Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
I woke to rain pelting my face. Cold rain, stinging rain—acid rain?
My eyes opened, round as coins, to a gunmetal sky. Big pellets of rain slapped my cheeks and forehead. The instinct overtook me to move, to take cover, but my limbs were heavy as iron. I lay prone, and beneath me the world jostled over and over without proper rhythm.
Where was I?
I turned my head, and a rogue wave of pain and dizziness nauseated me.
I swallowed and swallowed against the acid in my throat until it receded.
Now it came back to me: I’d taken a blow to the temple, been struck by the pommel of a sword.
Then, in a flash, I saw the rest of it in reverse—the crater, the mad rush through the city, Isa crushed, the wall exploding.
We’d been attacked.
We’d been slaughtered.
Monsters.
But I was alive, and my brain had been left at least partly intact. As for my body—I couldn’t even lift my hand to check if my skull was fractured; both arms were weighed down.
The rain went on hitting my face, and my eyes opened again.
This time I didn’t move my head, only my eyes.
To my left and right rose the wood frame of a wagon, which meant I lay in the back of it.
A horse’s hooves clopped on the earth. Above me there was no green hue in the sky, which meant no acid rain.
This was real, pure rain.
But that was so rare, I’d only seen a real rainstorm once in my life. It had been the greatest event of my childhood; people had danced in throngs on the cobblestones. What were the chances it would come again now?
I let out a strained breath. Had I been rescued? Had the guard come for me? Maybe I was being taken to the inner wall. Maybe a god had taken pity and blessed us—
Above my head, from the wagon’s seat, a voice said, “There’s the rabbit coming round.”
Dread settled in me like sediment.
I knew that voice. I’d heard it once, which was more than I ever wanted to hear it at all. Never, never again.
Against every instinct I shifted my eyes up, tilting my head to catch an upside-down view of the wagon’s seat. There, above me, sat a raven-haired figure with leather reins in hand. A man. He wore an ebony cloak with strange, entwined patterns inlaid in forest-green thread.
His face half-turned toward me, one hazel eye catching mine. “Wasn’t certain you’d ever wake.”
My lips parted. My voice came out as a rasp. “You…”
“Yes?”
“You domed me.”
A beat of silence as the rain fell, and then he burst into a carrying laugh. “Did I? Memory’s a funny thing.”
My teeth had begun to chatter. One of his hands came around, veined and large, and he drew a brown tarp over the bed of the wagon. The rain pattered against the tarp above me instead of my body. Meanwhile, I shivered; I’d never been so cold.
It wasn’t the wetness or the rain. It was everything else.
My people had been attacked. The southern wall was destroyed. My best friends and mother were dead. Isa the nurse had been crushed. My neighborhood was a crater. And now—now I was with the creature who’d pommeled me in the temple with his sword.
Then Vaelen had seen fit to make it rain—really rain—for the second time in my life. Somehow that felt like a greater injustice than everything that had come before.
The wagon rolled on, jostled by the rutted road. Neither of us spoke again, but questions revolved in my head. Where were we going? Who was my captor? Most of all: How to escape?
Escape, escape, escape. A part of my brain had been humming that word from the moment I’d seen that hazel eye gazing down at me from the wagon’s seat. I knew he was one of them—the reason we’d built the walls. The reason we couldn’t venture outside. The reason I’d become a guard.
Last night he’d loomed large, a wraith of shadow. But in daylight he appeared almost human. Almost.
My mother was right. Monsters weren’t from nursery rhymes or fables or fairy tales—the tales were of this thing sitting above me. No doubt she had seen one of these creatures brought into the city so many years before. Black-veined, she’d said, though I didn’t see that on his hands now.
And now she was dead because of them.
With that thought, it felt as though the gods held a quill over my head.
The tip swelled with ink until one black droplet fell directly onto my crown, and a feeling I’d never experienced before spread over me.
My heart began thumping, the blood rushed in my ears, and I clenched my jaw so tight I could have broken my own teeth.
What was this feeling?
A single word came.
Rage. It was rage.
Once I had the word for it, I knew the feeling like I’d experienced it my whole life. It was tearing, gnashing, shredding, murderous. My fingers clenched, and my body’s shivering became shaking.
I wanted to end someone. I wanted to destroy him—them—all of them who’d killed my family.
It was just to find the right time.
As I shivered, I became aware that my body was weighed down by the tarp, laden with rain. That was why my limbs felt heavy. I turned my wrists side to side and found them unbound; same with my feet. All it would take to escape was to lift this tarp and roll out the back of the wagon.
“I wouldn’t try that.” His voice cut low, less accommodating than before, crystalline in my ears even through the pelting rain. “You’ll be dead the second your feet touch earth.”
I stared into the semidarkness, shock flaring through me. The horse’s hooves clopped on. Steady. The wagon rolled. Steady. The rage thundered in me like it belonged to itself.
How had he known—
“Best save your energy,” he said.
“For what?” I said in my hoarse rasp.
“For Feyreign, rabbit.” He paused, and the rain seemed to pound harder. “Soon enough you’ll get your chance to run.”
I didn’t try to escape. Even if I had, I wouldn’t have been able to lift my arms or legs; with so much water, the tarp must have weighed more than me.
I felt wild, like an animal.
In my life I’d only ever seen wild animals from atop the walls. All our meat came from farms in the inner districts—pork and chicken and veal, though all were so heavily rationed to the outer districts that I barely knew their taste.
We had words for the animals we saw beyond the walls. As a girl I had learned them: bears and wolves and rabbits.
