Chapter 10
TAMSYN
STIG APPEARED AT MY SIDE. “COMFORTABLE?”
I did not satisfy him with a reply, but that did not keep my breath from shuddering out past my lips, rasping against the tree where my cheek pressed.
“You know,” he continued in a far too casual tone, “you don’t have to go through this. Admit the truth. Show yourself,” he coaxed with a silken tongue. “Tell me if there are others and I can spare you the pain. I’ll make it quick. You won’t suffer.”
I’ll make it quick. You won’t suffer. But his meaning was unmistakable. You will die. This day. That was inevitable. He would kill me.
The only question was how much I would suffer first.
“You’re not unhinged,” I said with a crack of a smile, contradicting my earlier statement. “You’re just evil.” Somehow I had never seen this, but I was seeing it now.
“The only thing evil is you.” He nodded at me, a feverish light flooding his eyes. “You and your kind.” He stepped back from me, then and called out, “Bring me the flog.”
A collective murmur rolled through the growing crowd. Bodies pressed tighter around us, blotting out the light from the surrounding campfires.
Darkness shrouded us, the air turning colder, my hot breath gusting past my lips.
Suddenly Alise’s shrill voice rose up on the night. Evidently, she had not obeyed the order to remain in the tent.
“Stig! No!” I couldn’t look behind me to see her, but the sound of her voice was closer now. “You cannot do this to her. Not to Tamsyn!”
There was a sound of rushing feet and then Alise’s swift sob, and I imagined Stig had gotten in her way, stopping her from reaching me.
“She’s an abomination. I am your husband. You were given to me, Alise. Place your trust in me. I know what I am doing.”
A hush fell. Tense and strained. It leaned forward, waiting and watching for what was next.
I twisted my neck, trying to look behind me. “Go! Just go, Alise,” I called, my voice breaking but no less determined.
“No, Tamsyn, I can’t let—”
Stig’s deep voice overrode hers, harsher than I had ever heard him speak to her. “Enough of this, Alise. I am your lord husband. You will obey! You will go back to the tent, and do not come out until morning.”
Silence descended, dropped like a blanket over the evening.
I listened to the air, cold and thin, hearing the things that throbbed beneath its shallow surface—the quick, ragged breaths and even quicker heartbeats.
Alise’s heartbeat. I picked it out, detected it among the rest of them, for hers was the fastest, as wild as the wings of a hummingbird, panicked and terrified. Afraid for me.
Stig addressed the maid then, instructing that Alise be kept in the tent, restrained if necessary. Footsteps crunched over the ground again, mingling with her soft tears, and I knew she was leaving.
Moments passed, and I imagined Stig was waiting, making certain she was well out of range.
Then he spoke, repeating, demanding: “Flog?”
I was faced with the knowledge that I was about to be beaten as I never had been before. What would happen then? My fear went beyond fear for myself. Would my dragon surface involuntarily like the day when Arkin tried to kill me? I couldn’t let that happen.
But what if you cannot stop yourself?
I twisted and strained my neck at an uncomfortable angle, glimpsing a solider handing off a whip to Stig.
I narrowed my eyes on it. Something about it was …
different, and I had seen all manner of whips in my day.
The shape of this one, the color … It was unlike anything that had been used upon me in the palace, and that told me that it was worse.
More damage-inflicting. This night was about making me suffer, after all. It was about pain.
It was about dying.
A sob scalded the back of my throat.
Stig tested its weight, examining it in his hand.
The tightly woven leather grip sprouted into a half dozen strips. He slapped them against his palm experimentally. “Have you ever seen a whip like this?”
I shook my head even as I pulled against my bindings. It was useless. My arms were tied to a tree with rope. Impossible-to-break rope. That same rope dug into my wrists until my fingers ached and went numb, incapable of movement.
“It’s called a piske. I found it in the palace dungeon.
” Of course. Among all the other relics used to defeat and destroy dragons back in the Threshing.
My dread sank lower, twisting deeper inside me.
That meant this was a whip especially designed to hurt dragons.
There would be no quick healing. No speedy recovery.
“They do quite a bit of damage to your kind.” For once, his flat brown eyes gleamed with life.
I swallowed. He was enjoying this.
“Who even are you?” I whispered, wondering how I could have been so wrong—about everything.
