Chapter 32
LARA
In the gray light just before dawn, Ivrael’s people pick through the still-smoldering ashes of the ballroom.
A giant cart has been rolled into the courtyard, I presume through the gates on the far side of the manor—gates that I’ve never seen opened. People I don’t recognize—human people, I realize after watching them for a moment—are busy piling what remains of burned bodies into the cart.
“Who are they?” I murmur to Kila.
She peeks out of the hood of my cloak. “Tenders of the dead,” she says. “They’ll make sure all the remains are properly staked and buried.”
Human tenders of the dead. Because, as Adefina informed me after my adventure in the Caix cemetery, normal Caix aren’t able to pass the iron gates. “You must have already left the burial ground by the time His Lordship found you,” she’d said. “There’s no way he could have come inside to save you.”
But she was wrong. Ivrael did come into the cemetery and save me. I just don’t know how.
I turn my mind back to the ballroom massacre. Remembering Oriana’s face as it melted to nothing in the heat of the dragon’s fire, I whisper to Kila, “What about the ones who were burned to ashes?”
“All the ashes will be swept up and buried in iron boxes.” The tiny raya shudders. “With any luck, that will allow them to rest peacefully.”
I don’t see how that can happen, given how they died. The smell of old smoke and wet wood heavy in my nostrils, I trudge back toward the kitchen.
One of the footmen stands staring at the building in a daze, and I pause beside him. “Did you see the dragon?” I ask, then quickly correct myself. “I mean the firelord.”
Without looking at me, he nods. His tone is incredulous as he shakes his head. “He burned everything.”
“Where did he go after that?” I don’t even know why I’m asking. By all rights, I ought to be telling everyone what I heard, letting everyone know that Ivrael is the reason so many of his people are dead.
But part of me is hopeful I can use that information to force the duke to send me home, to convince him not to kidnap my sister and drop her into this bizarre life.
I don’t know for sure, but it feels like that may make me almost as much of a villain as Ivrael.
But the footman doesn’t answer—not directly. He simply shakes his head. As I stand there with him, Kila peeks out from where she’s huddled against my collarbone, using my body heat to survive being outside. “We’re not going back inside yet, are we?”
“You can’t stay outside much longer.” I can tell she’s about to argue when a shiver rocks her tiny body.
“Fine,” she says. “You’re right.”
On the way back around the side of the house, I pass the figure of a woman huddled on the ground, knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs, forehead resting on her hands. It takes me a moment to realize it’s Ramira. Strands of hair straggle out of her usually perfectly coiffed bun. Along the line where her collar meets the back of her neck is a row of tiny red welts left over from Kila dusting her. Hard to believe that was such a short time ago—it feels like ages.
I drop down to my haunches beside her. I don’t exactly know what to say, but for the first time since the morning she swung into the kitchen and snarled at me on my second day here, I actually feel sympathy for her. Instead of speaking, I rest my hand gently against the middle of her back—and she actually leans into my touch.
“I can’t find Oriana.” Her voice is scratchy and hoarse with smoke, exhaustion, and probably grief. “No one has seen her. I don’t know what happened.”
I think of my last sight of the housemaid, engulfed in the dragon’s flames, and shudder. I should probably tell Ramira what I know—that Oriana is not coming back, that there’s probably nothing left to be found—but I can’t bring myself to say the words aloud.
Kila’s shiver against my collarbone reminds me why I was headed inside in the first place, so I stand to leave, still not knowing what to say but glad that I didn’t make things worse for Ramira. After months of Ramira and Oriana taunting me, I’d expect to relish the opportunity to dig the knife in. But I don’t. I can’t stand the idea of making Ramira’s grief worse.
I’m not sure where that puts me on the villain-to-heroine continuum. But I am certain, at least for a moment, of Ivrael’s position on that scale.
He’s pure villain, and I cannot allow whatever evil plans he’s hatching to come to fruition.
I am going to do everything I can to get him to take me with him when he heads out to the Trasqo Market to buy Izzy, and then I’m going to take my sister and run.
B y that afternoon, the bodies and ashes have all been removed, and word has gone around among the servants that Duke Ivrael has put a halt to all but the most basic of duties for the rest of the day. No one will be expected to work if it can be avoided.
Convincing Ivrael to take me with him is easier than I anticipated.
All day, I keep an eye out, knowing I need to catch him before he leaves. I even have Fintan watching the courtyard for me, prepared to let me know when Ivrael exits the house. So I’m ready when Fintan sticks his head into the kitchen and says, “His Grace has called for his travel gear.”
I meet Ivrael in the courtyard. The snow there is churned up, from both the many feet that walked across it this morning and the bucket brigade pulling pails of snow out of the courtyard to dump on the fire.
Planting myself directly in front of Ivrael, I cross my arms. “You’re going to The Trasqo Market, aren’t you? To get my sister? I’m going with you.”
“No.”
It was the answer I had expected. “You’ll need me if you want her to come quietly.”
“Or you’ll use the chance to escape.”
“Not if you have my sister.”
The duke’s mouth twists thoughtfully, and he chews on his lip as he considers my request. “Your raya friend stays behind as collateral,” he finally says. “If you don’t come back, I’ll have her tossed out into the snow, and she’ll die.”
I open my mouth to protest, but instantly snap it closed, realizing this is the only way I’m going with him and promising myself I’ll find some way around it. “Agreed.”
