Chapter 80 #2
Arkyn continues building me a plate of food, meticulous in his motions, muttering about how delicious it all smells. About how he’s missed our meals.
The last of my uhloo turns to smoking cinders as I dare to meet Kaan’s gaze, crushed by the primal ferocity in his eyes screaming all the words he’s too gagged to say.
I discreetly shake my head and quietly beg him not to bite.
Not to feed into Arkyn’s sick, sadistic games.
Kaan doesn’t realize it yet, but we’re tiptoeing the fine edge of a very sharp blade.
That his supposed brother is unhinged and erratic, all too willing to bash my heart in the hopes of getting the shape he craves.
What’s worse, he knows my weakness: Anyone who’s broken past the igneous outer shell of the withered organ in my chest.
Anyone I love.
For Arkyn, this is so much more than a feast. It’s carefully plated torture he’ll force us to sit through until he’s done with his fucked-up meal. All we have the power to do is mitigate the repercussions.
Footsteps thump from behind, and Kaan’s gaze slides from mine, widening. He releases a relieved groan, renewing his stiff battle against the chains binding him like a metal fist.
My heart drops.
“Forgive me, Sire,” comes a deep voice. “He’s finished with the throne room. Where would you like him to rune next?”
He …
Rune …
Arkyn’s stare sizzles the side of my face, watching me with honed intrigue. Despite the smashing beat of my heart, I resist the urge to look. To turn and check who’s speaking, and who might be standing beside him.
To show any sign that I’m invested in Ahvi’s welfare.
It’s probably too late to hide my love for Kaan, but I can spare Ahvi. Pretend I’m not aching to peek back over the chair’s backrest and scour him from head to toe. Tell him it’s going to be okay.
That I’ll make this okay.
Time becomes intangible while I count the runes on Kaan’s hefty chains instead. Watch them flicker with each wrestling surge, his sweat-dappled skin tightening every time one lights up—veins raised and angry looking. Like the runes are hurting him.
“Sire?”
“He’s to get started on the fighting pits,” Arkyn announces. “If they’re not protected by the rise, there will be consequences.”
Bile surges so hot and acrid it’s hard to swallow while keeping my face blank.
Unaffected.
A tight, suffocating mask Arkyn picks at with his cutthroat gaze, the quiet stretching well after the retreating footsteps fade.
So long it starts to itch.
“You thought he’d be dead.”
Arkyn’s blunt observation pulls a plug in the back of my throat, loosening a spigot of unwelcome tears that fill my eyes and spill.
He uses the pad of his bloody thumb to squash a bead against my cheek, frowns at it, then sighs, rubbing the moisture between his gnarly fingers. “You think me such a monster, Raeve?”
Yes.
I shake my head. Slow, so as not to startle him.
A stiff-necked lie.
He sucks air between his teeth, like he sees the motion for what it is:
Placation.
Tension wells like a rising dam. My heart labors, then feels as though it pops when he finally shifts again, using his hands to pluck another strip of meat and drop it on my plate.
I almost gag with relief.
“Well,” he murmurs, “it’s important you know that it was never my intention for the child to die. The miskunn foretold certain outcomes based on the information we provided you and the actions of your binder. It was just a little game, Fire Lark. Another song for you to dance to.”
I pinch my lips together. Feel his words plow through my ribs and mangle the contents of my chest cavity.
Another bit of meat is slapped on my plate, so hard blood splats against my cheek and neck. “Though I must say, I loathe being forced to resort to such measures to simply GET. YOUR. ATTENTION.”
His words explode against me with such force I physically recoil. A knee-jerk reaction that makes my face blaze. In its wake, I cower from Kaan’s pressing stare as he wrestles and gnashes through muffled words that hold no shape.
I’d do anything for him to turn away. Hate that he’s seeing this side of me, broken in like a trained colk turning to the tug of my reins … giving Arkyn my full, undivided attention.
A desperate attempt to douse his welling rage.
