Chapter 33 Toran
Toran
Toran woke in the middle of the night.
He hadn’t been asleep. But he hadn’t been awake, either. He sat under the windowsill in his bedroom in the Siren’s Hair, his mind too preoccupied with thoughts of Nes and Loriana to notice the time passing him by.
Hand braced on the windowsill, he stood on shaky legs.
From what he could see, no lanterns were lit. No light to be seen in the streets. Nes should be asleep by now.
He sucked in a heavy breath. His chest was tight, and behind his lids, his eyes stung from exhaustion.
He rubbed them. He shouldn’t have told her about his feelings for Loriana.
Whatever there had been between them, he’d screwed it up.
Though he couldn’t help but wonder if he and Nes had always been destined for ruin.
He wished he could talk to Quint. He needed a friend. But Quint was all the way on the other side of the city in the guards’ barracks.
So he was left to his thoughts. A dangerous thing on any occasion.
He crossed to the window on the opposite wall and blinked down at the dark street.
It was, for the most part, empty. Stalls were boarded up, tarps draped over tables while flags hung limp over doorways.
A few figures crouched in alcoves or under window ledges, huddled in on themselves.
He didn’t know if they were asleep or dead.
He did want to help these people. Of that he’d been honest.
A sound floated up the staircase and down the hall to his open door.
Someone downstairs was awake. He crossed the room to the doorway and stuck his head out, listening for movement.
It came again, softer this time. It could be anything.
Someone searching for a midnight snack or a wanderer trying to get out of the cold.
But something inside urged him to investigate.
He headed downstairs, avoiding the creaky steps. On the first floor, his eyes honed in on the empty tables and stools. The front door looked shut tight. When he faced the bar on the far wall, he halted.
There was the still form of Nes, stretched out on top of the bar, and Fell crouched over her. Fell was whispering something in her ear and had…
That was a knife he pressed to her throat.
His heart seized. “Nes!”
Fell’s head snapped toward his voice, and Toran watched as Nes took advantage of the distraction to knee Fell in the balls. The captain winced but didn’t roll off her. Fell leaned forward and slid his knife along Nes’s exposed throat.
Even in the dark, Toran saw the blood. Black in the night, it rolled out onto the blade, hiding the shine of silver, and began to coat Nes’s neck like thick dew.
He raced forward, but he was too slow. He could do nothing as he watched Nes punch Fell squarely in the jaw then kick him off her. The knife flew from Fell’s hand, skittering across the floor toward Toran. Nes wiped her sleeve against her neck and advanced on Fell.
There were two things Toran could see clearly—how Nes’s hand shook and the fear falling over Fell’s features. He’d never seen such a look on the older captain. All at once, it was deeply satisfying and horribly terrifying.
Toran picked up the knife.
Terror still wide in Fell’s eyes, the captain launched himself at Nes, tackling her to the ground. He wrapped his hands around her bloodied neck. His muscles strained as he tried to squeeze the life out of her. She fought him, but it was clear to Toran she wouldn’t win.
He rushed for her. He didn’t know what he was doing until the knife was buried deep in Fell’s back.
Captain Fell grunted and gurgled, blood spilling from his lips. Knife still in his back, Fell collapsed on top of Nes. She scampered out from under him, her feet sliding against the floor in her haste to get away.
She gasped, ragged and wet, and when Fell did not, Toran knew the man was dead. His eyes warred with him, unable to choose who to stare at: Nes or Fell’s body.
At last, he honed in on Nes, on the neck she was wiping clean with the back of her sleeve. He recalled the way the knife had glinted then dimmed as Fell slashed her throat. He lurched forward, cursing.
“Are you all right?” he asked, reaching for her.
She nodded, her hands wrapping around her neck like a scarf. He tried to pry her fingers away, but they wouldn’t budge.
“He cut you,” he whispered, not sure if Nes was listening to him. “Let me see.”
“I’m fine.”
“You might need stitches.”
She yanked away, out of reach. “I said I’m fine, Toran.”
He sank back on his haunches, fingers curling inward. He blinked. A flash of silver. Dark blood. He couldn’t see it anymore—not on her neck—but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. The smell of it singed the air, like the spark of a flame on a matchstick.
“I need to see the wound.”
“I’m fine.”
“For magic’s end, Nes! I just killed a man. A captain. My equal! And I will not have two dead bodies on this floor, so show me your damned neck!”
In her gaze, he saw a sort of pleading. It made a piece of his heart pool and puddle, but on this, he would not give in. He would not have her bleed out and die.
Slowly, Nes let her hands fall away from her throat.
He sucked in a tight breath.
The moon, the sliver that it was, chose that moment to emerge from behind a cloud and shine through the gambling den’s front windows.
In its light, the skin on Nes’s throat shone like a pearl.
It was smooth and specked with her usual freckles, and but for some smudges under her chin, free of any blood.
The wound on her neck was barely deeper than a scratch.
