Chapter 14 #2
His face was dangerously close, I realised, close enough to count the flecks of violet in his night-black eye, to follow every vein below the pale skin of his throat.
Already the heat of his fireborn body was seeping through his clothes.
Layers of linen and leather and fur between us, and yet there was no ignoring the lean firmness of his thigh against my leg, the flex of a restless bicep beneath my palm.
Even pinned beneath me, he didn’t look anywhere close to defeated.
His curls splayed across the forest floor, purple against mossy green.
His horns were a stark black in comparison, their ribbed surface gleaming in the sunlight; the stretch of his throat was almost indecently delicate beneath Uruz’s edge, a smoothness that belonged on marble statues rather than living flesh and blood.
His lips were red, and moist. Had they always seemed so painfully … silky?
His gaze lay fixed upon my face, bottomless and burning with something I hoped with all my might was rage.
Half a feet between our faces. Less, perhaps.
All of a sudden, I no longer dared to move.
It stretched between us for a loaded eternity, that moment of paralysis.
Two eternities, perhaps, and then he moved without warning – mouth curling into that thin, dangerous smile I knew to spell murder, head lifting even closer towards me without any regard for the knife at his throat.
I jerked away from his lips instinctively, as if he might—
No.
No, I was not thinking about that.
And Durlain certainly wasn’t as he parted his mouth a sliver and muttered, ‘I’m afraid you might be celebrating too early, Thraga.’
I blinked. ‘What—’
Something stirred at his throat.
A crystalline glimmer, a whisper of white – and then a shred of mist slithered from beneath his high collar, not thick and ashen but pearly and glittery, like ice turned gaseous.
It curled around my wrist before I could gather my wits.
A frigid, biting caress, repulsive like the cold touch of dead fingers; I gasped and yanked back my hand without thinking, Uruz slipping from my grip.
The mist clung to my skin like hoarfrost.
I gulped in a breath. ‘What are you—'
Tendrils of frost-tinged air were rising from his fingers, too – from his scars – and there was no need to finish that question.
Niflheim.
Death’s bloody arse.
I scrambled off him faster than conscious thought, a cry of shock catching in my throat.
He rose with easy grace, dark eye never leaving my face.
The mists coalesced around him, shifted with the motions of his coat and fingers – swirling and swishing in the pale sunlight, shaping a veil of glittery white …
No, not a veil.
A gate.
Shit, shit, shit.
‘Still so very sure you can win this fight?’ Durlain softly, pleasantly enquired, tendrils of frost coiling from his horns as the portal to hell itself solidified around him.
My throat was squeezing shut.
It didn’t matter that I’d never seen anything like it before, the shimmering emptiness opening up behind his slender shape.
I knew the threat of it without words or thoughts.
A wrongness that I recognised in some deep, primal part of me, like the skin-crawling stench of rotting flesh or the gurgle of a dying animal – a sensation that jarred with the very notion of life itself.
The urge to recoil from it was as instinctive as the urge to breathe. I needed to run, that instinct said. I needed to crawl if need be, as long as I got far, far away from the bottomless abyss opening up before me …
But I’d be damned before I let Durlain Averre see me crawl again.
I stood.
I breathed.
‘I … I suppose a ceasefire might be in order,’ I rasped, voice refusing to emerge any louder. The spring air had gone frosty against my face. ‘Until I figure out what runes to use against hell gates, that is.’
He gave a single emphatic blink.
Around him, the mists scattered and dissolved in an instant.
For a moment I almost thought he hadn’t noticed his magic fading, so blank was his incredulous stare at me …
and then something trembled on his lips.
Something that didn’t remotely resemble that savage murder smile of his, that wasn’t barbed and biting in the slightest – something that looked rather like—
Amusement?
I blinked, and it was gone.
‘You baffle me,’ he informed me, tone impassive, as he crossed to the other side of the clearing with long, resolute strides.
By the creek, Pain and Smudge stood glaring at us in unison, apparently unbothered by the hell gate that had opened up in our midst. ‘All the same, this has been a most educative exercise. Lunch?’
