Chapter 32 #2
I had a fraction of a second to brace myself before his fist slammed into my guts.
He was talking when I managed to locate my ears again, curled up and whimpering on the smooth obsidian, one arm growing numb beneath my torso while the other dangled awkwardly at the end of the wooden stick.
It took another smarting moment before the pain receded enough for my mind to take in the sound of his voice – ‘… enough of the civil methods …’
Fuck.
This had been civil?
I tried to breathe as hands hauled me back onto my feet.
Breathing was the first step of fighting.
And I was going to fight, I had to fight, even if I could already feel Aranc’s phantom hand around my throat again – because the alternative was worse.
The alternative was being slowly grilled to death over Aranc’s craters, or watching Durlain being—
No.
No screaming. No begging. I would wait for Durlain to make careful, sensible plans.
The hands pushed me forward, although not ungently. I took a single step and wanted to double over and vomit.
‘Might have to carry her, m’lord,’ Rook cautiously said behind me.
‘She’ll walk.’ Belloc gave a chuckle, sounding so much like Aranc that I almost gasped. ‘Builds character. Up you go, poppet.’
Rook’s hand closed around my elbow, tugging me forward ever so slightly – but supporting me, to an extent I was pretty sure would earn him a black eye if Belloc were to notice.
‘Fuck off,’ I breathed without moving my lips.
He didn’t respond, but his arm didn’t slacken either.
We struggled up the slope of another hill, my boots slipping over brittle black stone, the world swaying around me. The night air grew warmer as we climbed. Warmer and glowing and—
Oh.
Oh, shit.
Belloc was waiting ahead when I looked up, standing on the edge of the ridge, his broad face and russet-brown hair glowing gold in the sudden flood of firelight.
I knew what I was about to see. I should have expected it from the start, because of course the bastard was fully prepared for a fight …
but all the same, I winced as I staggered up the last few feet and the crater opened up below me.
The crater, and the bubbling rock.
It wasn’t just the heat that stole my breath.
He’d woken the fire that slumbered beneath the earth in this spot.
Like Durlain may have done, had he done it first …
but now Belloc had already claimed control of the volcano, and there was no wrenching a fireborn’s flames from his grip without exceptional power.
If Durlain tried to save me, and this was the trap waiting for him—
He would die.
No. No, I had to trust him – I had to, because I had no other choice.
Surely he was making plans already? He always had a plan.
Surely he’d realised somehow that it wasn’t me Belloc had been looking for; surely he would find a way to take on two birds and a royal heir and get the both of us out alive?
Surely.
He just needed time.
Belloc’s hand snaked around my upper arm, and I tensed, bracing for the next blow. But all he said as he dragged me towards him, was, ‘See the fire, poppet?’
Another punch might send me down into the crater, into that viscous golden hell. I nodded.
‘And you know what happens when people fall into it, don’t you?’
I’ve lived in your fucking brother’s home, some reckless part of me wanted to snap – but that was what I’d tell Durlain in his place, because Durlain allowed me to fight back.
Not Belloc. Not the rest of the world. I’d seen them, yes, the people Aranc had ordered thrown down the Estien lava; I’d seen their skin blister as they sank to their knees into the molten rock, and I’d heard them scream until the heat exploded their bodies.
I swallowed bile and nodded again.
‘Then we understand each other.’ A bulging arm wrapped around my waist, pulling me against his chest. ‘Cry for help.’
I stiffened.
He gave me half a second, then began pressing his fist slowly, slowly into my aching liver.
‘No. No, please.’ Fuck. I knew what this must look like. If Durlain had followed us up the cliff – if he was even just standing on the beach and looking up – there was no way he could miss me here, illuminated by the firelight like a glowing beacon in the night. If I started shouting and begging …
He’d think Belloc was about to throw me down.
Which, admittedly, might be true.
And on the other hand …
‘Please,’ I gasped again, because fuck, I needed time. ‘Please, I—'
‘Scream,’ Belloc said between his teeth, driving his knuckles hard beneath my ribs. I doubled over with a choked groan – no screaming, no screaming. ‘You’ll scream, or you’ll fall.’
No.
No.
Because Estien’s heir was not an idiot, despite all his gleeful brutality, and I was an asset only as long as I was alive.
If he burned me, he would no longer be able to lure Durlain into his trap.
And he wouldn’t even have me as his second-best prize when he returned to court – as a little present to bargain favours from his brother. He wouldn’t waste me so easily.
I gritted my teeth.
Belloc’s knuckles dug deeper. I tasted blood and bile, and didn’t scream.
‘Little bitch,’ he hissed, withdrawing his hand and slapping me hard across the face. My head slammed against his shoulder. ‘Don’t think you don’t have your limits. Don’t think I won’t find them. You will howl in the end, and you’ll make your own life a whole lot worse in the meantime.’
