Chapter 2
Everything ached.
Everything stung.
I hadn’t walked in eight days. Now, trying to follow the necromancer’s long strides down the night-black corridor, all those hours of motionless cold and hunger finally caught up with me; my knees shook as I staggered after his billowing cloak, pins and needles turning every step into mind-numbing agony.
My vision swam. My low, sheep-leather boots landed on the earthen floor with clumsy smacks.
Dead weight, the bastard had said, and hell, I felt the dead part.
The noose would barely have had any work left to do.
But the noose lay far behind me – I was escaping. Whether I failed or succeeded, I didn’t think I’d see the gallows again.
For Lark, I repeated to myself at every twinge of doubt, at every stab of pain. For Lark.
Somehow, I kept up.
The necromancer didn’t pause as he reached the end of the corridor, turning right without a glance to situate himself.
An even longer passage stretched out before us, a single whale oil lantern burning on the far side of it – looking nothing, absolutely nothing, like the short hallway down which four guards had hauled me eight days ago.
Death’s fucking balls.
‘It’s the other way!’ I hissed, loud in the stillness of night. ‘The exit!’
He didn’t slow down. ‘I know. Keep quiet.’
‘You— What?’
‘Keep quiet.’ I’d never heard a whisper so utterly murderous, the last letter landing like an axe into a chopping block. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
I managed a few stumbling steps at double speed, catching up with him halfway down the passageway.
His stark profile was tight with focus. His one eye lay aimed at some destination that was, apparently, not freedom and the vast wilds outside – but if we weren’t going there, then what in the hell-cursed world was I doing by his side?
Had this been some trap after all?
‘Do I get to know what you’re doing, too?’ I hissed, keeping my voice as quiet as his own, no matter how strong the temptation to raise it. ‘If you were planning to go visit the bloody provost in his bed first, you could have told me—’
He sent me a narrow-eyed glare. ‘Bjarte’s letter.’
‘What?’
‘The letter he was carrying when they arrested him.’ I was reading his lips as much as hearing the whispered words; his voice was as quiet as his steps. ‘Which is what I’m here for in the first place. To the left, there.’
He swept into the indicated side passage without another word. I followed half a second later, blinking at his tall back as my thoughts caught up.
‘Are you saying you deliberately had yourself arrested to—’
‘Easiest way to get yourself inside a prison, isn’t it?’ he muttered, slowing down, gaze counting the doors. ‘They don’t even let most guards into these rooms, so I figured asking nicely wouldn’t do much good. This should be the one – care to break the lock?’
With magic.
Unspoken yet unambiguous, that request.
I stumbled to a halt by his side, knees and hips screaming for a break. ‘I’d really prefer—’
‘Yes,’ he interrupted on a biting whisper, ‘we’ve established that you’d prefer not to, and we’ve also established I’m not going to be all that concerned about your preferences.
It’s a sturdy lock. Picking it would take a while, and I doubt you still want to be standing here when a guard comes ambling by. So?’
So—
Fuck, I missed Lark.
It washed over me suddenly and violently, the crushing weight of his absence – the hole in my chest so much hollower for all the people who weren’t him, for the heartless pragmatism flung at me by this creature of shadows and sharp edges.
Don’t worry about it, Lark would have said.
I’ll take care of it for you. Comforting and reassuring, his broad hand on my shoulder, his firm lips on the crown of my head – I could feel it again in a single moment of torturous bliss, the soothing warmth of his muscular body …
‘Distracted?’ the necromancer enquired two paces away, low-pitched voice brimming with enough acid to dissolve a body. ‘Do let me know if you’d like another two hours to catch your breath. I like to plan ahead.’
Fucker.
‘Go to hell,’ I mumbled, elbowing past him to the door he’d pointed out.
‘I tend to come back,’ he pleasantly reminded me. ‘Lock?’
Oh, damn it. Fine.
The guards would know of my crimes anyway.
For a brief, ambitious moment, I considered trying something more sophisticated – something using algiz, perhaps, which was the rune of protection and might just work on locks, too …
and then I remembered who I was doing this for, that this fireborn-allied nobleman was unlikely to appreciate any of the skills Kjell had taught me all those years ago, and curled my fingers into thorn’s shape again.
The heavy chunk of metal disintegrated.
‘Good girl,’ the necromancer told me, the compliment scathing on his lips. ‘Get inside.’
If he’d been planning anything unsavoury – anything more unsavoury than forcing me into witchcraft that might be the death of me, at least – he would have done it in the cell we’d left behind.
