Chapter 29 #2
I could simply ask him – I was almost, almost sure of it.
Could invite him to go ahead. Could peel that pretty black silk off him, could find out if his lips tasted as bitter as the words that emerged from them.
But he wanted me to ask, and my heels dug themselves into the metaphorical sand at that thought – because no matter how much he might tempt me and provoke me, I wasn’t crawling again.
He could size me up and pry me open all he wanted; that did not make me wax in his hands.
‘Nothing,’ I heard myself say, voice a fraction high. ‘Nothing of any importance, that is. Why?’
He didn’t take the bait.
He just considered me a moment longer – smouldering, toe-curling scrutiny, sinking beneath my skin like the heat of strong liquor – and then he smiled.
A dangerous smile. No calculation behind it, no artful seduction; just wicked, almost mischievous satisfaction, and the glow beneath my skin burst into a blazing bonfire.
‘You fight so well,’ he said.
Sweet fucking hell below.
I gave some sort of answer, presumably. I must have, because we both lay under our own blankets not long after, a safe arm’s length between us, the waves roaring their never-ending lullaby beneath our wooden hut – but all I could think …
You fight so well.
Thank Death and his misty hells that we’d kept the fire burning to alleviate the cold of Durlain’s scars; he might have felt me burning otherwise.
‘Shouldn’t you be saying something poetic now?’ I suggested.
We stood on one of the higher cliffs along today’s stretch of coast, icy wind whipping in our faces, the occasional drop of salt spraying up from thirty feet beneath us.
The sea was a dark, roaring monster. In the distance, towering basalt pillars rose from the waves, looking almost otherworldly in their sturdiness against the water’s violence.
I felt alive.
I felt, more than anything, reckless.
Durlain gave a noncommittal hmm next to me, coat billowing around his slender form, curls snapping around his face. ‘I didn’t have you down as a great admirer of poetry.’
‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘But I might be willing to make an exception if someone were to lyrically compare my eyes to the seething grey of the tempestuous sea, or—’
‘I’ll do no such thing,’ he interrupted, a small thread of amusement lacing his habitually bored court voice. ‘They are very green, for a start.’
I grinned. ‘Caught my trap.’
‘I’m not an amateur, Thraga.’ His side-glance was full of purple-flecked disapproval, and also something that made my heart skip in five directions at once. ‘Your eyes were quite possibly the third thing I noticed about you.’
Now that was a trap.
Every sliver of prey instinct within me knew it, and yet there was no resisting the temptation – a door beckoning to be opened, and how could I hold back, if what lay behind might just be everything I needed?
‘What were the first two?’ I ventured.
‘That you were more frightened of life than you were of death.’ He paused for a moment, dark eye pensive on the towering pillars of basalt ahead. ‘And that I needed a very stern word with whoever had been in charge of your hair up to that moment.’
My laughter broke from me like a flock of startled seagulls – true, reckless laughter, and damn it all if it sounded desperate. ‘Brave words, for a man standing at the top of a cliff.’
It wasn’t exactly amused, the look he threw me, or at least it wasn’t only amused. Something soft shimmered in the dark of his eye, which was a ridiculous thought, because this man was little but edges and angles and needles – and yet …
‘I’d risk worse to see you laugh like that,’ he said as he turned back to the horses – conversationally, almost matter-of-factly. ‘You’ve got a lot to catch up on.’
And I was speechless again.
By day four, it was hard to imagine I’d ever thought an uncaged Durlain Averre would turn into some lustful, raging brute.
There were smiles and small, musing observations instead.
Fleeting touches and lingering looks. He wielded them with the painstaking precision of a flaying knife, digging beneath my skin just as easily – a seduction campaign so subtle, so sophisticated, that I wasn’t even sure whether it was a campaign at all.
Whether it wasn’t simply him, being himself, in ways he hadn’t dared to allow before.
As if he hadn’t been capable of honesty until he’d assured himself I would not be the only one to pay for it.
Or perhaps it was just another face, another merciless game in that cunning, calculating mind of his; perhaps he was bored, and I was there, and he was curious to see how far he could push me.
I didn’t know. I didn’t quite know what I was hoping to achieve, either, because surely a fire this scalding hot could only burn me in the end. But all the same, I was …
Having fun?
It seemed unlikely.
Yet no matter how long I thought about it, huddled against the wind on Pain’s back, I couldn’t find any other way to describe my constant state of giddy excitement.
We rode east until the coastline bent to the north, passing through small fishermen’s villages to buy food and supplies but sleeping in the flood huts where no one could study our faces for too long.
The landscape grew ever more unearthly the closer we came to Mount Garnot itself.
Purple lakes and black beaches. Dead trees, their bleached roots sticking from the earth like half-buried bones.
On the fourth night, our hut faced a bay where luminescent algae flourished in astounding amounts, and we watched the glowing surf for hours, shades of teal and indigo rippling endlessly over the sand.
Even then, Durlain didn’t so much as put an arm around my shoulder.
It was on day five – with three days of riding ahead of us and the squat, blunted shape of Mount Garnot looming from the mists on the horizon – that I found the bottle.
I almost missed it. It lay a few yards away from the wet line of the surf, nestled in the black sand; if not for a pile of driftwood forcing me to step aside and look around, I’d have passed by and never known what I’d missed.
But the driftwood was there, I did turn, and the unexpected flash of yellowish green in the sunlight was too bright and too familiar to ignore.
I yanked on Pain’s reins to stop her. Behind me, Durlain said, ‘Thraga?’
My boots had already landed in the coarse, dark sand.
Heart hammering, I plodded towards the glimmer of glass and crouched.
It was no larger than the palm of my hand, the bottle in the sand: pear-shaped and half-empty, filled with a thin, bile-coloured fluid.
The label tied around its neck was torn and wet.
Still, I could make out some of the letters scribbled onto it, enough to know what it must have said – adder.
I knew that writing.
I knew that bottle.
I stared at it, small yet far from harmless, and felt the blood pulse behind my eyes in dull, frantic thumps.
‘Thraga?’ Durlain’s sudden nearness made me jolt. ‘What are you—’
‘This is Jay’s,’ I said hollowly.
Poison for his knives. I’d seen him labelling these very same bottles so many times, cracking lewd jokes while writing his descriptions; had seen him strolling into the woods with heavy leather gloves during missions, looking for snakes to milk, and returning with jars of this same foul liquid in his pockets.
It couldn’t be anyone else’s. It couldn’t be.
But the only way to explain its presence on this beach …
He'd been here.
Which meant Rook had been here.
Which meant they might just know where we were, might just be waiting for us – the two of them, and therefore Belloc, too.
Durlain didn’t even ask if I was sure. Just knelt beside me, threw a single look at my face, and said, ‘Well. Fuck.’
My nod was a weak, pitiful thing.
Out of nowhere, I smelled sulphur on the briny breeze.