Chapter 22
‘Thraga? Thraga. ’
The voice came from miles away.
I opened my mouth. Tried to open my mouth. Tasted mud, gagged, then choked on the gulf of water surging up my throat.
Hands rolled me onto my side as I retched and retched, spewing half a river from my lungs. My head throbbed like tolling bells. My limbs ached like hell. My skin was scalding hot, as if someone had built a fire on top of it.
‘Thraga.’ That same voice, sharp and hoarse at once. ‘Open your eyes. Can you hear me?’
I heard him.
My body wouldn’t obey my efforts to nod.
It was like grasping at the current again. I had thoughts. I saw and smell and heard. I was alive, and yet my consciousness seemed to float just out of reach, slipping through my fingers like fog. My eyelids were weights of lead. My tongue was a useless lump in my mouth.
Black spots were closing in on me again.
‘Thraga,’ I heard him say as I sagged back onto hard, cold earth, ‘Thraga, please …’
The mists of my mind evaporated.
It was dark.
I was cold.
My body was shaking. Shaking. Shaking. Bouncing up and down in a maddening rhythm, jolted against something hard and strong and warm over and over again—
A body.
Arms around me.
Horse. The thing moving beneath me was a horse.
My eyes blearily blinked open, the world a blur of shapes and shadows before me. Trees. So many trees. The sky was dark as ink, the moon a hazy half-circle before us – what madman would be riding like this in the depths of night?
I tried to speak and heard nothing but a wordless grunt emerge from my lips.
‘Thraga?’ A hoarse, breathless voice. The arm around me tightened as I twitched. ‘Thraga, are you awake?’
Another moan. My tongue wouldn’t move.
‘I still owe you a mulled wine,’ he rasped against the crown of my head, and even his breath felt cold on my skin. ‘This is a terrible moment to die, you impossible woman …’
I sank back into nothingness.
There were cries around me. Voices of people I’d never heard before. Strange hands on me, carrying me down from something, then into a circle of firelight. I was shivering. My back and face were clammy, clothes soaked with sweat.
‘She’s burning hot,’ a man was saying, and a wet cloth was pressed against my forehead.
I tried to tell him I was freezing, but I couldn’t open my mouth.
Consciousness came and went, in scattered, distorted flashes of impressions. A whiff of sweet perfume. Rough, calloused hands on my face. Soft sheets, pine-scented air, a glass with cool water pressed against my lips.
‘If you have the gall to die from this,’ the one voice I did know told me, hours or years later, ‘I will be dragging you back to life, Thraga.’
That seemed hilarious.
I couldn’t quite remember why before sleep took me again.
I was no longer cold.
It was the first thing I registered as I emerged from that dreamless darkness – that I wasn’t shivering anymore. The blankets weren’t heavy, clammy weights, instead pushing me into the mattress with soft, comforting care. The room—
I was in a room.
I knew it even without opening my eyes – the faint smell of wood and clean linen, the pleasant, mellow temperature. One or two walls away, footsteps thudded through— Was it a house? An inn? A palace?
No, not a palace. I smelled forest and fresh air, not sulphur and smoke.
Durlain had brought me here – that much I could pick out from the broken shards of memories.
A moonlit ride. A chorus of voices. People he knew, presumably, people he trusted – which ought to mean that I was safe, didn’t it?
They’d nursed me back to life. Seemed an odd thing to do if they were going to kill me after.
I considered the matter for a moment longer, then slowly, cautiously, opened my eyes.
And froze.
It took me a moment – a long, paralysed moment – to grasp what I was seeing.
I was lying in a room, indeed. Polished marble walls curved around me, their colours shifting from white to pale pink to lavender.
Carved leaves and flowers twisted across the ceiling arches; an intricate ash tree sigil adorned the keystone above my head.
Soft, warm sunlight filtered in through gossamer curtains and poured across my bed, across the pale wooden floor, across the intricate patterns of gold filigree inlaid in those birchwood boards.
I lay and stared, unbreathing, at the pastel-coloured splendour surrounding me.
Home.
I had to be dreaming.
Perhaps I had died after all.
It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. Home had burned on that cold winter’s day, flames rising behind me as Kjell held me and fought his way through the brambles. I still smelled the smoke. I still felt those thorns tearing at my skin, and yet …
I pushed myself upright in the pillows with trembling arms. There was the carved wooden door I remembered, not nearly as tall now that I was no longer a five-year-old child.
