Chapter 10 Lyra
Lyra
My eyes flicker between the queen and the male who stands, offering a small smile in my direction. Darian straightens the cuffs of his linen shirt before approaching me, and I take a step back before steeling myself. “What do you intend to do?”
His head tilts to the side. “Does it matter?”
Yes.
Nythen, I could have coped with. By all accounts, the spymaster of the Darkwielders relies on delivering pain as a method of extracting information, and my training made sure that I could take whatever he attempted.
Darian is an unknown. I step back once more as his hands raise, only to come to a stop. Looking down, I take in the shadows that wind around my ankles. They thread in and out, creating a lock that continues up my body, pinning my hands to my sides until I cannot move.
Twisting my head, I take in the smirking gaze of Kaelen Duskbane. He raises a dark brow at me. “Going somewhere?”
“It doesn’t hurt,” Darian murmurs. My head whips back to him. His palms are raised in front of him, but he’s stopped. “Only if you fight it. I need to touch your face.”
My breathing stutters at the realization. “I didn’t think there were any of you left.”
Walker.
His face tightens, as if I’ve struck at some internal wound, but he only steps closer, not responding.
For a moment, fear floods my mouth, filling it with bile before I swallow it down and close my eyes. This is the first test, likely of many.
I just didn’t expect to face a dreamwalker. Torture would have been easier. “Just… I need a moment.”
Darian pauses, the pads of his fingers hovering barely an inch from my temples. Closing my eyes, I take a breath, and then another. I force away the room I’m standing in, the shadow-carved faces watching me with hatred and suspicion burning in their dark eyes.
I force it all down. Every memory. Every piece of me gets shoved far, far down, into the box. Any thoughts of my father, of Reena, of anything that might identify me as a threat.
I was never very good at this. But now my life depends on it.
Reena’s life depends on it.
My breathing steadies. Keeping my eyes closed, I take a few more breaths and nod in silent permission.
Darian’s fingers are cool as they brush my temple before moving on. He cradles the back of my head, his thumbs presenting the barest pressure against my skin. Trapping me in a cage made of his hands. The pressure deepens, almost to the point of pain.
I have to give him something. Something that will stop him seeing the truth, something that will offer fractured evidence that the story I’ve told them is true.
It’s not all lies.
I start to tremble beneath the silence as I let those memories out, push them to the surface, spill them like oil across my mind for Darian to catch.
Cindral.
Cindral, his lieutenant’s sigil gleaming against golden armor as he smiles down at me. His hands against my face as he pulls me to him, his lips sealing over mine. He had been so gentle, and I had been so happy to finally be seen as something more than the soldier they kept telling me I was.
My stomach had flipped. I had smiled beneath those full, warm lips, had pressed myself into him without knowing what I was asking for.
When he took my hand, I followed without question.
I don’t want to go any further. I don’t want the walker to see what happens next, and my head pulls back in instinctive refusal. Darian moves with me, his fingers not releasing my head where he holds it.
What a fool I had been, to think that I could have anything for myself. To see affection where there was only obedience. To mistake cruelty for softness.
“Steady.” The low, quiet tone attempts to soften the harsh sound of my breathing. “Just a little longer.”
I have no control over the small, pained noise that echoes from my throat in response to Darian.
But my focus is on those memories, and only those.
It’s all too easy to let myself sink back into the nightmares, let them swallow me up as they did so many times in the days and weeks that had followed, until I learned to box them up too, just like the rest.
But now I show them all to him.
Darian’s presence is barely noticeable. An itch, of sorts, the vague sensation of someone hovering behind me, just out of sight.
But I can feel him, nonetheless. There’s a strange sort of comfort in that understanding, the knowledge that I am not alone in that room.
Or perhaps it’s simply that I’m not there anymore.
That my feet are planted firmly in Umbraxis, and Cindral is a long way away.
I let this man flick through my worst experiences, let him stand by and watch in the corner of my mind as a door closes behind me in Solvandyr on another day, and Cindral locks it behind him, pocketing the key.
Every detail unfurls between us in sickening clarity.