“Apologies, Arkyn.” Another muffled scream batters me from across the table. “I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just a lot to take in.”
Arkyn’s smile gleams, his next words gentle. “What lovely manners you’ve learned. Apology accepted.”
A scoop of wet vegetables slop upon my plate while my dignity shrivels up and dies.
“You’ve always been a force, Raeve.” He sucks the meat juice off his fingers and thumb—a rowdy slurp.
“Since I found you stumbling south with that crack in your skull. Your eyes were so dark and determined.” He wobbled a finger at me.
“You would’ve made it wherever you were headed, if only to die on the doorstep.
” A shrug before he pinches something flaky that he scatters over my meal. “Had I not saved you.”
I doubt that’s how my Other saw it at the time, but sure.
He grabs an urn and dribbles steaming gravy over my mound of food. “I was told the blow had busted your memories beyond repair, but knowing what I do now … Well, I think they’re in there somewhere.”
He slams the urn back on the table in front of Kaan, sloshing him with gravy.
It must burn, but he doesn’t even flinch, eyes on Arkyn, who pinches a tendril of my hair and twirls it around his finger in a way that makes my skin crawl.
Makes his pet trill from the darkness above, like she wants to leap down and gouge my fucking brain out.
“Such bold, beautiful rage doesn’t simmer without a source. ”
I stiffen, pitted with paralyzing unease.
He knows something. He doesn’t dance around a point unless it’s sharp enough to bleed you dry.
“Not that I’m complaining,” he rushes, leaning back to pull a familiar dragonscale blade from within the folds of his cloak, so dark red it’s almost black.
Rygun’s.
One of the blades that was in my sheath.
He leans forward across the table, using the blade to slice through a lump of bread.
“Your many victories have filled my coffers and granted us safety during the coming falls. And were it not for your efforts in The Fade, eliminating certain threats that would’ve otherwise hindered progress, well,” he says, his next words nails pounded into the soft, fleshy bits of my soul, “there’d be no beaded army ready to purge my brother’s forces the moment I charge on Dhomm. ”
Kaan makes a dense sound while my thoughts churn like a storm of razorblades, slicing back to a memory. Something Arkyn once said about the bronze crown.
Kaan’s crown.
Sometime soon, I’ll wear my bronze crown, and you won’t ever have to hurt again. I’ll be on my rightful throne, and you’ll be by my side, enjoying the spoils of your battles.
Dread kicks me in the gut so hard I lose breath, watching Arkyn slice bits of bread away like flaps of skin.
The crown has been Arkyn’s target this entire time. Since I first fell into his clutches, he’s been using me, scavenging resources, all with the goal of usurping the big-hearted king who brought The Burn back to life after the ruthless rule of his pah.
Now Kaan’s here. Chained. His life threatened.
And it’s all my fault.
I rot amongst the realization, too ashamed to meet Kaan’s blazing gaze as Arkyn pierces a slice of bread and brings it close, flopping it beside my plate.
“As the great prophet Geisé Líarth-atan once etched on a scroll I scavenged from his sealed tomb, ‘Before we can harvest our rewards, the world must burn.’” He slaps the dragonscale dagger on the table, snatches the weald, flicks the lid, and hisses a scalding word. “Vaghth.”
I freeze.
My Other shifts, rising near the surface of my skin when a shred of flame rips from the weald and settles in Arkyn’s clawed hand.
“Only then can new life rise from the ashes.” He peers over the roil of fire, eyes all but burning a hole in Kaan’s face as he brings the flame so close to my cheek I can feel its hot hunger flicking at my skin, trying to taste me.
“With Raeve at my side, bearing me strong heirs the likes Pah only dreamt of.”
Kaan bucks and roars, savagery contorting his face while I sit with a stiff spine and bile surging up my throat. While I choke on my shock and putrid repugnance for what Arkyn has in mind, all while trying to prepare for the first melting stroke.
For him to dish me the same pain he once felt.
