Chapter 1 #2
But he was asking. Ignoring him was the more dangerous option. If you fight back, they’ll hurt you worse – and fuck, at least the interruption had halted the spiral of my thoughts, steadied my heart, softened the ache in my fingers.
‘Eight days,’ I ground out.
My voice was hoarse from lack of use. Alternatively, from all the screaming I’d done before I stopped using it entirely.
He gave a soft hmm. ‘What are you in for?’
I shrugged and felt the ache in my spine with the motion, the stiffness of my mud- and sweat-drenched tunic. ‘Killing a dozen soldiers.’
Murderers. A dozen murderers.
His lips parted in the flickering firelight, faltering for the blink of an eye – surprise, of course, because there was always surprise. You? A slip of a girl? Wouldn’t think you capable of killing a spider, let alone—
‘Interesting,’ he said before I finished that thought, and there was a sliver of … something in his voice. An emotion, too faint to name. ‘Most people try to deny that sort of thing.’
Oh.
Different surprise.
‘They caught me with my knives still dripping,’ I said flatly. ‘I recognise a losing battle when I see one.’
And I hadn’t particularly cared about winning the battle, either. Not anymore. Not with Lark’s empty eyes burned into my mind, the necromancer’s hut empty, the vial of blood useless around my neck.
My hand came up to touch it now, already a thoughtless reflex even after a mere few days. How fitting, that that was where the noose would go.
If the hooded man before me noticed the gesture, he gave no sign of it. ‘So what was the verdict?’
His accent was barely noticeable. Either he’d learned it later in life, or he’d trained hard to get rid of it.
But it was there, a hint of that lilting cadence, that overly meticulous enunciation – the way people spoke at court, and the very sound of it made me want to strangle him with his own fucking chains.
‘If you’re trying to strike up a friendship,’ I muttered, not daring to avert my eyes, ‘I recommend forgetting about it. It’ll be a short-lived one.’
His lips twisted. ‘How short?’
‘Eight hours, give or take.’
‘Pretty short,’ he admitted, intonation unchanging. No amusement. No compassion. Just that silky quietness, a flimsy, gossamer shred of sound in the dark. ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’
‘Are you,’ I said, voice even flatter.
He was finally quiet, then.
I shifted cautiously in the hay, chains chafing where they’d sat on my skin for over a week, tunic sticking to my back and chest. The man opposite me didn’t move.
No attempts to pounce on me; no visible anger over my unsubtle snub.
The compulsion had drained from my limbs over the course of our conversation – a small blessing, although I wasn’t going to thank him for it.
Was it safe to take a nap?
It seemed futile, getting another few hours of rest before eternal sleep. Then again, it would at least speed up the wait a little.
I’d just rested my head against the smoothest patch of wall I could find when Lord Twisty Lips sat straighter, a rustle of hay my only warning before he spoke again. ‘I was wondering if you’d seen a friend of mine around here.’
You have friends?
I swallowed that instinctive reply.
‘Seems unlikely,’ I grumbled instead, lifting my head again to face the shadows where his eyes would be. ‘Haven’t gone for a great many walks around the property.’
Again the corners of his lips curled up, the gesture sharpening the lines of his jaw rather than softening them. It was oddly expressive, that mouth – thin-lipped but firm, and just a fraction too sensuous for the whetted face it belonged too. ‘Your cell faces the gallows.’
So he had noticed that, too.
I realised, belatedly, that I had no clue what he was in for.
‘It does,’ I muttered, unwilling to help out, unhappy to ignore him. ‘Does your friend seem the type to end up swinging, then?’
‘Hmm. Possibly.’ A brief pause, as if he was assessing his options; then he added, ‘His name is Bjarte.’
I frowned. ‘Bjarte Vigdisson?’
The silence fell like the strike of a hammer.
It shattered the last of the nameless nobleman’s stilted smiles – the corners of his mouth falling so suddenly it would have been a triumph if not for the way every inch of him stiffened in the same moment. Sharpened, like a bird of prey flexing its claws.
I had a single moment for an oh shit and a should not have said that, and then he leaned forward, hands clenching by his sides – causing his hood to shift for the first time, firelight streaking over the face the shadows had hidden before.
He resembled a dagger more closely than any human being ought to.
Straight, sharp nose. Angular cheekbones. Glossy black locks, falling in waves over a still half-covered forehead … and then there were his eyes.
Or rather, his eye.
