Chapter 21 Interrupted
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
INTERRUPTED
Voices filtered through my death—angry, sharp sounds.
I groaned at the intrusion.
Can’t a woman die in peace?
“What do you mean she’s dying?” The voice cut through my delirium, familiar, cold, and unexpectedly furious. “Why wasn’t I informed immediately?”
“She hasn’t been eating, Your Majesty,” a timid voice replied. “Started getting feverish about three days ago. We thought—“
“You thought?” The voice was now soft, which somehow made it seem more terrifying. “You are not meant to think. You are meant to report the condition of my wife.”
Wife. What a strange word. I felt like I should be more frustrated with it. Instead, I was merely irritated that my peace was being interrupted.
“Open her cell. Now.”
Heavy footsteps approached, and I flinched as the cell door screeched open. The sound reverberated through my skull, pulling a moan from my cracked lips.
Cool fingers touched my forehead, and I jerked away instinctively, my body remembering what my fever-addled mind could not fully process.
“Mireille. Look at me.”
I tried, truly I did, but my eyelids felt weighted with stones. When I finally managed to pry them open, Valen’s face swam before me, features shifting and resettling like disturbed water. Was this real, or another fever dream?
I’d had so many of those lately.
“You’re burning alive,” he muttered, and something in his tone surprised me. Concern? From the Blood King? Surely another hallucination.
I wanted to laugh, but it came out as a wet, rattling cough instead. “Isn’t that... what you wanted?” My voice was barely a whisper, scraping past my parched throat. “To watch me... suffer?”
His jaw tightened. “Not like this.” His hands moved beneath me, one supporting my shoulders, the other sliding under my knees.
The world tilted as he lifted me from the filthy dungeon floor that had been my bed these past weeks. Everything hurt. The slight jostling of his steps sent fresh agony through my head, and each breath felt like swallowing fire. I couldn’t stop the whimper that escaped me.
“Shh,” Valen murmured, the gentleness in his voice so incongruous with everything I knew of him that I was now certain I was hallucinating. “I’ve got you.”
My head lolled against his chest, and despite everything, I found myself drawing comfort from his touch. How pathetic I’d become, seeking solace from my jailer. But loneliness and pain makes beggars of us all, I supposed.
He carried me from the cell, each step sending fresh waves of pain through my body. The dungeon corridor stretched before us, torchlight casting long shadows that danced like specters along the stone walls. The air smelled of damp and decay and ancient suffering.
“You should have told me she was this bad,” Valen growled at someone I couldn’t see. “She’s no use to me dead.”
No use. Of course. Whatever his reasons for keeping me alive, they weren’t born of compassion. The momentary comfort I’d felt in his arms soured, replaced by hollow resignation.
“Please,” I murmured into the fabric of his shirt. “Just let me die.”
His arms tightened around me. “No,” he said again, but this time, there was something else in his voice, a thread of what almost sounded like desperation. “You don’t get to escape that easily, Princess.”
We stopped abruptly, and through the haze of fever, I realized we stood before another cell. It looked almost the same as mine. Old, but with chains that glinted dully in the torchlight.
“She needs help,” Valen said, addressing whoever resided within.
A long silence followed, broken only by the steady drip of water somewhere in the darkness and the rasp of my labored breathing.
“And why,” came a voice finally, low and gruff in its evident disuse, “should that concern me?”
Something stirred in my memory at the sound of that voice. A conversation. Had I dreamed it? I couldn’t be certain.
“Because this is the only way to keep her alive,” Valen replied, tension evident in every syllable. “And because I’m asking you to.”
A soft, dangerous chuckle echoed from the cell. “You lost the right to ask anything of me long ago, brother.”
Valen’s chest rose and fell in a controlled breath. “You know I would heal her myself if I could.”
“But you can’t,” the voice replied, closer now. I forced my eyes open, trying to see past Valen’s shoulder into the cell. I could see nothing but swirls of darkness. “And I will not.”
My harbinger. My death. The realization came unbidden, but it felt right. This prisoner, this being in chains… he was my harbinger. He’d come to herald my end, to guide me into whatever waited beyond this life. My hands lifted to reach for him.
“She’s dying,” Valen insisted. “She will die if you do not help her.”
“Yes,” my harbinger agreed, sounding almost contemplative. “She told me she wishes to die. Several times, in fact. Most recently just a few hours ago.”
