Chapter 1 #3
Maybe it didn’t seem as great a risk to him; he would get to keep his fingers if they caught him, would still be hanged swiftly and cleanly a few days later.
No one would strip a nobleman naked to parade him through the streets.
The village children wouldn’t be playing scatter jacks with his knuckles for decades.
Low cost of failure. But if he unexpectedly succeeded …
Would they blame me, the guards?
They would be pissed, and he would no longer be there to take it out on – whereas I would be harmless and defenceless and on the way to the gallows anyway.
They might search me again, more thoroughly this time.
They might “search” me, if they needed some cheering up to distract from their failure.
And if I was really, really unlucky, if they found the mark …
My gut clenched.
What could I do? Sound the alarm?
It wouldn’t win me anything. But at least it wouldn’t lose me anything, either, and that was all I’d dared to hope for in a very long time.
My cellmate might try to stop me, of course – that pin looked sharp enough.
But a stab through the heart wasn’t any worse than a drop into the noose, and as long as it spared me the agony of a witch’s death—
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ the bastard muttered on the other side of the cell, ignoring me and my spinning mind entirely as he chucked his pin aside, turned away from his ankle cuff, and began to strip off his gloves.
The hands emerging from the stiff, black leather were pale. Slender. Not as clawlike as I’d come to expect from his corvine appearance, and—
My thoughts stuttered.
My heart stopped dead in my chest.
And they were scarred.
It took me a moment – a long, breathless, slack-jawed moment – to believe the evidence of my very own eyes.
Because his scars weren’t common human scars, the sort I wore all over my body.
I would not have been able to distinguish those in the dark.
These marks … these were white. A cold, silvery, translucent white, as if mist had solidified in what must once have been a wound – as if his body was a fractured porcelain vase, pieced back together with crystal-clear resin.
They sat like jagged rings around the base of his fingers, five on each hand.
Necromancer’s scars.
I stared at those hands as they resumed their lockpicking work, and no longer felt my own cold skin. Felt nothing but the weight of a small vial of blood, resting like the tip of a finger against my breastbone.
Lark.
Lark.
Eight hours left, and here was the chance I’d sought – in a barred and locked prison cell, and about to escape forever from my grasp.
To hell with the alarm.
To hell with staying far, far away from him.
‘Can I come with you?’ I choked out. ‘Please?’
An ankle cuff sprang open with a small, clear twang. The necromancer didn’t pause, didn’t lift his gaze to meet mine, as he shook it off. ‘Eager to strike up a friendship after all?’
I swallowed heavily. ‘You’re deathmade.’
‘Very observant.’ He turned his shackled foot towards the window and the firelight falling through it, his narrow face a maze of sharp-edged shadows.
‘Oh, don’t bother elaborating – I know the story.
Someone died. You miss them most desperately.
You’d do anything to speak with them just one last time, you’ll offer me gold and untold riches – proverbially, of course, since you have neither of them – and won’t I just, from the goodness of my heart, be so kind as to resurrect them? Is that accurate?’
I stared at him, mouth dry as ashes.
He did look up then, sending me another of those frost-eyed smiles. No goodness in his heart, that smile said. A matter of debate whether he had a heart at all.
Something shrivelled within me. ‘Why—’
‘I’ll tell you a secret,’ he interrupted, speaking a fraction slower now, his voice still so spidery soft in the darkness.
‘One you won’t accept, because only those who’ve seen hell can grasp the truth of it – but you’re welcome to take it as a comfort at the gallows.
Death is an endpoint. A final destination.
What’s dead has reason to be, and it’s best kept that way.
Don’t stir the mists, because you will be disappointed. ’
Those who’ve seen hell.
He worked his pin without faltering in the silence. Soft clicks, in an irregular rhythm, as the springs of the lock fell into place.
‘You were dead once,’ I said numbly.
A soft hmm.
‘And you came back.’
No answer, this time.
I didn’t need it. I knew the stories. All mortals must die … but every once in a while, Death sends one of them back.
