Chapter 9 #2
But there was a flash of something sharp about him – an intangible impression of claws unsheathing – and his voice abruptly went glacial. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t.’
‘What?’ It happened too swiftly. Another mask, almost, except it was still very much Durlain towering over me, tall and effortlessly menacing. ‘I do appreciate—’
‘You realise I’m not doing any of this for you, don’t you?
’ he interrupted, and it was almost too biting, the tone of his voice – as if he was actively trying to wound rather than to make a point.
‘I’m saving my sister’s life. That’s all there is to it.
Don’t mistake me for your darling songbird just because you happen to be of use to me. ’
A gut punch.
An ice-cold, deliberate one, and it took all I had not to gasp for breath. ‘How dare you— I just— What—'
‘Careful, Thraga.’ His voice went silkily soft again, dark eye still watching me with that skin-crawling interest. ‘Your grammar is abandoning you again.’
Oh, the rotten, maggot-brained bastard.
‘Forgive me for expecting the barest minimum of civility!’ I spat, jerking half a step towards him before I could stop myself.
He didn’t back down, although his eye narrowed in the quietest warning.
‘A simple you’re welcome would have sufficed, damn you – do you really have to be as unpleasant as humanly possible about literally everything? ’
His lip curled a fraction. ‘I am an unpleasant person.’
‘You’re making that clear enough, yes!’
‘And yet you appear to hope for something better.’ He moved so easily I barely noticed he was moving at all until he stood before me, looming over me from so close – his curls a deep, inky purple in the firelight, his features shards of broken glass.
‘Don’t be a fool, Thraga. I’m not your friend.
I’m not your ally. I win fights, not hearts – forget that, and you’ll be the only one hurt at the end of the day. ’
Had I been in any danger of forgetting?
Where in Death’s misty hell was this coming from?
To think I had been relieved to see him, mere minutes ago.
The hairs on the back of my neck were prickling now, every nerve in my body awake with red-hot rage – rage, and just a flicker of guilt at the memory of my treacherous body reacting to his nearness before.
Had he noticed? Had he drawn conclusions so laughably wrong I wouldn’t even know where to start refuting them?
‘Oh, no need to worry.’ The words emerging from my lips hardly sounded like my own, biting as bitter poison. ‘My heart has never preferred limp-dicked wife-murderers.’
I’d pushed past him and onto the dark landing outside before he could retaliate.
The triumph of that parting shot lasted until I reached the room that would be mine for the night.
The accommodation Frode had assigned to me was located on the upper floor of the inn – a small, grey cell barely large enough to hold a narrow bed and a chair.
It was clean, at least. Not too cold. But there were no windows and no sources of light, and if an enraged Estien royal slipped inside in the middle of the night and smothered me to death with the thin pillow, not a soul would notice until the morning came.
I swallowed hard, and felt burning palms against my throat again.
But choices had been made. No way back now, after the words I’d thrown in Durlain’s face – entirely justified words, I reminded myself, even if he may have been planning to bring Pol back to life and had suffered torture and death not to lose the last remnant of her life.
He should never have killed her at all. She was in my way – what sort of monster would poison a brave, kind woman for that reason?
I’m not your friend, he’d said. I’m not your ally.
Was he warning me I might end up in a similar grave if I became an annoyance rather than an asset?
I pulled the door shut behind me with a firm yank and locked it, trying to shut out the thoughts and doubts. Then I turned and viciously slammed my toe against the bedframe in the dark. The walls were paper thin; I barely managed not to howl a curse that would wake every servant on this floor.
Surely, this was somehow Durlain’s fault as well.
Fucker. If he could make an effort to be pleasant to his other tools, then why not to me?
I found my way by touch – the coarse weight of woollen blankets, the firm lumpiness of the straw mattress.
Only after I’d sat down did I take off my knives, one by one, savouring their familiar heft in my palm to try and soothe the doubts tightening my chest. Ehwaz – really, really here.
Uruz – really, really here. Isa, Kaunan …
It was no use.
I knew it the moment I dropped Eihwaz to the floor last.
Heart pounding, I forced myself to ignore the compulsion pulling at my hands, made myself untie my trousers instead.
I had to be sensible now. I’d felt those knives.
Where would they have gone – through the fucking floor?
I was feeling doubt, yes, churning, nauseating doubt, but that was a feeling, and a ludicrous one at that – the knives were there, if I bent over I’d find them without any trouble, and Belloc couldn’t get to me.
No one could get to me, because I’d locked the door, and—
Had I locked the door?
I sat frozen on the edge of my bed, my shaking breath the only deafening sound in the silence.
Surely I’d locked it. I always did. This room was not so different from the one Pol had arranged for me, and it had been a habit to lock that one … but perhaps I had, in the dark of night and the confusion of this strange place, forgotten?
I rose, stepped out of my trousers, then tiptoed to the other side of the room. My fingers found the wall, another wall … and then, hinges.
Wood.
Handle.
I turned it, the metal cold against my palm. The door didn’t move.
See? Lark said in the back of my mind, and I saw him again, sprawled naked in my blankets.
He’d have gotten into so much trouble if Aranc had found him there, spending the night in another bird’s bed …
and he’d come all the same, had made sweet love to me all the same, put up with my endless doubts and obsessions all the same.
