Chapter 4 #2
‘Because I’m asking you to.’ His tone was pleasant.
The look in his eye was the opposite. ‘If it’s your intention to behave like an obstinate toddler for the remainder of our acquaintance, merely because I happen to have poisoned a friend of yours once, do me a favour and tell me so.
I’ll make sure to adjust my approach accordingly. ’
Was that a threat?
I tried to imagine Pol – kind, fearless Pol – delivered to this bastard’s mercy, and my nails dug into my skin so hard they might draw blood.
‘I’m not trying to be obstinate.’ The words burned on my tongue. ‘I’m trying to keep myself safe. I don’t think I have any reason to trust you, and you know plenty you shouldn’t know about me already. I’d hate to add any unnecessary information to that list.’
He arched up an eyebrow. ‘You seem to forget I have no reason to trust you, either.’
‘You’re a prince.’ I all but spat the title. ‘What would I—’
‘A dead prince,’ he interrupted, lightly but for the narrowing of his eye.
‘I have about as much access to my dear father’s throne and treasury as you have at the present moment, and if our names were to spread, mine is the one the world will recognise.
I was brutally murdered once; I prefer not to repeat the experience. ’
Brutally.
My eyes shot to his hands, to the ice-like rings around the base of his fingers.
Someone had cut off his fingers before he died.
Which he had fully deserved, most likely …
but staring at those diamond scars, imagining what his bleeding corpse must have looked like, I still couldn’t help but feel a little queasy.
‘Very good,’ Durlain added, hands unmoving, voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘You found the proof of my untimely demise, I see. Trust me, you don’t want to see the rest of it. Do you think we might have a civilised, adult conversation now?’
I hardly had a choice.
For Lark.
‘Fine. There’s …’ I faltered, then shoved my plate aside to plant down my elbows instead.
I had to focus, tiredness be damned. I had to tell him what he needed to know, and absolutely nothing else.
‘There’s someone who was at Estien with me.
Another of Aranc’s birds. We usually worked together on our missions, and he helped me escape. ’
A small tilt of that horned head. ‘Why did you escape?’
‘Aranc …’ It almost seemed an answer in itself, that name. ‘Aranc was making me do … things I really didn’t want to do.’
If he’d asked more, I’d have shut him up.
If he’d made another of his sneering remarks, if he’d dared to open his vile mouth and make light of that living, burning hell, I’d probably have driven a knife through his hand, then taken a few more fingers for the fun of it.
But he sat still, crowlike and perfectly motionless in the golden light of the fire, and all that escaped his lips was that soft, ‘Hmm.’
A relief, probably.
My hammering heart wouldn’t yet believe it.
‘Lark didn’t need to leave,’ I choked out instead, because everything, everything was easier to talk and think about than Aranc and his wishes, Aranc and his threats.
‘He could just have stayed at Estien and been safe, but instead he came with me to make sure I got out alive. We’d go to his family, you see?
We’d go to his family, and they would hide me if Aranc came after us.
Except that soldiers caught up with us too early, and I was only gone for half an hour to gather wood, but I came back and … and …’
Durlain heaved a deep sigh, eyes clinging vaguely to the wall behind my head. ‘And your noble protector was dead?’
Fuck him. Fuck him.
‘Yes,’ I breathed.
‘Tragic.’ He couldn’t have sounded more markedly indifferent if he’d cracked a yawn with it. ‘So you killed his murderers?’
‘They came after me,’ I said numbly. ‘I tried to reach the Nine Stones first. People have said for years that there’s a necromancer hiding there, so it seemed the place to go.
’ That desperate chase through the forest, Lark’s blood still warm against my skin, Aranc’s dogs snapping and howling at my ankles …
‘And then those soldiers managed to surround me just when I found the hut by the Stones empty, and— Well.’
‘Well.’ He gave a small, mechanical laugh. ‘Which is how the people of Svein’s Creek found you?’
‘Yes. From what I’ve heard, Aranc’s people had stayed with the provost the night before.
He got suspicious when they didn’t return by nightfall and sent out people to look for them.
’ I lowered my face into my hands – the pressure of my fingers not nearly enough to scrub the vision of my mind, the blood, the screaming.
‘And then of course the Svein’s Creek men didn’t realise I’d been the target of that pursuit in the first place.
Aranc’s people had only mentioned Lark, because if they had to explain why they were chasing some puny girl … ’
Durlain made a small, choked sound.
I looked up. ‘What?’