As if nothing had happened.
For lack of a better idea, I picked Uruz up from the moss, got my lunch from my pack, and ate it without another word.
We rode on not long after, together this time, through the dead forest and the windswept hills that lay beyond.
Neither of us spoke. I was still reeling from the end of our duel, and Durlain was even quieter than usual – pensive almost, the line between his brows lingering until we crested the last hill and found Brainne tucked between the steep slopes of the valley.
Only then did I realise, pathetically late, that he still hadn’t taken back a word about Lark.
The First Fruits celebrations were in full swing by the time we reached the city gates, bonfires roaring in the narrow streets, ale flowing freely on every square and corner.
Cheap ale, of course, most of it heavily diluted with water …
but who cared so long as there was enough to get blind drunk on?
Even the smell of drink couldn’t mask the stench of the nearby marshes, the volcanic rot that had earned Brainne the name of the poisoned city.
Having to wade through the laughing, singing masses, we spent an eternity reaching the richer parts of town, where the streets were just a fraction quieter.
The inn Durlain had chosen was yet another luxury establishment, of course, an old Seidrinn building refurbished in fireborn style: heavily perfumed candles burned in every nook and cranny, the scents mingling with the aroma of bruised flower garlands on the floors.
Even then, the putrid stink of the marshes was never more than a deep inhale away, glass windows and heavy velvet curtains be damned.
The place was also bursting with drunken fireborn.
Durlain oozed Givron-ness from the moment he stepped over the threshold with his spelled eyepatch on, demanding a room be prepared for him this very instant, insisting that servants be pulled away from the festivities in the main hall of the building.
I spent most of our climb up the stairs hoping the celebrations were at least contained in that hall …
and then we reached the narrow landing and passed the first open door, and the audible gasps and moans emerging from the room behind put a swift end to that desperate optimism.
Damn it.
Even with my eyes tightly focused on the far end of the corridor – and on the floor, and on my bags, and really on everything except Durlain’s sharp features beside me – there was no stopping the heat rising to my face.
‘Consider it this way,’ he muttered as we left the revellers behind, ‘at least few people will be paying attention to us.’
He seemed blessedly unaffected. I took it as my cue that we would simply pretend none of this was happening.
‘Convenient,’ I said, and it only came out a fraction strangled.
His swift smile was thorny and mirthless, and emphatically ignored the fleshy slaps echoing through a door to our right.
His quarters were quiet, at least, situated on the far side of the building.
Vases with perfumed dried flowers stood on every available surface in the main room, fighting the marsh air for all they were worth.
There was a small adjoining room for me, so cramped and windowless that I suspected it had originally been a wardrobe – far from an ideal arrangement, but on the other hand, at least it meant I wouldn’t have to check my locks a hundred times tonight.
It was hard not to feel a fraction relieved at that.
I dumped my bags on my bed. When I returned, a quilted bedspread had been flung over the mirror in the corner.
Best not to comment on that, probably. ‘What’s the plan?’
‘I’m going to pay my contact a visit,’ Durlain said, not bothering to look my way as he slipped out of his travelling coat and into a more refined alternative. ‘He lives close by. Shouldn’t take more than half an hour. You’ll be getting food for us both.’
Not a request. Not even an order. A stated fact, and the worst part was I couldn’t disagree with him; even if I loathed the idea of leaving this quiet sanctuary, he was doing plenty already. I ought to pull my weight.
‘Will do,’ I said. No sense in arguing – I already knew the bastard would emerge as the winner, and that was more satisfaction than he deserved. ‘Any requests?’
He ran a swift hand through his hair, raking it from its original, slightly tousled state into a noticeably more tousled state. ‘No porridge, preferably.’
I blinked at him.
He raised a caustic eyebrow back at me.
‘I … Yes. Alright.’ Had that been a joke? His expression suggested the opposite, and yet it seemed equally unlikely that this was the moment he’d pick to air any serious grievances, a day and a half after the fact. ‘I, um, should manage that.’
