids opened slightly, showing me the whites as his eyes rolled back. He extended a hand toward Mortag next.
“You can stop this, Isleen.” Caym held out his other hand to me. “Just come to me.”
“Mortag—no!” I tried to run to my healer only to realize my legs were trapped in place.
I had no control.
All that training, all that false hope that my mind would be any match for him. He would kill everyone I loved until I accepted his terms—until I surrendered to him.
I reached deep into the depths of my mind, and I screamed to the one who I knew might hear me, not knowing if from a distance his mind would let me in.
“He’s here. Caym is here. Run!” I helplessly slammed against the shield of his mind as if it were a pane of glass.
The smoke descended over Healer Mortag.
No, no, no. The dust of what had once been my healer fell into a pile next to my cousin’s. My heart cracked in two.
I tried to scream out, but a hand wrapped around my neck and squeezed. Caym had killed them both so quickly, and the shock of the moment washed over me as I gagged for air.
“I may not be able to kill you, but what an impressive partner you will make once you give in,” Caym said. “Pity, really. My nephew had been so happy with his first wife—didn’t even notice when I made her an envoy. What was her name? Fiona? Farah?”
Freya. He’d taken Krait’s first love. My stomach churned.
“She was only strong enough to change the moon cycles by a few years before her untimely demise. Will you be more useful than she was?”
“Never,” I choked out.
“We’ll see.” He frowned. “Pity this black moon had to sour your honeymoon. I suppose there will be no heir. That was what you were going to try, wasn’t it? ”
He made a tisk-tsk sound before he slammed my back against the stucco wall so hard that debris from the ceiling rained on us. I cried out as he released my throat, but his face was so close that I shuddered. He closed his eyes as though he might kiss me and then breathed out that awful amber smoke. I gagged as it slipped into my mouth, caressing my tongue. He would devour me, take me under his command and never release me.
I could be worse than Firose, worse than any other under his command.
That future flashed before me.
Fallen cities.
Nothing but ruins.
Smoke, ash and annihilation.
“No!” Slamming against every mental barrier I could find in Caym’s mind, I pushed against them, looking for a movable wall. I held my breath and fought against his attempt to let that awful smoke consume me. He tore through every dark thought and tried to ignite my despair.
With one final mental strike, I let all my rage lash toward him.
The intoxicating feeling of control overtook me.
Caym reeled back into the butcher-block table, falling as though I’d physically struck him.
As I took hold of his mind, our thoughts tumbled together—memories mixing, intentions warping, emotions cutting through the night like glass against delicate skin.
Blue tea being poured.
Amber smoke filling a battlefield.
Finding journals written in my mother’s hand.
Freya atop a moonlit roof with Caym at her back.
My sixteenth birthday.
Poisoned eggs.
Screams of women in a pleasure hall as amber smoke engulfed them.
A ruby-encrusted sword.
Barden letting soldiers through an Egress to assassinate me in Luz.
The fall of a guillotine.
My mother’s face was the last memory I saw.
Caym writhed against the tile floor as I held him down with just my fury. My screams cut through the night. It took so much strength to hold him there that my body hunched and slackened. Moving backward toward the door, I wondered how far I could get before he would be released.
Then I ran.
Out on the streets of Sahlmkar, I sprinted without aim. Realizing I had no idea where the prison was, I felt helpless to find Krait. The bustle and life that I’d seen upon arriving had ceased. I didn’t see a single soul.
Empty shop windows blurred past before I turned down the alley toward the one power in this land who might be able to help me.