‘You— Nothing.’ He shook his head, annoyance tight around his lips, as if to chase away some poorly timed insight. ‘Aranc knows you’re a runewitch, then? Anyone else?’
‘No. Just him.’ I swallowed with some effort.
‘I wasn’t sent to the court as a witch. One day a bunch of fishermen caught me stealing in some backwater village, and I fought back so well that the provost had me shipped off to Mount Estien as a gift for the king.
I was exactly the sort he likes to recruit for his little corps, you know.
Unremarkable. Skilled with a weapon. Nowhere else to go. ’
Durlain’s expression suggested he thought that a rather sensible approach, if anything. ‘I see. And then?’
‘Then they put me in a room with Aranc,’ I said numbly, ‘I panicked and tried to use witchcraft to get out of the place, and once he was done nearly burning my fingers off, he told me he’d give me a nice traditional witch’s execution if I didn’t stay to do his bidding. So I stayed.’
If you fight back, they’ll hurt you worse.
It sounded like a hollow excuse in this warm, sheltered room. All those deaths, all that fear, and if only I’d gathered the courage to leave a little sooner – if only I hadn’t needed Lark to make me see I really, truly couldn’t go on the way I had for years …
He might still be alive.
So many people would still be alive.
On the other side of the table, Durlain’s only response was a cool and measured, ‘Ugly.’
‘Yes,’ I said, feeling small. ‘I was really quite looking forward to that noose.’
‘I gather.’ He absently ran his fingers through his curls, easily avoiding the horns.
The result was just as messily tousled as the previous situation had been.
‘But you’re nonetheless willing to do the hard work of staying alive to get him back?
Your’ – he cleared his throat, then finished, with a cutting precision that perfectly conveyed his opinions on the name – ‘Lark?’
Hell below.
At this point, the question was no longer why anyone had decided to cut him to pieces. Rather, how in the world he’d managed to reach adulthood without losing any limbs or digits sooner.
‘Yes,’ I said tightly, because I wasn’t going to do him the favour of arguing.
‘Well. That’s good news.’ He unfolded his long legs and sat straighter – a swift, anticipatory motion, as if the true conversation was finally about to start.
His gaze came away from the wall, settling on my face for the first time.
‘Alright, then. I’m willing to discard all my wise and well-intentioned warnings on the many dangers of bringing the dead back to life, and I’ll use my magic to retrieve your darling songbird from Niflheim—’
My breath caught. ‘Don’t—’
‘—on the condition that you help me rescue my sister first,’ he finished, undisturbed.
The rest of my rebuke disintegrated somewhere halfway up my throat.
His sister?
Shit. I’d completely forgotten about that part of the story – he had a sister.
‘Cimmura?’ With her name came the memories, half-coherent shreds of the whispers that had buzzed through Aranc’s home for weeks. ‘Who … who also died? Didn’t she? When you were—’
Something flickered in the darkness of his gaze. ‘When we were both murdered. Yes.’
‘Right.’ It came out a little sheepish. ‘Did you bring her back?’
‘We both came back all by ourselves,’ he said, something bitter in his voice I couldn’t fully make sense of. ‘She’s deathmade as well.’
Death’s arse. It sounded like one of Jay’s groan-worthy jokes – what’s worse than one fireborn necromancer? Two fireborn necromancers!
I decided it might be better not to share that pinnacle of drollery with the man before me and instead said, ‘So where is she now, then?’
He breathed a mirthless laugh. ‘In Lesceron Garnot’s dungeon.’
I stared at him.
Durlain did not elaborate, sinking back in his chair with the air of a man who’s said all that needs to be said.
Mount Garnot. I’d never visited it – King Lesceron’s court was notoriously secretive, and located on the far east coast of Seidrinn – but the rumours had been enlightening enough.
Those dungeons were little more than sunken caves beneath the ocean, stories said.
Not all of them dry. Protected not just by the tonnes and tonnes of solid rock above them but by the mountain’s ever-flowing lava streams too – and most dangerous of all, the toxic fumes that emanated where molten rock met the raging ocean below.
I took a single breath out there, one of Aranc’s diplomats had reminisced upon return from one of the rare Garnot missions, and you could hear my lungs squeak for weeks …
Cimmura Averre had been young. Might still be a child, even. And as unlikely as it seemed with a brother like hers, I couldn’t recall her ever being accused of so much as an unfriendly word to anyone. I’d rarely heard anything about her at all.
Which did beg the question …
‘Why?’ My voice had gone a little faint. ‘What did she do?’