Told you there was nothing to worry about. Now come here and kiss me, witchling.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ I whispered into the darkness.
Except that there was everything to worry about.
Had I really checked that door as well as I should have? Perhaps it had just jammed. Perhaps I hadn’t actually pulled, too distracted by the memory of Lark and the gaping hole of grief hollowing out my stomach – perhaps—
My fingers found the handle again.
A short, swift yank. No movement.
There. Time to go to bed. I scurried to the other side of the room, hit my toe a second time, and swallowed another round of curses. It would be so easy to make some light now. Dagaz, sowilo, easiest spell in the world – except that someone might open the door and see—
No, I’d locked it.
Hadn’t I?
Shit. Shit, shit.
It was late. I was exhausted. Eight days of prison and a night of little sleep; we’d leave early tomorrow, and there would be another long day of riding after.
I had to sleep, and instead I found myself staggering back to the door in the ink-black darkness, the iron bands of fear drawing tight around my lungs and guts.
One last time, then – one last time, and this time I had to get it right, this time I had to be certain …
I pulled.
No movement.
Two last times, then.
Three. Four. My hand was clammy around the cold metal doorknob.
Five, and hell, was it possible to damage a lock by pulling at it too often? I might be digging my own grave here, yanking at a cheap inn lock over and over until it broke – what if this fifth time had been the last straw and the mechanism would cave at check number six …
I tried a sixth time.
Nothing broke.
I had to stop. I had to sleep. I knew, I knew, I knew, and yet the alarm still vibrated through every fibre of me, a never-ending haze of unsoothable doubts; I checked the locks again and again until I was almost crying with exhaustion, and when I finally collapsed onto the prickly straw mattress, hours past midnight, my dreams were bright with the violent orange-gold of fireborn flames.
I woke at sunrise. Even weeks of little sleep couldn’t shift the lifelong rhythms of my body.
The lock was still shut.
Of course it was – the realisation settled into my limbs like the weight of my days-old exhaustion. It seemed almost unthinkable, by the dim daylight creeping in between door and threshold, that it could ever have been anything else.
You and your fixations, witchling …
I cursed myself as I slid into my trousers and gathered my knives, mind foggy with tiredness.
What in the world had I been thinking? Surviving another day of Durlain’s company was going to be hard enough; doing so on four hours of sleep would be much, much worse.
And for what? Now that I considered the matter rationally, it was crystal-clear that Belloc could have burned his way through that door with a flick of his hands, lock or no lock – and speaking of Belloc …
We needed to get the hell out of here.
No time to dawdle and blame myself; I could do plenty of that later. First we ought to make sure there would still be a princess to save by the time we reached Mount Garnot.
There was no sign of Durlain downstairs, but Frode was already bustling around between the swords and the dead stags, smooth-shaven and fashionably dressed as he had been the night before.
Lord Givron had bought a new horse for me, he informed me, to replace the animal that had regrettably broken its leg the previous day.
I should bring my master his breakfast and eat something myself, and then I was expected in the stables to prepare our mounts.
My master.
I couldn’t even muster the appropriate feelings of spite. The relief was too great – not another day pressed against him in the saddle, at least.
After whatever the hell had happened last night, that twisted parody of intimacy would have been awkward to say the least.
Cook glared at me when I slipped into the kitchens, clearly not mollified by whatever explanation Kjersti had given for my absence.
A large tray stood waiting for me by the door.
On it was a meal fit for kings – bread with soft cheese and dill, two eggs with runny yolks, a small plate of berries – and beside it stood a bowl of porridge, lumpy and watery, with not so much as a spoon of honey stirred in.
‘For you and his lordship,’ Kjersti’s red-haired brother told me, looking apologetic as he handed me the food.
I forced a smile. ‘Thanks.’
I did not fight back, after all.
I endured. I played along. The only way to survive in a world where my very existence was a crime and the odds would always, everywhere, be stacked against me …
and then I pushed open the unlocked door to Durlain’s lodgings and found them empty, the sound of a running tap emerging from behind the bathroom door.
His hot baths.
His little luxuries.
The very reason I was stuck here hauling his breakfast around, sleeping on uneven straw mattresses, smiling obligingly at people who treated me like shit, and fury flared through my veins with such sudden ferocity that I almost gasped.
I thudded the tray down on the table, hard enough to send the plates and knives rattling. There was no sign anyone had heard me; as an act of defiance, it was woefully insufficient.
This was stupid. Unforgivably stupid. If you fight back, they’ll hurt you worse – I knew, I knew, except …
I stood frozen, staring at the cabinets without seeing anything, as my thoughts turned upside down.
Except that last night, I’d tried to play along, and Durlain had cut me down for it.
I’d apologised when I thought I ought to yesterday morning, and he’d told me to stop.
I’d let him take the reins from the moment he’d dragged me from that Svein’s Creek prison, and rather than appreciating the compliance, he’d told me to pull my weight.
Somehow, me not fighting seemed to piss him off just as much as the knife I’d held to his throat. And if that were the case …
I looked at the tray.
I looked at the bathroom door.
I picked up my breakfast, quietly and cautiously, and bolted.
Damn it all. If Durlain would be surprised to find only a bowl of tasteless porridge on his table by the time he emerged from his bath, that sounded entirely like his problem to deal with.