Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
I landed on his back and plunged my knife toward his neck. My legs wrapped around his torso and my free hand clung to his leather jerkin.
It was, as the regiment commander called it in my kingdom, certain death.
It couldn’t be foreseen. Couldn’t be deflected. And I couldn’t be wrenched off him fast enough to stop me from delivering just one strike.
One strike was all I needed. If these creatures were anything like humans, I knew exactly where the knife’s tip needed to go—right into the artery on the side of the neck. My knife touched skin, the point piercing his flesh…
Sunlit iron. Monsters’ bane.
And yet, somehow, I found myself dislodged. The world spun, I was thrust in the wrong direction, and I hit the floor so hard my skull would’ve cracked if I hadn’t fallen onto the bearskin.
Motherfuck.
Air hitched in my throat, and my eyes danced as the world swam. I dropped the knife and clutched at my aching chest, panic threatening to overtake me.
This wasn’t it. This wasn’t it at all.
Dorian set his hand to his neck—and paused. His fingers came away red. They bleed. They bleed red. He stared at the blood, then at me, a flicker of genuine surprise passing across his face, brief but unmistakable. “You actually cut me.”
I’d do more than that once I could breathe again. As it was, I struggled to keep his face from swimming in my vision.
“Wind’s knocked out of you,” Dorian said above me, wiping the blood on his pants. “You’ll get a breath in a moment, but it’ll feel like an eternity.”
I know that, I wanted to snap—if only I could breathe to say it. I’d grown up in the southern district; getting the wind knocked out of you was a rite of passage. But that didn’t make it any less shocking.
Meanwhile, my brain wrestled with two realities:
I had executed a perfect attack. Everything about it was correct. I’d stabbed him with sunlit iron.
And yet here I was, once again at Dorian’s feet.
The edge of his lip curled as he watched me writhe with my mouth open. “That’s twice now I’ve spared your life. Not to mention the three days spent in a wagon with your moaning my only company. What’s that count for? A lot, I should think.”
The only thing worse than a monster was one who thought he deserved thanks for not devouring you.
If I had the power to start fires with the heat sparking in my breast, this one would already be aflame.
Finally, finally, my chest unlocked and I sucked in air so loud and hard it hurt almost as bad as being thrown. I sat up, breathing fast, knees to my arms, head down. Times like this, you were reduced to one thought, one feeling—right now that was gratitude for air.
I shook my head, my voice a rasp. “My knife…” Dorian’s eyebrows rose as he waited for me to finish. “It’s sunlit.”
“And?”
He was supposed to be burning or melting or poisoned or anything but what he was doing right now, which was standing in front of me with the tiniest red nick on his neck.
Dorian’s brow lowered. “Oh, you thought…” He let out a breath, head tilting. “Your iron hasn’t been sunlit in four hundred years. That’s just a blunt bit of metal you’ve got.”
I stared, unblinking. He was wrong. Sunlit iron was produced in the northern district, where all metal came from. It was carefully melted under the sun, shaped only during the day, and the weapons laid out for a month before they were sent off.
Dorian turned away, regarding the dresser. “I see you rooted around in the drawers.” He stepped up to it and shut one that sat half-open. “But only managed to dress half your body. There’s a thing called ‘pants,’ you know.”
My eyes dropped to the knife on the floor, looking duller by the minute. If there was proof of sunlit iron being bullshit, it was Dorian harassing me about my clothing with that fucking nick mocking me from beneath his hair. “None of it—none fits.”
A piece of clothing dropped into my view beside me. It was black leather. A pair of boots followed. “I figured as much.”
I eyed the clothing. This was a farce. “Just kill me now and be done with it. If you had a soul you wouldn’t torture me like this.”
“Hmm.” His black boot tapped once, twice on the wood. “The Sylvanwild Court isn’t fond of torture. Now Noctere, on the other hand…”
Finally, I lifted my face to him. I felt exhausted. “Noctere?”
He pointed to the tapestry I’d studied last night. “If you went through the dresser, then I know you stared at the pretty picture.” I hated how he predicted me, how he always guessed right. He tapped the shadowed quadrant. “Noctere. The ones who never left the dark.”
A cold weight settled in my gut. I followed his finger to the darkness on the tapestry, and for the first time, I wondered if there were worse places to end up than this bedchamber.
Then I remembered, like a slap:
They—he—killed your mother.
I snatched at the leather he’d dropped. “If you want me to put this on, you’ll turn and face the hall.”