He looked down at me, and beneath the dark fury in his expression, beneath the storm that had been rolling in his eyes from the moment we had reunited, he rasped back at me, “Who even are you?”
That was when I understood. When I realized he felt the same way I did. Wronged. Betrayed. And there was nothing I could do to change that … to get him to stop looking at me with hate, to calm the storm in his eyes.
There were minds and hearts that could never be changed in this life no matter what was done or said.
His attention returned to the whip in his hand. He let the multiple strips of lustrous dragon hide slide slowly against his palm, stopping when he reached the ends, seizing them. It was then I noticed something glinted there.
“See these?” He gripped one of the arrow-shaped discs and held it up to me. “These are made from dragon scales.”
I exhaled a jagged breath.
“It’s going to shred you to ribbons,” he proclaimed with immense satisfaction.
I wouldn’t easily recover. Perhaps I never would … but then, that was his intent.
I sucked in a sizzling breath. One thing was for certain … I would bleed. My dragon blood would be on full display, for I had not perfected the art of bytte.
I scanned the night air, gauging its darkness, its ability to conceal. Would the deep purple be discernible in the night?
Maybe I could control my blood this time.
Maybe I could do the thing that had remained the most challenging to me this past year. I choked back a sob. Who was I fooling?
His voice scraped against my skin. “Your blood will flow like a river.”
And I knew he was right.
His eyes glinted with delight. He remembered.
That day in the woods with Fell, I had shown Stig my purple blood to prove I was a dragon. Of course he would remember that. He was counting on my blood to once again be the final evidence, the proof he needed to redeem himself in front of his entire regiment.
He moved away from the tree, from me, calling to his soldiers: “Keep your weapons at the ready. Archers, too! She could turn at any moment. Be prepared!”
My mind raced, fast as the molten blood pumping in my veins.
The dragon blood. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut, willing myself to calm, to ease, to resist the dragon buried within me.
During training, they’d said the easiest way to control your blood was to control your dragon, to carefully curb all dragon tendencies to keep your blood as red as any human’s.
I strained my eyes, glancing wildly around me, seeing what I could in my limited range of sight.
I had to escape. Despair washed over me. Suddenly the lives of three soldiers seemed a paltry sacrifice. It was what Vetr had been trying to instill in me all along.
Save yourself.
Save the species.
Leave no witnesses.
I understood that finally—more than ever. I had not saved myself and now all dragonkind was in peril.
I must not turn. No matter what befell me.
Either my blood stayed hidden in my veins, safely tucked beneath my skin, or it did not spill at all. I did not think the latter much of a possibility.
Stig released a loud practice crack, and I flinched violently.
I considered accepting my death—doing something drastic, saying something to compel a soldier to charge me, to invite the thrust of dragon bone deep within me.
Even if I could think of something to provoke such an attack, I would then be dead. I would be gone, but my body would still remain. What was to stop Stig from carving me up? From searching for the evidence in my corpse—evidence he would find.
Think, think, think.
I could see it all so plainly, playing out before me as clear as a sunny day.
The discovery of me, my truth, would lead to an invasion into the Crags.
Armies from Penterra and Veturland and Acton beyond the Dark Channel would march into those frozen mountains, deep into the mist, into the ancient caves and winding tunnels to find my brethren.
They would leave no hollow or den unexplored.
The pride would be found. Dragons would be flushed out.
It would be the Threshing all over again, except this time it would be the end.
Dragons would be done. There would be no miraculous salvation, no evolutionary trick the result of a witch’s spell.
It would be complete annihilation. An era of darkness, an inescapable shadow.
And any human suspected of being a dragon? It would be like the witch hunts all over again. Anyone under the slightest cloud of suspicion would be put to the sword.
I blinked, and the vision vanished like a bubble bursting, but no less felt, no less true. Such would come to pass. I knew this … unless I stopped it.
A breeze stirred my hair across my cheek like skimming fingertips, barely there, so soft, and I realized that my thick braid had fallen from its coronet around my head to trail down my back in a sloppy rope.
The three days of hard travel had not been conducive to normal grooming.
In a typical morning, I brushed out my hair, rebraided it, and pinned it up.
But nothing had been typical since I’d left the pride.