6. The proof is in the…burns? #2
My teeth clicked as I opened my mouth and snapped it shut, drawing the suffocating attention of both men. A feat, considering I wasn’t confident one of them even had any eyes.
But what good was the protest that danced on the tip of my tongue? Streja was already dead.
“Jasper can burn you, if you’d prefer that,” Maksym mused from my side.
I didn’t even bother to look up as I shook my head, and the mage wasted no time.
He turned over Streja’s hand, pulling it a little away from her body, and let the orb of nytefire drop onto it. A crackle sounded out as the blue flame devoured her skin, followed by the unmistakable acrid odor of burning flesh laced with something sour.
I averted my eyes and drew my shirt over my nose and mouth, though the threadbare fabric and my body’s unwashed musk did little to help the nausea that churned quickly in my stomach.
“That should be plenty,” Maksym finally said.
I lifted my attention as the mage gathered up the nytefire like it was a piece of cloth, and he tossed it back towards the row of lanterns.
I could’ve sworn his throw was on a due course to miss, but, at the last second, tendrils extended from the ball like arms and caught the edge of the lantern, merging with the flame inside.
Even more concerning than that, perhaps, was the smirk that graced the lower half of the mage’s face when my attention trailed back. As if I, a simple and magic-void Odessan, would be impressed and not unsettled by such a display.
“If you take a look…” Maksym’s hand brushed my back and nudged me a little closer to the table. “Nytefire burns.”
I almost missed them.
Streja’s body had lost all its usual rosiness, and any of her skin not charred black or blistered was a pallid gray-white.
But the closer I looked, the clearer the faint, cragged lines now intersecting her skin became, as did the ashy quality it had taken on. Like the outer shell of pieces of lit charcoal, except there was no longer a brightly burning ember at her core.
Fresh unease washed over me. I couldn’t tell if it was because someone who’d shown me so much kindness was now dead before me, or if it was the creeping acknowledgement I had gleaned no similar burns on my other fallen comrades, even ones with far darker skin than Streja.
The looming king beside me could not be right.
“Where are the rest of them? The other bodies?”
The ones laid out in this room only accounted for half of my travel party, and it wasn’t hard to assume the condition of the other half of the Odessans. They were probably the ones covered head to toe in nytefire burns.
But Maksym glanced at me with clear confusion and repeated, “Others?”
He cast a glance at his mage, but Jasper shook his head. “We only found these ten and you.”
I narrowed my eyes at them before I glanced back around the room.
“That’s impossible. There were…” My eyes danced around the room once more, and I swallowed.
Twenty of us traveled, I was sure.
Myself.
Ten cavalry soldiers I knew with varying levels of familiarity.
Nine other envoys of my brother’s clear choosing.
As muddy as my memories of recent events were, I remembered our departure clearly.
And while a handful of the bodies laid out in the surrounding room had been too burned to be recognized, there was no helping the knot that formed in my chest at how clearly I knew the rest of them.
“You said…you found my camp, right?” I asked Maksym directly, and he gave me an uneasy nod. “Well, what else did you find? How many tents? And our horses… Where are they?”
The king and his mage exchanged another look of apprehension, but it was Jasper who spoke with a slight grimace decorating the exposed half of his face. “The fire left little structure behind. But no horses anywhere nearby. Very little gear either. A few travel bags, no weapons.”
Slowly, I shook my head.
“That’s impossible,” I breathed. “There were twenty of us. Twenty horses. Twenty tents. At least twice that in weapons and bags…”
As each statement tumbled out of me, it became increasingly hard to breathe, like a band snaked around my chest and tightened with every exhale until each breath came like a painful pass of a saw.
I ghosted my hand over my empty pants pocket as I pressed my other palm to my thundering chest, desperate to find even a pinch of a nonexistent something there to calm myself.
“I’m not sure how else you’d like us to explain it to you, Miss Wynn,” Maksym said, “but I’d suggest you spend some time these next few days carefully considering all this whilst you mull over your options.”
Right. How could I have already forgotten?
Three days to decide if I wanted a quick or tedious execution, or a slow death married to Grimmoria’s Umbrite king. Right on the heels of my people being slaughtered, of course.
I didn’t give the king the decency of a response before I started back towards the stairwell.
There wasn’t a single thing in that room I needed to see more of, despite a protesting voice in the back of my mind scolding me for not parking myself beside Streja and getting out the emotional goodbye clawing away at me.
But I couldn’t in front of these strangers.
They already had an egregious upper hand.
From behind me, hushed words were exchanged before I heard the mage say he would meet Maksym later, and a single set of footsteps hurried after me.
I didn’t even need to look back to know it was the king who’d be escorting me back to my cage; I could feel the way his presence seemed to upset the very air around us, like a charged storm cloud trailing behind me.
But as we climbed the miserable stairs back up to the cell block, and I fought to keep my ever-growing nausea at bay, Streja’s distant words came crawling back into my mind again.
“Here, princess. Let me put you to bed.”
“Crash in my tent; it’s closer.”
“I’m so sorry, Nor. It’ll be over soon.”
But this time, they came with fragmented memories of camp, merriment, and drowsiness, of a feeling of fear and a look of resignation on my friend’s face.
Why did I have the most sickening suspicion that Streja saved my life?