Had I told him that? In my delirium, had I whispered my desire for death through the walls? I couldn’t remember, but it was true. I wanted this, my life, to end.
“You’ve been talking to her?” Valen shifted me in his arms, and I bit back a cry as pain lanced through my head. “I sat beside you for two decades and you hardly said a word to me, your own kin.”
“She talks,” my harbinger replied. “Sometimes I listen.”
The drip of water echoed in the silence that followed, a steady countdown to something inevitable.
Drip. Pause. Drip. Drip. Pause.
“I’ll remove one of your chains,” Valen finally said, desperation now clear in his voice. “If you help her.”
The chains clinked again, a mocking sound. “One chain?” my harbinger questioned. Then he laughed—a sound like stones grinding together. “Two chains, or she dies.”
I felt Valen go rigid. “One chain is already generous.”
“Two,” my harbinger repeated. “Or watch your bride return to dust.”
The word ‘bride’ sent a shiver through me. I finally remembered why I felt so unsettled in Valen’s presence. He had done this to me.
“Fine,” Valen spat after a long pause. “Two chains. But she must be completely healed and unchanged.”
“She will be healed,” my harbinger said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “Bring her to me, Blood God, and I will save what you’ve nearly destroyed.”
“Open the prisoner’s cell,” Valen commanded, his tone brooking no argument.
There was a pause, then a nervous cough. “Your Majesty,” came a hesitant voice, “this cell hasn’t been opened in decades. King Aeldrin’s orders were—“
“King Aeldrin is dead,” Valen cut in, his voice silky with menace. “By my hand, if you recall. His orders mean nothing now.”
I felt a ghost of satisfaction at the guard’s discomfort. Let them all be uncomfortable. Let them all fear for their lives as I had watched my family fear for theirs.
“Yes, sire, but the prisoner... he’s not—“
“Do you imagine I don’t know who he is?” Valen’s chest rumbled with barely contained rage. “Open. The. Cell.”
The guard stammered something I couldn’t make out, followed by the jangle of keys and the groan of ancient metal.
The sound scraped against my eardrums like nails on slate, bringing fresh waves of pain.
I moaned, turning my face into Valen’s chest in a futile attempt to escape the noise.
His hand wrapped around my head and pressed against my ear, as if to muffle the noise.
A curious gesture for one meaning to torture me.
“Leave,” Valen said, his arms tightening around me. “If I remove these chains and you’re still here, you’ll all die.”
The guard’s breathing quickened. “Perhaps we should wait for the court healer to—“
“He would be useless here,” Valen interrupted. “This requires... a different kind of healing.”
The fever twisted his words into nonsensical patterns that fluttered around my head like moths. A different kind of healing? Different from a god’s power, even?
The screech of hinges echoed through the dungeon, magnified by my fever into a sound so piercing I thought my skull might crack. Then came a clinking sound, rhythmic and heavy. Chains falling and dragging across stone.
“Give her to me,” said my harbinger. Up close, his voice was even more ancient than I had imagined, like mountains speaking, like the earth itself finding words.
Valen hesitated. I felt the slight tensing of his muscles, the momentary tightening of his hold on me. Was he reluctant to surrender me, or merely calculating his next move? I had learned, with Valen, everything was a game of power.
“You can trust me with your precious bride,” my harbinger said, amusement coloring his tone. “I cannot help her without touching her, and I’ve given you my word.”
“Your word has proven flexible in the past,” Valen replied, but he was already shifting me, transferring my weight to another set of arms.
The transition was disorienting. One moment I was pressed against the hot solidity of Valen’s chest, the next I was enveloped in a warmth that seemed to calm me entirely.
These new arms were strong, impossibly so, yet they cradled me with a gentleness that made something deep inside me ache with recognition.
Without thought, I nestled closer, burrowing into the embrace like a mouse seeking shelter from a storm.
My nose brushed against a neck that smelled of ancient stone, of earth after rain, of something indefinably other.
I inhaled deeply, the scent cutting through my fever in a way nothing else had, clearing my mind for one precious moment.
My harbinger grunted, a sound of surprise rather than displeasure, and adjusted his hold on me. One large hand splayed across the small of my back, the other cradling my head, fingers tangling in my sweat-dampened hair.
“Thank you,” I breathed, my lips brushing his neck with each syllable, “for finally coming to kill me.”
The silence that followed my words was broken only by the distant drip of water. I felt his body go utterly still, even his breathing suspended for one long moment.