Rabbit. That was what my captor had called me.
The rain poured and I saw a rabbit in my mind’s eye. Small, earth-colored, long, weedy ears. They ran at any sound, even the far-off changing of the guard on the walls.
Rabbits were quick. Rabbits were prey.
The world around me gradually darkened over the next hours.
Nighttime had fallen. The rain tapered, and the wagon veered at a thoughtful angle.
Soon we came to a stop, and my body thrummed with the memory of the past eight or ten or twelve hours.
I didn’t know how long we’d been traveling.
I didn’t know how long I’d slept before I’d woken.
The wagon creaked and boots hit the ground.
They passed over grass, and then the tarp was thrown off the bed.
Water sloshed onto the ground. Cold air rushed over my face and a tree-fringed, moody night sky offered itself to my eyes.
The clouds were low and fat, but the fingernail moon still made itself faintly visible.
The wagon’s boards jerked beneath me, and dizzy anger spiked as he climbed into the bed and stood over me, his hair a shroud over a shadowed face.
I stared up at him. I wouldn’t be the first to speak.
“Can you walk?” he said.
I gave a single, careful nod.
“We’ll see.” He lifted a blanket I didn’t know lay atop me and flung it off my body. Cold swept in like a greedy scavenger, seeking out every warm part of me. “Get up.”
I felt almost fearful to try. I pressed my palms flat on the wagon’s bed, and first lifted my head. The dizziness struck me, then pain, and I wavered there as the treetops veered sickeningly to the left. Acid rose to my mouth.
No, no—
Before I could stop it, I rolled onto my side and dry heaved. Nothing came up, but the sudden motion made everything worse. I heaved again and again into the wagon, choking on nothing but bile.
A hand touched my shoulder, fingers looking to grip there, and I threw him off with a snarl. “Don’t you touch me,” I rasped in a voice I didn’t recognize.
He let out a noise like a scoff or a chuckle, then dropped back down to the ground. He passed around the front of the wagon and soon I heard the sounds of the bit and bridle being removed from the horse’s head. Two seconds later, the sound of a fat slap made me flinch.
The horse’s hooves sounded down the path and into the grass. He’d freed it, sent it away. Why?
It’s not his horse. It belonged to us, to my kingdom.
I lifted my head and the dizziness intensified at my movement, but I got on my hands and knees and stared at a whorl in the wagon’s wood bed. Familiar wood, sallow and prone to splintering. This isn’t his wagon, either.
He climbed back in. The wagon wobbled, and so did my vision. “You could crawl there, but your leathers would be shredded at the knees before—”
“Give me a second.” My voice was thick and sickly.
I forced my eyes to fix on the whorl until the world stopped moving and I could swallow the acid back. As I knelt there, I thought of Isa and her last words to me. Never trust a man, especially not outside the walls.
Though I didn’t know if I could even call the creature standing above me a man. He had the vague look of one now, but even a bear could stand upright.
I didn’t care how much it hurt or how hard I heaved—I wouldn’t let him touch me.
After a minute, I took a deep, quick breath. The whorl in the wood had gone still and my stomach had steadied. I jerked one foot forward, planting my boot under me. That was when I realized I still had my boots on, and my leathers. At least I’d been left that dignity.
Better to do this fast. I pushed off my hands, wedged my other foot under me, and rose. The world threatened to go topsy-turvy all over again and my temple throbbed so fiercely, I had to clamp my eyes shut.
Don’t fall. Don’t fall. That was my only wish, to not fall over.
I forced my eyes open and turned, slowly, to face him. My gaze lifted.
He hadn’t moved; he stared at me from the other side of the wagon’s bed, not as tall as I remembered him from the southern district. Now, under this pale moonlight, he didn’t swim with shadows.
He also didn’t look like a bear standing upright.
He looked halfway like a man. But something dark and strange haunted those features, hardly visible but pronounced at the edges, like his face had been cut from tempered glass pieced together with odd parts.
His mouth curved down at one side and his nose bore a knot on the ridge like it had once been broken and reset.
His cheekbones were almost too prominent in this light, his jaw too sharp.
He might have been five and twenty, but those eyes… they didn’t have a young man’s light.
“Well,” he said, “this feels familiar.”
And it did. We stood as we had on the night of the attack, facing one another. Except this time neither of us held a blade. If he wore one, it was hidden under his cloak. I saw no belt.
My lips twisted with the effort to keep me from swaying. Even so, my fingers itched to reach for my belt, to find the grip of my sword.
His eyes narrowed. “You dropped your sword when you fell. The knife’s still there, though. You want to try? Here I am.”
I wanted to. I envisioned what the fight might look like: I’d reach around, unsheath my sunlit knife, and by that time… No, it was a fool’s plan. I’d be dizzy and retching before I could even get one stab in.
My fingers stopped moving.
He gave a nod. “Wise. Start walking.”
The wagon rocked as he dropped out, cloak rising in a gust before the dark swallowed him.
Alone. He’d left me here. Some kind of trick.
My breath quickened. My eyes began to search—
“You can try, rabbit,” his voice called out from the darkness. “You can try.”
That voice felt like a leash. It wrapped around my neck and tugged, and I knew even in this darkness escape would be hopeless.
I didn’t have the first fucking idea where I was. And he knew as much.
One careful step at a time, I climbed out of the wagon until my feet finally touched damp earth. The rain had become the faintest spray, and it blew speckles into my face as I followed the sound of his footsteps into the dark.