He stares deeply into my eyes, and those golden sparks begin to appear in his irises as if they’re floating to the surface from somewhere deep inside him. They twirl around and around, and I am mesmerized by them.
Ivrael stands so close to me that his breath fans my hair as he speaks.
“Do you swear you won’t attempt to leave my…service?” His voice is soft, intimate—not quite a whisper, but nothing anyone else around us would be able to hear. The pause he inserts before the last word of the question turns my thighs to jelly. And that pisses me off.
But I know the answer he’s looking for, and I’m willing to do or say anything at all if it’ll help me warn Izzy away from him. So I tell him what he wants to hear. “I swear.”
Ivrael searches my gaze for a few more moments, and I do my best to appear open, guileless. Finally, he nods as if satisfied and drags his gaze away from me.
I have to fight myself not to heave an audible sigh of relief. I will lie my ass off to get what I want. I give a sharp nod like I’m happy with the decision to leave Kila behind, and then I turn to march back to the kitchen.
I don’t really own anything except the clothes I was wearing when I got here, the scratchy wool clothes I’ll be leaving behind, and the cloaks Adefina created for me. So instead of packing, I use the time to tell Adefina what is happening.
But I still don’t tell her about Ivrael’s betrayal of his own people, the way he sacrificed them to the firelord, offering them up to be burned alive.
The tiny, niggling idea that I might be doing the same thing to Kila eats at me.
“Promise you’ll take care of her,” I say to Adefina for at least the fifteenth time.
“I promise.”
“I don’t need to be looked after,” Kila protests.
“You will, if Ivrael comes back and orders you frozen to death.”
“But he’s not going to do that, is he? I’m just the guarantee that you’ll behave, right?”
“Absolutely, yes, of course.” But my words are more certain than I am.
When I finally get Adefina alone, I whisper, “Don’t let Ivrael kill her. If for any reason you hear that I’m not coming back, take Kila and run.”
Adefina agrees readily enough, which worries me—does she have so little faith in me? Then again, she’s not wrong. I have no idea if I’m going to be able to save my sister, but I can at least make contingency plans for my friend.
Back outside in the courtyard, Ivrael is waiting with two footmen.
“Why are they coming?” I ask.
Ivrael glances at me and raises one eyebrow.
I really hate it when I’m not the only one who can do that trick.
“Let me guess,” I said, my voice in as dry a tone as I can muster. “It’s to make sure I don’t try anything funny.”
The corner of his mouth quirks up, and it occurs to me for the first time that if he ever truly smiled, the effect would be devastating. “Although it may surprise you to hear this, not everything I do is about you.”
My mind flashes back to the conversation I’d heard him having with the firelord the night before. “Could’ve fooled me,” I mutter.
But he’s already turned back to the footmen and gives no indication he hears me. I stand there shifting from foot to foot, awkwardly waiting for him to finish telling them what to do before turning back to me. With a critical glance at my clothing—as if he’s only just noticed almost a full year later that I am still wearing the same outfit I had on when he bought me—Ivrael says, “Did you bring a bag?”
“A bag? Like a suitcase?” With an incredulous stare, I shake my head. “What would I put in it?”
Ivrael looks confused for a heartbeat. “I assumed the maids would help you find something suitable.”
I snort. “It might’ve been nice for you to let someone know that. Or—you know—not have kidnapped me in the first place?”
“Your guardian?—”
“Had no right to sell me in the first place.” The longer he actually speaks directly to me, the angrier I get, now that he’s given me the opening to say what I’ve been thinking.
Ivrael’s mouth tightens. “And yet he did sell you. Which only proves that he should never have had control of you in the first place.”
“Like you’re any better.” Everything that’s happened to me in the last year, from being turned into some kind of weird cook’s assistant and fill-in maid to being attacked by bloodsucking undead Caix to watching people burn to death just the night before—all of it crowds into the forefront of my mind as if it’s trying to tumble out of my mouth, but it all hangs there like a giant multi-car pile-up on the freeway between my memory and my ability to speak. In the end, all that comes out are the sputtered words, “You absolute prick.”
I turn and stalk away, feeling Ivrael’s gaze on my back.
When I return to the courtyard, Ivrael and his two servants, Khrint and Tenyt—or rather, his guards, as I’m thinking of them now—are waiting for me.
Impatiently, the duke waves his hands in the air and speaks words in that language I don’t understand, calling up four of the ice horses this time. I could almost believe that the one closest to me is the same one I rode here from the Trasqo Market the first time, an impression that’s only heightened when it bends its head down toward me and rubs its cold nose against my shoulder. I scratch its forehead gently, and it blows a fine, icy mist out of its nostrils.
The ice horse’s cold breath reminds me of Kila’s tiny shivers, and I pray I’m not trading one sister’s safety for another’s.
Without a word, Ivrael boosts me onto the horse’s back. He and the other two men leap atop their own horses’ backs, and with a flick of his forefinger, Ivrael leads us up and over the courtyard wall.
As we soar into the air, I wonder which is the bigger lie—Ivrael’s promise to spare Kila, or my promise to return. I clench my teeth against the thought and turn my mind toward home, telling myself that finally, I’m going to get my sister.
I cannot wait to be back in my world.
The real world.
Home.
The word echoes in my mind as we rise higher into the sky, but somehow it doesn’t taste like freedom anymore. It tastes like ashes and broken promises.
While behind us, Starfrost Manor grows ever smaller, taking with it all my certainties about villains and heroes…