Chapter 37
thirty-seven
Nesrina sees stars.
Nesrina awoke with a pounding headache and debilitating exhaustion weighing down her limbs.
She hadn’t felt this bad since . . . ever.
Not even after having too much whiskey with the duke at the symposium.
What had she gotten up to last night? The last thing she remembered was swimming with the twins and Kas in the creek—but that was before the symposium.
Confused, she tried to groan, but found it took too much effort.
Prying her eyes open also proved impossible. Perhaps she was ill.
As the minutes ticked by, time began to flow nearly correctly again, and memories of the past few weeks drifted aimlessly through her mind as they waited to tie up to a dock.
The queen. The king. Ataht. He got hurt? Where? The palace? Little bits and pieces of moments fluttered about, drifting past one another, swapping positions, until they finally settled, properly moored in Nesrina’s brain. Her heart dropped to the floor.
Everything fell into place, everything. Perhaps a bit more than she’d asked for since she was only aiming to figure out where she was.
The summons, the palace, the twins, the tutoring, the dragon, the blades .
. . She breathed deeply and attempted again to open her eyes.
Stormhill and the duke . . . Kas Kahoth.
Her Kas. Nesrina struggled to lift her hand, it weighed a million pounds.
If she was ill, maybe someone was there, watching over her.
She had to let them know she was awake. Kas, dinners, the symposium.
The king. The queen. The dresses. The proposal.
Her lids still wouldn’t budge, although they wanted to pop open at that particular memory.
Ataht. The prince had been injured, possibly killed. On her watch. Then she’d been attacked. Oh, gods. Someone snuck up on her while she was cleaning up from the dreadful lesson.
I need a plan.
Rather than strain against whatever it was that weighed her down, Nes calmed her breathing, and listened. She was indoors, a fire crackled. Someone was in the room with her, poking the logs, jostling them about. They didn’t need to know she was awake, not yet anyway.
The longer she lay there, the more she came to her senses. Throbbing pain emanated from her skull, and her forearms burned and ached at the same time. A little part of her wondered if she still had hands.
She attempted to wiggle her little finger, and it worked, brushing against her thigh.
Nes tried to lift her arm farthest from the fire and—she hoped—out of sight of her captor.
It worked, kind of. She felt restrained, though nothing seemed to be tethering her arms or legs to the bed.
She’d been kidnapped, but why? Was this connected to the king?
To Ataht? Had her captor mistaken her for the princess?
She was ridiculously short, after all. Was someone making a move against the Crown?
What the fates did she have to do with it, if so?
Nesrina tipped her head a fraction of an inch, and she felt it: a thick, heavy band shackled her neck. On a whim, she tried to summon a bit of chaos to craft a small dagger in her left palm.
Nothing happened.
Heartstone. Enough of it to cut off her magic. Her pulse vibrated as a wave of fear propelled by the complete loss of power rushed her system, tightening her chest. Time to face this head-on.
When Nes peeled open her drowsy eyes, it didn’t take long to adjust to the gloomy room.
But where was she? And, furthermore, who was that standing by the fire?
Her heart’s fluttering strengthened to a deep pounding, and she willed it to quiet down.
The cloaked figure still hadn’t noticed she’d awoken.
Some kidnapper. He held a fire iron in his gloved hand as he stoked the small blaze. A long blade hung from one hip, and from the other, a large canteen. It looked . . . clunky. Interesting fashion choice.
The man shifted and almost looked at her, but he didn’t. She caught a glimpse of his profile, fully masked in a dark, crusty material that shielded everything save his eyes.
Nesrina lifted her left arm, enough to make out what was going on with her throbbing limb. A long, angry-looking wound marred the inside of her wrist. Her right was the same. It looked like someone had sliced her open, then done a poor job of cauterizing the wounds.
Narrowing her eyes at her kidnapper, she studied the fire-poker in his grasp, then allowed her gaze to drop to the ground as she rolled, noiselessly, onto her side. Dark, glossy droplets—her blood—trailed from her cot to the stranger’s feet. His canteen. Ew. Had he collected her blood? Grotesque.
It was easier to see from her new angle.
She seemed to be in some half-abandoned shack.
Tattered curtains on the room’s single window were drawn, blocking out most of the light, but mote-speckled beams snuck in there and from the room’s single door.
Small pinpricks peppered the walls where daylight entered through the half-rotted wooden planks.
At least the fireplace still works. She supposed she was somewhat lucky, in that regard.
Without the fire, her kidnapper wouldn’t have been able to cauterize her wounds, and Nesrina would likely have bled to death.
If he was a powerful firebearer, he’d have done a better job, so if he had fire magic at all, it wasn’t strong.
What magic did her captor have? And more importantly, why had he cut her open?
Had he been trying to kill her, then . . . felt bad about it?
The mysterious man startled. He stepped to the single window and peeled open the curtain using the tip of the sooty fire iron.