A bridge between worlds. A creature both dead and alive.
The second ankle cuff unlocked, and the necromancer impatiently shoved it into the damp hay, paying more attention to his boots than to my fraying, battered heart.
What’s dead has reason to be – oh, fuck him and his so-called secrets, callous poison delivered in that eerily soft, eerily kindly voice.
Lark had a reason to be dead. That reason was me, and to hell with keeping things that way; I owed him, I owed him my life and my sanity and every drop of joy I’d been able to squeeze from life under Aranc’s thumb, and who cared if I’d be disappointed in the end?
I’d trade places to get him back into this world, if I needed to.
He deserved to be here. He was the brave one, the strong one, the unwavering rock by my side; he was the sun and the summer, and I—
I had been dying for years, anyway.
If I took my last breath for him, at least it would mean something.
‘And if I don’t care?’ I said, voice rough.
‘Then you’d be a fool.’ The words were impassive enough, but the hint of causticity beneath was unmistakable. The first twist of his pin into the next lock was a snappish one. ‘More specifically, a fool who’ll be dead in eight hours.’
Yes.
And that wouldn’t do. Not if I still had the chance to undo the damage I’d done.
‘So what do you want?’ There was a time for pride and dignity, and this wasn’t it. If he wanted me grovelling on my bare knees, grovel I would. ‘Name your price. There has to be something I can do to—’
‘I fail to see what use I’d have for you,’ he said, barely moving his lips, the offhand disregard more cutting than the sharpest of insults.
His single eye lay trained on the shackles of his wrist, the pin moving in its lock.
‘I’m perfectly capable of slaughtering a handful of soldiers on my own, should the need arise. ’
I had no trouble believing that, somehow.
‘Will you know where to hide after you’ve escaped, then?’ I whispered. ‘I know the Estien lands well. If you need to shake off any pursuers—’
He let out an impatient sigh, shaking off the third cuff. ‘Moving offer, not needed.’
‘Right. I … I know my languages, too?’ The chains pulled on my wrists and ankles when I leaned forward, trying to meet his gaze.
Was this too close to the truth? But at least it wasn’t the full damning truth yet, and I could come up with a justification.
Probably. ‘I can read Old Seidanna, for example. So if you need any translations …’
Was that a faltering of his fingers?
I must have imagined it. He didn’t even grace the suggestion with a response as he worked his last lock, his crystalline scars glittering in the darkness – a soft tick, another one, and the heavy iron manacle clicked open around his wrist.
He rose without a glance at me. Stepped past me the way one might pass a beggar in the streets, brushing stalks of hay off his cloak as he made for the door. His footsteps were inaudible against the rough stone tiles.
He really would walk off.
My life at stake, my heart at stake, and he would walk out of this cell and never look back.
‘Please,’ I whispered.
No response.
‘Please.’ I struggled forward, towards him, iron edges biting into my cold, chafed skin. ‘Just give me something – anything. I’ll carry your letters! I’ll poison your enemies! I’ll do your laundry for the rest of your life! Just—’
‘Tempting.’ He didn’t turn to look at me, tall and poised, melting into the shadows in his long black cloak.
I heard the small shutter in the cell door open.
Saw him fumble something through – a short length of rope, tied into a loop.
‘Not worth the effort of dragging dead weight through a prison, though.’
‘I’m not dead weight!’
‘There’s nothing you can do that I can’t do myself.’ A loud click sounded outside the cell door – the iron bolt as it was hoisted from its hook. ‘I’m afraid that makes you, by definition, dead weight. Anything else? I’ll be out of here in a moment.’
Leaving me to die.
Leaving me to kill Lark a second time – unless I—
No. No, what was I thinking? Better to die than to share that secret.
Better to die swiftly and with little pain, at least; a choice I’d made over and over again in these eight endless days, every moment I hadn’t broken those chains, every moment I hadn’t shattered that door.
The cost of failure was too high. If I told him now – if he told the guards, or betrayed me to the next farming village we passed …
Be careful without me, witchling. You know what they do to your kind.