His eyes held fast on mine. For several beats he didn’t move, until finally he gave an exaggerated turn with his hands clasped chastely in front of him.
My fingers slid toward the pants—and my knife.
“For the love of Irin, put it away,” he said. “Remember what I said? Three times as strong and twice as fast.”
I flinched, gaze darting up to his back. He was still facing away. “How do you do that?”
“I don’t hear you putting on those pants.”
“Fuck the pants—”
“I’d rather not.”
“—how do you do that?”
He didn’t answer. Just stood there, boot tapping.
“Anyway,” I said, “you’re wrong. I was picking it up. It would have been stupid of me to try again now.”
I heard something like a scoff or a chuff from him, but nothing else.
I breathed out and stood with the pants in hand. Unfurled, they looked exactly my size. I’d only met one female—Rhiannon—but she’d been at least half a foot taller than me. I plunged my foot into the first pant leg.
“I do it,” he said, “by listening.”
I paused, half in and half out of the pants. He was answering my question. “You couldn’t have known where my fingers were headed by listening.”
“Those aren’t what I was listening to, rabbit.”
I considered this for a moment. Then I stuck my other leg into the pants.
They were perfect on me, supple and not too tight or loose.
Like they had been crafted for my body. Next I slid on one of the boots, which was dark leather with thick laces and twined with tough bramble-cord.
The insides were pliant and even more remarkably fitted to my feet.
“You’ll need this, too.” Dorian tossed something else over his shoulder—a brown leather belt. I almost didn’t catch it.
“I’d rather use my own.”
“That bloodied, battered thing?”
“Yes.”
“Fine. I don’t care what you use. Just get it on, and fast.”
I grabbed my own belt from the pile of my clothing beside the bed.
I had received this on my first day in training with the guard, and I’d cherished it since.
It wasn’t fine, fat leather like the belt he’d thrown me—it was worn and probably used by someone before me—but it had a sheath for my short sword and a pouch for my knife.
I had practiced with this belt on every day of my time as a trainee and as a guard.
I strapped it on over my tunic. As soon as I did, the weight and position of it sent a tendril of calm through my body. “How did my wounds heal?” I asked him. “When I stepped through that gate last night.”
His shoulders rose and dropped. “The stag wished it.”
The stag. Rhiannon had spoken of a stag last night. “What is the stag?”
“You’ll find out once you’re dressed. May I turn now?”
I crossed toward the door, grabbed up my knife, and replaced it on my belt. “You could always walk away. I don’t think either of us would mind.”
He turned back toward me. He held my gaze for a moment that grew, his dark eyes shifting between mine. “You despise me,” he finally said. No tone, no question—just an observation.
The words were so clear, so unmitigated, so true, I nearly lowered my gaze. I didn’t speak, didn’t nod or shake my head. But my lack of response was clear enough—if he was as observant as he claimed to be, he’d see it in my eyes.
The ghost of a crooked smile appeared. His mouth was the only feature on his face that wasn’t hard, unyielding. “That’s good,” he said. “It’s better than fear. It gives you power.”
Power? He wanted me to have power?
I could have spat. Mostly, I was just fucking bewildered.
My voice came out low, angry. “You’ve locked me up.”
He turned toward the doorway, one hand flicking out toward the unmade bed and bathing chamber. “Looks like you didn’t have the worst time of it.” He nodded to the left, then turned down the hall. “This way.”
We walked the hallway we had passed through last night. At the wide landing at the top of the staircase, I peered over the banister to the central room below. It was empty. No jeering men, no Rhiannon on her throne.
Our footsteps echoed as we passed down the staircase. The room seemed almost bigger, grander, or maybe I felt smaller.
Periodically I stole a look at the man ahead of me. I had tried to kill him, and still he walked with his back to me, like he didn’t fear me at all. And why should he? I’d only embarrassed myself.
Small, fragile…
The old voice slid in like a blade. I had heard it so much throughout my life, it had become a part of me—the part that emerged when shame rose up from my belly and into my chest and heated my neck and cheeks.
I squeezed my eyes shut, pressing the voice away, no matter how much its words resonated. Shame was useless to me.
We came to the double doors we’d entered by last night. Dorian stopped here and swept a hand toward the room at large, his eyes lifting. “This is our citadel.”
I’d never heard of a citadel. But the less he knew of my ignorance, the better. “All of it?”
“Right up to the tip of the spire.”