I am to teach you, he had said. And I had smiled again. Had taken his outstretched hand with a bubbling, girlish joy in my stomach, wonder and nerves fluttering in my stomach that I might finally experience what Reena whispered to me of with blushed cheeks during her visits.
But this was not what she had described to me.
After the first day, I had stopped smiling.
By the second day, I had stopped screaming, too.
And on the seventh day, when he had deemed my training complete, Cindral washed my golden blood from his hands at the basin without saying a single word. He walked away, and left me to bleed out on a soaked, stained bed.
I had dared to show him that small, hopeful part of me, the hidden piece of my soul that still remained after years beneath my father’s thumb, that was still Lyra, and he had stolen it. He ripped that version of me into pieces so small that I barely remember them now.
Duskbane will do worse, he whispered into my ear while I cried and begged him to stop. This is for your own good.
I push the memories away, shove them back down before anything else can slip through.
I plunge into newer nightmares instead—Tharn, his mouth moving in unheard pleas, the way his blood sprayed scarlet and gleaming against crisp white snow.
The sight of a soldier, clad in Lightbringer gold and chasing a boy through the dark trees, eating up the space between them with every long step.
My arrow buried deep in his throat, the shock in his eyes.
Angry faces, and shouts of traitor, and pain.
The bite of the snow against my back, soaking into my skin through a pretty white dress completely unsuitable for the Veilspire.
The sight of the night sky, stars blurring in my fading vision and the scent of burning, innocent flesh in my nose.
It would have been a beautiful place to die.
When my eyes open again, my breathing is steady. It’s Darian who staggers back, sweat coating his face and his pale skin a sickly shade of green as he stares at me with that troubled, purple gaze.
He looks almost bruised, this male. As if the world has not been kind to him. A beautiful, broken bruise that wears his nightmares in the dark circles beneath his pretty eyes.
I wonder if I have added to them.
“Well?” The demand comes from behind Darian, and he flinches. “What did you get, Veyr?”
He doesn’t move his gaze from mine. I lift my chin and wait for him to share those days with the people watching us, waiting for him to offer up my worst moments as a form of payment for my life.
My lips feel dry. Cracked, and I taste iron as I lick them.
He follows the movement, a small line forming between his eyes.
But then the line smooths out, his lips lifting at the edges and the tinge clearing from his skin.
He wipes his pain from his face so perfectly that I feel wrong-footed when his smile widens into something almost genuine.
He takes a step toward me, head tilting. And his words are almost a purr. “Not a lot. Empty-headed little Lightbringer. Although I saw enough to confirm her story as true, at least for the most part. Not a complete confirmation, but enough that I’m confident she’s not a complete liar.”
I wait. But he… he doesn’t say anything else.
Darian turns his back on me, slipping his hands into his pockets and sauntering back to his seat, dropping into it with the grace of a king as I stand there, searching for the trick. He reaches for the goblet in front of him and drinks deeply, draining it.
My eyes flick to the Duskbane prince. The reason for the memories I shared. But he’s not looking at me. Instead, he’s watching Darian, jaw tight and his eyes curiously bunched at the edges.
“Well then,” Eres breaks the silence. He turns to the queen, as they all do. “What do you think, Your Majesty?”
Maelira Duskbane watches me with eyes eerily like those of her son.
I had heard that she had stepped back from the running of the war effort, that she had handed the reins to her heir, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Although she looks to him, as if searching for his thoughts before turning back to me.
“We cannot allow the girl to move around without restriction.”
I keep my eyes lowered, feigning respect. “I’m a good worker, your Majesty.”
A scoff sounds. Fingers wrap around my wrist, making me flinch. Kaelen Duskbane turns my hands over roughly, inspecting them. His hands almost swallow mine as he inspects the bandages that cover them, my darkened fingers peeping out.
I didn’t even see him move.
He drops them as if they’re diseased. “Interesting that we can’t confirm, since her hands are bandaged.”
“She didn’t stake herself to the ground, Kae.” Eres looks disapproving. “I’m happy to oversee Lyra’s stay, if supervision is your concern.”
In front of me, Kaelen freezes. His head swivels to the healer. “What?”
“I can always use additional assistance.” Eres tilts his head, studying me for a moment before he nods, almost to himself. “If you feel a Binding is necessary, I will offer.”