‘Most obliged.’ There was still no trace of a smile on his face.
‘Alright,’ I said again, and decided it was time to retreat into my bedroom.
Perhaps that had been exactly the aim of the whole exchange: confusing me enough to ensure I would flee rather than pick a fight.
If he had been anyone else, it might have been a rather farfetched theory; for the prince of many faces, on the other hand, it didn’t seem that far beyond the realms of possibility.
Through the closed door of my wardrobe-annex-room, I heard Durlain leaving our quarters. A relief, I told myself.
Anyway. Food.
I spent a few minutes changing into less grimy clothes myself – an unimaginable luxury, having multiple sets to change between – then stared at my knives for what felt like half an hour, unsure what to do with them.
Every instinct screamed at me to keep them on me.
But Durlain had told me that my best strategy was not to draw attention, and on a festival night, I would stand out if I were armed to the teeth.
I left them by the bed in the end and kept only my two new, magicless blades on me, hidden beneath my tunic.
Rather than returning to the entrance hall downstairs, I made my way to the back of the inn across the first floor, grimacing at the sounds emerging from some of the rooms I passed.
It was old, this place. Built in traditional Seidrinn style, with thick stone walls and small windows, then refurbished later to fit the tastes of our newly arrived fireborn masters.
It meant that, beneath all the wood panelling and dark brocade, at least the bones were solid – and sneaking through the candlelit corridors, I was grateful for it.
I didn’t want to know how much detail I might otherwise be hearing.
Not that I begrudged anyone a good lay, but in this bloody place …
Mists take me. It was the hypocrisy of it.
The corridor widened into a gallery, an elegant wooden walkway that ran all the way around a wide-open space, overlooking the main hall below.
The sound of voices and music grew explosively louder as I stepped onto it; I smelled wine, food, cloying perfume, none of them able to mask the far more carnal stench of human bodies beneath.
A single glance over the ornate balustrade told me all I needed to know – fireborn men, human women, the usual way of things.
A celebration of fertility – that was the old Seidrinn tradition.
At the Estien court, they scoffed at the primitive vulgarity of it …
yet here we were, two days’ travel from Mount Estien, and I’d wager my knives that most of these men had travelled here for the sake of the festival alone.
After all, who cared about primitive when there would be willing girls around?
Fireborn women were protected by fathers and brothers, by the complex system of honour that turned them into possessions to ruin; for a courtier seeking simple pleasure, this approach was far less headache-inducing.
And these women …
I allowed myself to watch them for a moment – younger than me, most of them, in their best Surd’s day dresses, laughing and cooing in the laps of strangers. Lark would have scoffed now, standing beside me. Cheap traitors, all of them …
But was it cheap, really?
A full night of warmth and drink and as much food as one could eat. For a good part of my life, I hadn’t been able to imagine a greater luxury.
Fuck. Lark …
It flooded me without warning, the crushing absence of him on this hell-forsaken night.
Four years of celebrating First Fruits together.
Four years of sneaking out of the barracks, of delaying our journeys home for these joyful stolen moments; four years of secret toasts in wayside inns and rural towns.
And here I stood, bleakly alone and farther from safe than I’d been in my life, surrounded by the exact company he would so lovingly have protected me from.
Of course I’m not going to join their table, witchling. Better for you if we keep the watching eyes far away from us …
And then, cutting through the aching haze of melancholy with such force my heart stuttered at the impact—
He had to tell you it was done for you?
Durlain.
Loud and clear, as if he was standing right behind me.
Oh, the bastard. The plague-bitten, piss-ridden bastard, to weasel his way into the few happy memories this world had granted me – why would he harp on just those two innocent little words? Lark had made sacrifices for my sake, and so what? It made him a better person, not some sort of dastardly—
An arm slipped around my waist.
The stench of wine-drenched breath washed over me.
And a slurring voice, court accent thick as mud, drawled, ‘Too shy to join the party, love?’