What’s got into you? Nes listened closely. Past the sound of the crackling flames, she could make out distant barking.
Before she could feign sleep, or being passed out, or dead, the abductor was facing her, firelight brightening the side of his terrifying mask. Shit, shit, shit, shit.
The man began to draw his sword before apparently thinking better of it. He re-sheathed the thing.
“Are you going to kill me?” she rasped, voice so weak she sounded like a stranger. Oh, shut up, Nesrina!
He didn’t speak, only stared at her from pale brown eyes, listening.
The barking sounded like it was drawing nearer, but she couldn’t be sure. It could as easily have been a trick of the wind.
Her kidnapper shook his hooded head. His blasted crusty mask didn’t move an inch.
In a rough and falsely lowered tone he said, “I should.” Turning away from Nesrina, he glanced out the window for a second.
“It matters not. You’re fucked regardless.
I have everything required.” He patted his canteen.
Ew.
“The runes will reveal the truth, and the true king shall wear his crown.” The man’s sandy eyes bore into hers. “I’ll have time with you again. As much as I’d like.” He burst into laughter, half an octave higher than his deepened voice.
A cacophony of barks and howls interrupted his gleeful chortles—the dogs were closer than before.
Her abductor startled and lost his grip on the fire poker, letting it clatter to the floor. He attempted to posture menacingly, a poor coverup for his faux pas.
With that, the man abandoned her, taking off, sunlight blinding her before the door banged closed behind him. Less than a minute later, Nesrina heard a set of hoofbeats thunder past and disappear.
She waited a moment longer, the occasional half-distant bark echoing through the quiet.
Then she attempted to sit up, and though dizziness washed over her, she was eventually successful.
Her collar had no hinge she could find—fitted in an endless ring.
His mask was bark. An earthshaper. Weak, but determined, she stood and shuffled to where her captor had left the fire poker behind. Idiot.
Her heartstone beads were hand faceted, Kas had said. That meant it was chippable. It would be risky, but she had to try to break through it. Her kidnapper could return at any moment. She needed to free her magic.
After a round of deep, steadying breaths to help rid her vision of those pesky stars, Nesrina slipped the hard tip of the iron up the side of her neck, beneath the collar.
The shackle fit perfectly in the wedge between the point of the poker and the hooked piece that peeled away from the shaft.
Bracing head against the wall, she levered the base of the fire iron away from her body, then back again.
Metal ground against stone with a teeth-shivering crunch, and the blunt iron point threatened to pierce her skin each time she swung her arm up. The heartstone pulled bruisingly tight against her neck, but she could hear it grinding away, slowly but surely.
There was a crack as a piece of stone chipped away, and she tried yanking the collar free, but it held firm.
Employing a new technique, Nes tilted her head to the side as far as possible and thwacked the stone with the fire iron.
Metal clipped her jaw, and she nearly screamed, hissing through the sharp pain.
Her body threatened to give out, but she didn’t stop.
Pressing the tip of the iron where the stone had chipped already, she pushed in as hard as possible—and lost her grip. The metal flicked off, missing puncturing her by an inch, as a snap rent the air. With a crack, the collar fell away from her neck.
Gasping, Nes dropped the poker and turned back toward the narrow bed. The sheets were stained dark, still damp with her blood. She hadn’t been there for long, and her captor could return at any moment. He implied he wouldn’t be killing her. But could a kidnapper really be trusted?
“Could you make a person?” the prince had asked her once.
“. . . Perhaps a representation,” she’d replied.
Nes blinked away constellations. It was worth a shot.
The blood loss made it hard to focus as she tried to pull from the far off layers of chaos that flowed through the atmosphere itself.
It was everywhere, and it was beautiful.
She couldn’t wait to share the sight with Kas one day. He’d find it magnificent.
Kas. Thoughts of him marched into her mind, reinforcing her fuzzy memories, filling her with the resolve she needed to push on. She had to escape, to get back to the safety of his stupidly long arms. A life without him wouldn’t be worth living at all.
She’d get back to him. It wasn’t up for debate. She didn’t even get to tell him she loved him—and Kas certainly needed to know that important information. Plus, she had to say yes.
Arms outstretched, Nes willed chaos to gather, pulling it in as she crafted and molded a being on the bed. Blinking away the darkness threatening to overtake her, she allowed herself a moment to revel in her work before wielding the fire iron once more and stumbling out into the afternoon light.
Her captor was nowhere to be seen, but hoofbeats approached rapidly from somewhere to her right.
Nesrina hoped he hadn’t spotted her as she ducked into the dense woods.
Brambles bit at her calves as she tumbled forward, searching for somewhere to hide, somewhere to regain strength before making her escape in earnest. A distant crash registered vaguely in her muddled mind.
A muffled shout. The spots in her vision were growing, multiplying, crowding her field of view.
That man— She realized who took her as she fainted.