“Fell c-cut you. It was deep.” He hated how his voice shook, but his mind couldn’t make sense of the memories in his head and the evidence in front of him.
His fingers hovered in the space between them, reaching for the gaping wound—so clear in his mind—and trying to reconcile it with the thin cut that was before him. “Sliced your neck open.”
Nes leaned away from him. She shook her head, a slow, pendulum-like rhythm. “It’s just a surface wound. I managed to hold the blade back.”
“There was blood everywhere.”
Except, even as he glanced down to prove his words, he saw the floorboards, bathed in the blood leaking from Fell’s body. He couldn’t distinguish her blood from his.
She had bled. He was sure of it. And yet, miraculously, it hadn’t been enough to kill.
But he knew, perhaps better than most, their world was not one of miracles.
He turned his back to her and tried to keep his fingers from curling around the hilt of his sword.
At his feet, Fell’s corpse was a shadow, as if even the moon couldn’t bear to see the monstrosity of his actions.
It wasn’t his first kill. But it was the first time he’d killed a fellow guard.
And now he saw exactly how wrong he’d been.
Aeos wasn’t his fault. Never had been.
He hadn’t plunged a blade into Kai’s back. He hadn’t killed Malia or Bastian or Safie, either. Their deaths weren’t on him. But Fell’s was.
He could still feel the hilt of the knife in his palm, feel the resistance as the blade struck bone first before sliding under and through to Fell’s heart.
He’d felt Fell’s very pulse leave him, travel up the metal, and shake Toran’s veins.
As if the other captain had been so desperate to hold on to life, any life, he’d tried to take Toran’s.
He shuddered. Blood swirled the air with his every inhale.
“Toran?”
Slowly, he turned. “We have to get rid of the body,” he said, eyes everywhere but her throat. She’d covered it again, pulling her cloak tight so she looked like a head floating over a whisper of blue cloth.
He moved first, pulling the knife from Fell’s back.
Wiping it on his cloak, he stowed it at his hip beside Cavallis.
Then he wrapped his arms under Fell’s shoulders.
He didn’t bother to turn the body over. He didn’t think he could handle seeing the shock frozen on Fell’s face.
Already, he knew the feel of Fell’s heart beating against the knife would haunt his dreams.
“Grab the legs,” he told Nes.
She moved quickly, almost easily, and it unsettled him. He wasn’t sure how he’d expected her to react, but it wasn’t like this—like she was used to moving corpses.
He’d been either a guard or training to be one for as long as he could remember. He’d killed a total of eight people, including Fell, and had watched at least a dozen others die. But he would never get used to the sight of death. That Nes somehow had…It both scared him and made him pity her.
Together they lifted the body and hefted it into the kitchen. Fell was surprisingly light. As if the heaviest thing about the man had been his ego, and now that he was dead, it had deflated, leaving him beyond recognition.
Throwing open the back door, they shoved their way into the dumpstreet behind the Siren’s Hair and let go. The body dropped between a broken crate and several large trash bags.
Nes began throwing random scraps of trash on top in an effort to hide the body. He watched as Embley Fell was lost to the mass of filth and decay. So many years of torment, so many scathing looks and prickling jabs, all over in an instant.
Beside him, Nes straightened and hugged herself, her whole body shivering in the cold.
“No one can know,” he whispered.
The punishment for killing a fellow guard was exile or death. But to the best of his knowledge, such a crime hadn’t been recorded in more than a hundred years. And a Crown had certainly never been involved.
Toran had thought he didn’t care—about his position or his country.
Like he had so many times before, Fell now threatened to take it all away.
Leave it to Fell to make his last act one that could thwart Toran’s happiness.
For he’d been wrong, he did care. About protecting his country.
About being Prince Kohen’s Crown and fulfilling the King’s mission.
In exile or death, he wouldn’t be able to do either one.
And he realized neither of them could speak about tonight.
Not if they wanted to capture Damari. For he had just given Damari what she wanted most—Fell dead.
If she learned the man she was after was already dead, he doubted she would stay in the city.
She’d escape the first chance she got, disappearing onto their vast continent.
Just as Nes had said: If she were the Witch, she’d hide.
He rubbed the back of his neck, fingers pressing down on the symbol still marring his skin.
Nes didn’t look at him. Only continued to stare out at the night. For a second, she seemed to blend with it all, her body woven into the dark instead of standing out under the moon. “I won’t tell anyone.”
They stood like that, side by side, for a long while. The wind the only one speaking, the cold the only one answering. Until the sky slowly started spitting rain.
At last, he said, “You know how to keep a secret.”
It was a question, and yet it wasn’t. A statement riddled with suspicion.
He glanced over at her. The wind tugged at her hair, whipping it across her face. Strands threaded through her long eyelashes. She didn’t answer him. Which was just as well. Any answer would have been a lie. But in her silence, he felt the truth.
She knew how to keep a secret. Knew well. Nes had been keeping secrets her whole life.
And he had just killed a man to help her protect them.