It wasn’t untrue.
Fuck. How long would Durlain take?
‘I … I’m trying to think,’ I ground out, which wasn’t a lie, either. Perhaps these were all useless heroics. Durlain might be able to think perfectly clearly with me shrieking in the background; if I exaggerated it as much as possible, he might even realise I was faking it. ‘Please. I—’
‘I’ll give you a minute,’ Belloc said, tone a mockery of courteous pleasantness. ‘In the meantime, I’ll just …’
I flinched as his sentence drifted away, expecting another slap to the face.
But his hand didn’t move up.
It went down instead, along my side, my hip, my thigh. There was a twist of his fingers on the edge of my sight. A slither of steel over leather, and then—
He lifted his hand again.
Holding Uruz between his fingers.
I shouldn’t have moved. I shouldn’t have spoken.
I shouldn’t have given him any reason, any at all, to think I cared about that blade more than about any pocket knife one might buy between here and Mount Estien – but that was Uruz, my Uruz, the weapon Kjell had given me over a meal of pancakes on my twelfth birthday, and beneath me, the lava bubbled and hissed.
There was no stopping the burst of air from my lungs – ‘No!’
Belloc flipped it around in his fingers – a taunting, threatening gesture that needed no words to convey the possibilities.
‘No! No! Please, don’t! I’ll—’
He swung.
And the knife went flying.
It was falling forever, a golden glint of steel in the dark of night – spinning, spinning, spinning in the air as I stared, unable to believe, unable to accept, as if the force of my gaze alone could outdo gravity.
I didn’t see my life flashing by. I saw Uruz flashing by, eleven years of it: stabbing into the straw dummy on Hjarn beach over and over, splintering doors around its spelled blade.
Fending off sword swings and cutting through limbs and chests and necks—
And then it was gone.
There wasn’t even a splash. The lava caught the blade and swallowed it, and then it was only me and Belloc and the silence, five knives on my body and the aching, hollow sense of an amputated limb in the empty sheath on my thigh.
‘No,’ I whispered.
As if I might undo it.
As if it might come back to me, Kjell’s craft, Kjell’s magic, Kjell’s love.
Belloc just laughed. Laughed and brought down his hand again, lowering it with mockingly elegant finger swirls to my hip.
‘No – stop!’ I tried to yank away from him, choking on another half-sob as his other fist drove into my midriff again. ‘Please, please—’
‘You sing so beautifully now,’ he purred against the crown of my head, and Ehwaz – slender, beautiful Ehwaz – went flying.
There was nothing human about the howl that tore from my throat.
‘Nightingale. That’s what he should have called you.
’ Isa and Kaunan in his large hand, turquoise and carnelian shining in the firelight.
I had to be quiet now – I had to stop giving him what he wanted with every next knife to be destroyed – and yet I couldn’t hold back, my shrieking sobs ripping from a place sense and reason couldn’t reach. ‘Music to my ears …’
He swung.
I was too numb to even wrestle.
My precious twin blades, ice and fire, blue and gold, dead and gone in the blink of an eye. Wunjo followed them, thrown into the greedy fire almost carelessly – so small yet so powerful, ten years of spells shaped on its edge …
Belloc slipped Eihwaz from the sheath by my shoulder last.
‘No,’ I breathed.
There were no other words left in me.
Kjell’s very last knife. Two weeks before he’d died. Black hilt, a blade the shadows clung to. Use it well, little monster.
‘No?’ Belloc mused.
‘Please.’ Just one of them left. Still – it was something. ‘Please, let me—’
He loosely dangled the knife between his fingers – never straying close enough to the deadly edge for me to hope he’d accidentally cut himself and end it. There was nothing but amusement in his voice as he said, ‘Scream for help.’
Nothing left to lose.
Durlain would have heard me anyway.
I sucked my throbbing lungs full of hot, acrid air and hollered, ‘Help!’
‘Please,’ Belloc prompted, unmoving.
‘Please!’ My voice broke. ‘Help me, please, please, please—'
‘Well done, Nightingale,’ he said and tossed Eihwaz down the crater with a careless flick of his wrist.
Maybe I screamed.
Maybe I kicked.
The world was a blur of empty sheaths and boiling rock.
The horizon tilted. Sharp obsidian cut through my skin as Belloc all but threw me down, back onto the steep path I’d come from; with my arms still chained, I rolled down the slope a few feet before coming to a halt against a jagged boulder.
My head pounded. My tongue tasted of blood.
‘’Take her down,’ I heard Aranc’s brother say – to Rook, no doubt. He sounded like a man forced to deal with a stain on his trousers. ‘Chain her up. Then take your friend to the beach and go keep an eye on our murdering prince.’