Chapter 7 #3
‘Fine.’ This might be an unwise decision, but the alternative was unbearable – knowing nothing while living with the awareness of his knowledge. ‘Tell me what happened to your fingers, and I’ll answer your next question. An exchange of hostages, so to speak.’
He didn’t respond immediately, and that was a triumph in itself – that it took him ten counts of Smudge’s hypnotising clip-clop, clip-clop to sit up straighter behind me, thighs tensing as if he was bracing himself.
‘And this is the question you want to ask under that bargain? Why my dear brothers saw fit to relieve me of my fingers?’
‘Why they tortured you at all,’ I corrected him, because of course he was spinning things again, and I could see him trying to weasel his way out of it so easily.
They chopped off my fingers because they wanted to hurt me.
Your turn. ‘They could just have killed you quickly and cleanly if they wanted to be rid of you, yes? Why the additional … flourishes?’
His fingers twitched. ‘Flames know why Aranc is coming after you at all. I’d have kicked you out of my court within the first week.’
If only he had.
But I bit my tongue, because the bastard was deflecting again, and instead said, ‘Were you planning to answer the question before nightfall?’
A sharp inhalation behind me. ‘There was something Lorn and Nalzen wanted from me before they slit my throat, and I refused to give it to them. They got creative in their attempts to make me talk.’
I frowned. ‘What sort of something?’
‘I can’t see how it matters to you,’ he snapped. ‘They destroyed it.’
Of course it didn’t matter to me. He was quite right about that. It mattered to him, though – enough for his voice to go as tight as his thighs against mine – and if I was to survive weeks of travelling by Durlain Averre’s side, I could do with a few weak spots to prod.
‘And if I want to know regardless?’ I said.
Again he was quiet for a while. Only with the greatest effort did I manage not to twist around in the saddle like some impatient child and steal a glimpse at his face – because I could almost hear him thinking over the tireless clatter of the hooves and the splatter of a nearby creek, and I was overcome by a sudden and almost frantic urge to know what the prince of many faces looked like when he wasn’t sure what face to wear at all.
Before I could come up with an excuse to turn, he abruptly said, ‘My archive of the dead.’
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected.
I just knew it wasn’t that.
‘Your what?’ Morbid images flashed by in my mind – decomposing limbs on bookshelves, jars of teeth and eyes. ‘How would you—’
‘I shouldn’t have to explain this to you,’ he interrupted sharply, and this time his hand did come up, making it halfway to my chest before he appeared to realise what he was doing.
With a jerky, twitchy movement, he yanked it down again.
‘Blood. Bone. Any material a deathmade mage could use to bring the dead back to life. I’d made a habit of storing that away for the enemies my father killed, for— Well, for people, and—’
My breath had hitched. ‘Pol?’
‘Yes.’ It was almost a snarl. ‘Of course.’
He’d been planning to bring her back.
Which didn’t excuse anything. Of course it didn’t.
Sweet, bright Pollara Estien, who’d treated nobles like harmless jokes and everyone else like nobles – who knew every single servant by name and coddled their children when they were sick.
Pollara Estien, who had on a night from hell pulled me into her very own quarters, taken a single look at my torn clothes and bleeding hands, and told me, I’ll make the old bastard give you a room of your own.
The old bastard in question had been her uncle, King Aranc Estien, and I’d gotten my room the very next day.
She had died, she was dead, and she had not come back – that was all that mattered, not the lethal games the man behind me had played with her life as though she were a pawn of no consequence. And yet …
A minute ago, I’d believed he’d barely spent a thought on her death, and that, apparently, had been a lie.
Of course.
I filed those two words away, too confusing to consider now.
‘Why were you keeping an archive at all?’ I asked instead, cautiously, hoping he wouldn’t notice I was digging much too deep if I tried to do it gently.
‘I’d gotten rather sick of waiting for my father to die.
Again.’ The last word was another snarl.
‘Figured I’d find a necromancer – one different to the mage in the King’s service, that is – and gather some people to take matters into my own hands.
Most of the dead I’d collected would have made good allies. ’
It almost made sense.
But would he have suffered his brothers’ torture to save an archive of potential allies? Of people he’d no longer need himself, if he were to die anyway?
Surely he must have realised that Lorigern and Nalzen weren’t about to let him walk away unscathed?
I didn’t ask, because there had to be a reason he wasn’t telling me, and once he refused a single question, I was quite sure he’d be done talking entirely. Instead, I settled for a noncommittal, ‘But you said they destroyed the archive.’
His body went taut again. ‘Yes.’
‘So you did tell them?’
‘Yes.’ A small pause. ‘In the end.’
Something was very, very wrong about the tone of his voice.
I’d heard a great many varieties of sharpness from him by now, brambles and steel edges, acid and biting frost. This was not sharpness. Instead, between one instant and the next, his voice had gone perfectly, horrifyingly flat – not the flatness of indifference, but rather …
Rather, the flatness of stagnant, rotting water.
In the end.
‘What happened before the end?’ I tried, not sure if I really wanted to know.
His exhale was cold against the shell of my ear. ‘They brought Muri in.’
Muri.
Cimmura.
‘Oh, shit,’ I breathed.
‘Threatened to kill her if I didn’t talk.’ Still there was not a spark of feeling in his words. Nothing but that dull, desolate emptiness – the ashes that remained after fury had burned all else away. ‘So I talked. And then they killed her anyway.’
My heart stood still.
Durlain’s pulse was a drum against my back, pounding frantically through wool, through linen, through skin and bone … and for an instant, a single and utterly deranged instant, I almost sympathised.
‘That … that’s beastly.’ I grasped for words and didn’t find them. ‘She was a child, yes? She—’
‘Fourteen years old.’
‘Shit,’ I said again.
‘Yes.’ Some sort of emotion seeped back into his voice.
Bitter venom … and this time it didn’t seem to be aimed at his brothers but rather at me.
For having asked him to talk. For having the gall to listen, to know and feel in response.
‘Does that satisfy your curiosity, or would you like to pry a little deeper?’
Oh, I had made such a terrible mistake.
If you fight back, they’ll hurt you worse – and even though I hadn’t drawn a single knife, hadn’t signed a single rune, Durlain knew as well as I did that my questions had been fuelled by nothing but defiance and spite.
‘Quite, yes,’ I managed, heart squeezing into a tight, painful knot. Now he’d strike. He’d strike, and fuck, I’d soon wish I’d remained clueless and defenceless. ‘What … what do you want to know from me in return?’
‘Oh, there’s no need to be impatient,’ he said – softly, almost gently, and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. ‘I’d hate to rush my contribution. Enjoy the newfound knowledge, Thraga. I’ll collect your side of the bargain soon.’