The narrow built-in wardrobe. The washbasin in its own little alcove and the mirror on the wall. As if I’d gone back in time …
Except for the knives on the nightstand beside me.
Kjell’s knives. The blades he’d forged for me after my mother’s death, after my home had burned – tokens of violence that didn’t fit this idyll of my youth, yet here they were.
Someone had put them in the right order, I realised as my eyes reflexively darted over them to count – Ehwaz, Uruz, Isa, Kaunan, Wunjo, Eihwaz.
That sounded like something that might happen in a dream.
But when I reached out and slid my finger along the tip of Ehwaz’s blade, the sting of pain was unmistakably real, and so was the drop of blood that welled on my skin.
Which meant …
Mists take me. All of this was real?
In a burst of bewilderment, I yanked off my blankets and swung my legs out of bed, realising only then I was wearing a fine silk nightgown of the sort only noble ladies could afford.
My own scrawny, sun-tanned feet were jarringly out of place beneath the delicate hem and landed on the floor as though they knew they did not belong here; I stood with quivering knees, and still the room did not go up in smoke around me.
I barely dared to take the first step.
But the dusk-coloured walls remained in place when I slid my fingers across the satin-smooth surface; the tap in the washbasin turned smoothly, and real, cold water poured from it. And then there was the warm sunlight, that golden glow that didn’t even exist in this frozen, barren land …
I’d just turned towards the curtain-covered windows when I heard the steps growing louder behind me.
It was too late to hide. Too late to lunge for my weapons.
All I managed to do before the handle turned was check whether my rune mark was hidden beneath my lacy sleeves – and then the door swung open and Durlain Averre, prince of many faces himself, stood on the threshold with a glass of water in his hand and a towel over his shoulder, jerking to a standstill at the sight of me.
We stared at each other.
My limbs suddenly no longer knew what to do.
He looked so much like himself it was almost incomprehensible, and yet he didn’t – same horns and eyepatch and cheekbones, same tall, menacing elegance in his tailored dark clothes, but with an unfamiliar edge of nonchalance to the picture of him, sleeves rolled up and that bloody towel over his shoulder.
Still impending doom, yes. But he looked like impending doom at home, and that was patently impossible …
Because this was mine.
This was supposed to be mine.
He gave a sharp headshake in the doorway, as if to jolt himself awake. ‘You’re—'
‘I grew up in this place!’ I blurted.
My voice was hoarse. Barely more than a croak, really. But it came out with all the force of my pent-up bewilderment, and he went quiet as abruptly as he’d started speaking – eye narrowing at me with something that looked less like surprise and more like concern.
‘Thraga?’ As if it might not be me who was speaking. ‘You were down with a fever for days. You might—’
‘I’m not delirious!’ The shrieking undertone of my voice damn well sounded delirious.
‘I know this room. I know this house. There’s a landing behind you with five doors opening onto it, one bathroom and three more bedrooms beside this one, and then on the next floor there are three larger bedrooms, two of them connected, and—’
He was slowly stepping back, as if the next item on my list might be an announcement of bloody murder. Without taking his gaze off me, he cleared his throat and loudly said, ‘Aunt Gon?’
My mouth snapped shut.
From downstairs, a warm yet unmistakably courtly voice drifted up. ‘What is it, dear?’
‘She’s awake.’ His eye remained fixed on me, intent in a way that made my skin feel like turning inside out. ‘And has some questions. As do I, I might add.’
There was a moment of silence.
Then footsteps came closer – not hurried, because courtly ladies did not hurry, but ascending the stairs with a firm, measured pace. I had half a thought of reaching for my knives, and then the owner of those feet stepped into view and rendered that thought both ridiculous and useless.
The woman emerging from the stairwell was not a warrior.
She was, however, as court-bred as any fireborn lady I’d met in my life.
She was tall – almost as tall as Durlain – with dark, silver-streaked hair that she wore in an elegant pile of curls atop her head.
Delicate golden jewellery dangled from her horns.
A dozen rings or more adorned her slender hands.
Her midnight-blue dress looked simple but had probably cost the sort of money that could feed an orphanage for a year; her tastefully made-up face gave the impression she’d never in her life done anything as vulgar as cry or sweat or – hell help us all – raise her voice.
A woman I should loathe on principle, and yet her warm, graceful smile felt like a lifeline through the tempest of my confusion.