Lark’s voice. As if he was standing behind me again.
My breath staggered in and out, rough with the onset of a full-blown panic. Couldn’t. Had to. Couldn’t. Had to. Round and round, and the necromancer was already tilting the doorknob, was already pushing the door ajar …
He was little more than a ghost in the shadows as he paused, then turned – a barely-there creature, holding my life and death in the palm of his hand. ‘Any last words?’
Safe failure. Or the risk of a lifetime.
It had been such an easy choice when failure had merely meant my own sorry death. Now it was Lark’s, too, and my lips parted, then faltered, struggling to form words I had never spoken out loud in my life. I’m … I’m a …
No sound came out.
The necromancer shrugged and nudged the door open another few inches, slipping into the darkness of the corridor outside. Away from me. Away from Lark, my beautiful, powerful Lark, who’d sat by my side when no one else would, who’d made me laugh when I could do nothing but cry—
Something cracked within me.
‘Wait!’ I choked, a whisper-scream tasting of bile. ‘Wait, please! I’m a runewitch!’
The door halted inches before falling shut.
For three deafening heartbeats, there was no sound in the world but the echo of that reckless, deadly confession. I felt blunt knives on my fingers. Rough hands yanking at my hair. Witch! the crowds would holler as they tore my clothes off me. Witch! as the stones started coming. Witch! as—
The door creaked again.
The necromancer slid back into our cell, back into the glow of the lantern outside – and hell below, it turned out I hadn’t seen the worst of him yet.
If he’d looked about to bite me before, he now gave the impression he might just devour me whole.
His lips had parted a fraction. His good eye was enormous in his strangely striking face, locked onto mine with a look that lay a hair’s breadth away from frantic – hollow, and worst of all, hungry, as if I was the answer to some question he’d spent a lifetime asking.
The door remained half-open behind him. A glaring warning to any passing guard, and he seemed to have forgotten about it entirely.
I sat frozen, not daring to breathe.
‘You said …’ There was a sudden strain in his voice. ‘You’re a runewitch?’
Yes. I am.
Three short, simple words. I couldn’t persuade my lips to form the shapes. Half a nod was all I could handle, and even that felt like driving a blade deeper into my own guts.
‘That …’ His throat bobbed. ‘Prove it.’
I stared at him, horrified.
Of course he’d want evidence. Of course he thought me desperate enough to lie.
But to prove the existence of my powers, I’d have to use my magic – here, in the heart of a fireborn prison, and without Lark’s vigilant eyes to watch over me or his mighty axe at my back.
When was the last time I’d attempted even a single spell without his reassuring presence by my side?
‘Go on,’ the necromancer added, voice sharpening, a small muscle tightening at the corner of his lips. His eye didn’t stray from me. He barely even blinked. ‘Why don’t you break your own chains?’
Why didn’t you do it days ago?
He didn’t have to add the question out loud.
The disbelief in his voice made the point without wasting a single word.
Or perhaps it wasn’t disbelief but rather fear to believe, and that was even worse – because it suggested he had looked for someone like me, that he did have a use for me, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what a man like him needed the powers of runes for.
‘I prefer not to use my magic,’ I said hoarsely.
‘Do you, now?’ His smile grew across his lips like ice across still water. ‘That’s a shame, because I prefer not to waste time picking any more locks. Time to prioritise.’
Fucking bastard.
He had to know what he was asking, hadn’t he? Broken chains would betray me even if he didn’t. As soon as the guards found our empty cell, they would know magic had been involved, and as soon as they knew that—
I let out a rough breath. ‘They’ll come after us.’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ he said, a hint of biting amusement lacing his quiet voice. ‘They’ll do that no matter how we leave.’
Fuck him.
Fuck all of this.
I hooked my trembling fingers into thorn’s shape – left index finger straight up, first and second finger of my right a triangle against it – and around my bruised, chafed ankles, the heavy iron shackles snapped like twigs.