Arkyn snaps the lid back down on the weald, opens it, closes it again … strumming my already-roaring pulse. When he slaps the instrument on the table, it’s a teeth-gnashing effort not to flinch.
Bringing the roil of fire a little closer, Arkyn swallows, likely salivating over the thought of mutilating me to the tune of Kaan’s desperate, muffled screams. Leaving me confused when he clicks his tongue, then mutters a seething command and crushes his hand around the dying flame.
Little relief comes, his hand still smoking as he sweeps some of my loose hair back behind my ear. “Not yet,” he murmurs—too fucking close—his breath a hot shudder that batters the side of my face.
He peels away, snatches my cutlery, and begins hacking up my meal into bite-sized chunks, relieving me of just enough space to pull a breath. My gaze flicks between the weald and his hands while he shovels meat and gravy on a fork, then brings it to my lips.
My stomach knots with such revulsion I almost garnish the bite with a spray of spew.
“Open your mouth.” His command booms, drenched in a demoralizing tone. “I suspect it’s been daes since you last ate, and you’ll need your strength.”
He might as well be asking me to kneel.
My gaze lifts on instinct, finding Kaan’s. Falling into the too-vulnerable craving to seek shelter within the eyes of the male I love.
Though his features are rippling—like a beast is just beneath his skin, threatening to burst free—his gaze is a soft landing that reaches across the table and gently lifts my chin. Such intentional tenderness despite his obvious pain, worry, and rage.
Arkyn grabs my jaw, jerks my face in his direction. Flattens his nose against mine and roars a single bludgeoning word. “EAT!”
“I’m not hungry!”
He stills. So does the air, like Clode just poised to listen. All the while, I silently chastise myself for being so fucking stupid. For biting.
The repercussions are instant.
With trembling, untethered ferocity, Arkyn pries my jaw open and pushes the fork past my lips, stuffing my mouth with the warm meat and stodgy sauce that dribbles down my chin.
He drops the utensil, slams my head back against the headrest, clamps my teeth together, and pinches my nose—the point clear.
Choke the food down or suffocate.
Kaan jerks against his chains, roaring as I chew. Swallow. Gag it all back up, then force myself to swallow again.
Arkyn’s grotesque smile is saccharine.
“Your words have grown clearer since you left me,” he murmurs well after the mouthful is finally gone. Well after my breath is spent, my chest bucking for air. “I’d been told such things. Hearing it is something else.”
He releases me, uses a napkin to dab the gravy from my chin while I gulp breath so fast my head goes light and airy. While Kaan’s ember eyes cradle me from across the table, pulling me close despite the chasm between us.
Arkyn pushes up, tosses the napkin at Kaan’s face, and stalks to the table’s shadowed far end, his billowy cloak making the candle flames flicker and flare. Over a hundred tiny fires that dance for him. “I wonder,” he calls from the dark, “how good is your reading?”
His tone needles.
“Courtesy of Veya,” he continues, snatching something off the table, “I have the perfect treasure to test your capabilities.”
Kaan thrashes and snarls with surging ferocity, perhaps realizing Veya’s also been rounded up.
Caged.
Arkyn chuckles, moves back, and plows his arm across the tabletop. My meal slops to the ground, plate clattering with a pitching echo as he slaps a book on the stone.
No, not a book …
A—
Kaan stills. Goes deathly silent as my blood chills, gaze hungering over the swirled design painted on the cover. A beautiful, near-perfect depiction of Kaan’s málmr, the two dragons bundled together like a moon.
My fingers twitch with the desire to brush across the leather. To feel the pages flick beneath them, bring the diary close and breathe its ancient scent. Because that’s what it is, I recognize.
Ancient. The diary of someone lost to the world.
My exhale is a shudder.
Slowly, I look up, straight into Kaan’s catastrophic eyes—unsaid words battling between us. All the confirmation I need that this diary belonged to Elluin. To the version of me he fell in love with so many phases ago.
The me he lost.