I swallowed the habitual sting of dread and slipped into the dark room, fighting my quickening breath as he closed the door behind him.
‘No light,’ he added, shoving past me and making for the cabinet on the other side of the room. ‘The window faces town.’
I’d have put naudiz and sowilo on the window to keep the light in, had he asked me to – but if he wanted advice, he could learn to say please first. Instead, I staggered to the other side of the room and sank into the single chair, watching his tall, hooded silhouette in the moonlight as he rummaged through files – trying to work out how the swift, depressing ending to my story had turned into this messy and equally depressing beginning of one, and finding that the concept of tomorrow alone gave me a headache.
‘There’s a knife here,’ the necromancer muttered, that muted voice with its utterly punchable noble accent. ‘If you need a weapon—’
My knives.
I’d already shot to my feet.
It was Ehwaz he was holding in his ice-scarred fingers, with its slender hilt and triangular blade that made it so perfect for throwing. I stumbled towards him, unable to take my eyes off it in the dark. ‘Yes. That’s mine.’
‘It is?’ He sheathed it easily, then pushed it into my grasping hands. ‘Convenient. Is this your belt, too?’
It was. I buckled it around the waist of my tunic with a relief I could feel in the tips of my toes; only now did I realise how naked I’d felt without it all this time.
‘Another blade, here,’ the necromancer added as I was still attaching Ehwaz’s sheath, pulling a second object from the dark of the cabinet. ‘If you’d like to have an extra …’
The glint of steel in his hand was long and broad. Uruz. ‘That … that’s mine too.’
He turned towards me, something a fraction quizzical in his glance, but didn’t comment as he handed me the knife.
I strapped it to my thigh, over my worn trousers, as he went on looking for Bjarte’s letter and whatever was in it – only to pause again half a minute later and start, ‘Why the hell are there more knives—’
I cleared my throat. ‘Probably mine.’
‘Really.’ His tone wasn’t one of disapproval, which was a surprise. If anything, he sounded wearily resigned. ‘Here you go, then.’
Isa and Kaunan – twin knives, identical but for the turquoise in Isa’s pommel and the carnelian in Kaunan’s.
The only gems I’d ever owned; I’d stared at them for days after Kjell gave them to me.
My fingers trembled as I tied them to my belt now, then checked and double-checked the knots, and then a third time, and—
Oh, shit.
Ehwaz. I grabbed for my hip with a panicked lurch of my heart, half-convinced the slender weight of my oldest knife would have vanished again. No, still there. Uruz – still there. Isa, Kaunan, still there, and—
Wunjo. Not there.
My stomach was cramping again.
Had I checked the others correctly, at least?
Hadn’t I mistaken something else for knives – hadn’t I muddled them up in my food- and sleep-deprived state?
Again, then, just to be sure. Ehwaz, Uruz, Isa, Kaunan, and I let my hands linger longer this time, trying to print the feel of them into my palm to soothe that roaring beast of anxiety in my chest. They were there.
They were really, really there, I’d felt them, and—
Was I sure, though?
My breath was quickening. I was being ridiculous. I knew I was – me and my fucking fixations again – yet all the same the panicked urge beneath my skin wouldn’t be allayed, wouldn’t let me just believe what my own senses were telling me. Again, then. Ehwaz, Uruz …
‘Looking for something?’ a thoroughly unwelcome voice enquired.
My fingers froze inches away from Isa and Kaunan’s twin hilts.
Fuck.
Had he been watching me?
‘No.’ It sounded breathless and too shrill. ‘No, not at all. Just … just checking my knots. Did you find any more knives?’
An obvious lie. An obvious diversion. The necromancer didn’t make the point he could so easily have made but instead said, ‘I found the damned letter. Time to go.’
Already?
My heart stopped dead in my chest.
‘No,’ I blurted before I could think twice. ‘No, wait, I—'
‘Wait?’ he repeated, an unmistakable bite to that one word. ‘What for? Do you need a little more breathing time?’
‘I … I’d like to find the others. My other knives.
’ My fingers were jittery with that insatiable urge to check and check again, the lack of weight on my shoulder unbearable with only the first four knives back in their usual places.
‘Two more – they should be in here somewhere. Can’t take that long to look for them. ’
He let out a long, slow hiss, but stepped aside, making room by the cabinet. ‘One would think four blades are about as much as anyone might need, assuming you aren’t hiding any extra arms beneath that rag.’
It took great self-restraint not to stamp on his toes as I joined him.