His left socket was covered by a velvety black patch, sitting snugly between the keen edge of a cheekbone and the stark line of an eyebrow.
But his right eye was unharmed and well, glittering in the firelight, and there was something in its narrowed darkness that made my heart go colder than the night outside – the look of a starved animal, smelling blood.
As if he was about to set his teeth into something, and I wasn’t sure whether something would be me or the unfortunate Bjarte Vigdisson.
‘He was here?’ His voice had gone even quieter. Careful, even – circumspect in the most ominous of ways. ‘You’ve met him?’
It took all I had not to try and shift back through the thick stone wall behind me.
There was something very, very wrong about this man.
Impending doom, I’d thought before, and I found myself thinking it again now, caught in the gravity of that one-eyed stare – unable to tear my gaze away from the maimed, marred perfection of his face.
He wasn’t handsome by any means. Certainly not attractive.
But he was undeniably beautiful, in the way a well-forged sword was beautiful – mesmerising, the way a coiled serpent might be.
It was the sort of cruel, honed beauty that sensible people stayed far, far away from … and I was chained up in a cell with it.
My throat felt thick as I swallowed.
‘His name was announced before an execution,’ I breathed, trying desperately to think of something else to say.
Bjarte Vigdisson, the official had declared, and then there had been the familiar creak of wood, the snap of a neck; after eight long days, I dreamt those sounds. ‘Three days ago, I think. Maybe four.’
His gloved fingers twitched by his side.
So his friend was dead. Worse, I’d been the one to tell him that his friend was dead, and I knew the sort of things men did when their friends were dead – what in the world had I been thinking, opening my mouth at all?
‘I’m …’ I cleared my throat. ‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.’
His gaze didn’t soften. ‘Are you.’
No.
I’d been sorry for Bjarte. He’d been one of the few to die with dignity in the days I’d spent here – quietly and quickly, not pleading and begging and moaning like so many others while they were hauled onto the scaffold.
I didn’t think I should tell the man before me any of that, though.
I shouldn’t be saying anything more if I could avoid it at all.
‘If you don’t mind,’ I mumbled instead – holding my breath as I turned away and curled up against the wall again, praying he would think me out of reach if I simply pretended to be so – ‘I’m going to sleep now. Big day tomorrow.’
He didn’t respond.
That was worse, somehow, than if he’d risen to his feet and lunged at me across the width of the cell. Worse than if he’d cursed and hissed and rattled his chains. Attacks I could handle, or try to handle. The anticipation of one …
My hand slipped to my hip before I could stop it. Ehwaz. Not there.
My thigh. Uruz. Not there.
My other hip. Isa. Not there.
Kaunan. Wunjo. Eihwaz. None of them there.
I’d known, of course. I’d known, and checking just once should have purged the restless tension from my veins – but a soft-voiced, snake-eyed nobleman might still be watching me from yards away, and the unease fogged my brain, jumbled my thoughts and quickened my breath.
Perhaps I’d checked wrong. Perhaps if I tried again, they would be there – Ehwaz, Isa, and fuck, that was the wrong order—
Something clicked on the other side of the cell.
A soft click, like a pin dropping, yet in the presence of this vicious stranger, it could have been a thunderclap.
My heart jumped into my throat. My hand stiffened, tight with the compulsion pulling at it.
I held my breath as I opened one eye, and then the other, too …
because in the hay, illuminated by a glint of firelight, Bjarte Vigdisson’s friend sat bent over the shackles on his ankle with a long, narrow pin between his gloved fingers and was poking it around, carefully, in the lock.
I blinked. The vision did not change.
Fucking hell.
I shouldn’t make a sound. I should be thanking my lucky bones that he’d found something else to focus on, something that wasn’t my throat or the fastest way to wrap his hands around it … but if this was what I thought it was, I might be in big, big trouble.
Eight hours.
Why did all of this have to happen to me now?
‘What …’ I cleared my throat against the hoarseness, bracing myself for another of those savage glares. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Escaping.’ He didn’t look up from his work. His voice had gone from menacing to merely grim – as if the frenzy of a moment before had dissipated, or rather solidified into single-minded action. ‘What else?’
Escaping.
As if it was that fucking easy.
Getting out of this cell – yes, that was easy, or at least it would have been for me. I wasn’t sure how he was planning to do it; he seemed confident he would find a way. But then there would be the walls. The guards. The dogs, and more guards …