Chapter 32
TAMSYN
I CAME TO MYSELF SLOWLY, SWIMMING TO THE SURFACE OF awareness, through water that felt thick, viscous as the vapor enveloping the Crags. Except no—I was not in water. Nor did I feel the hug of mist on my skin now. Not here. Wherever here was.
I lifted a leaden hand to my head as if the dull throb there could be assessed, could be felt and measured. I was in no state, however, to assess anything, and I supposed that was its own assessment.
I was in a bad, bad way.
Voices bounced around me, and I tried to pick them out, pluck each word for its own meaning and then line them up together, like beads on a string, into something that made sense.
“She’s coming to,” someone cried.
“Gor, I thought she would be dead from a blow like that.” There were several mutters in response to this. Accord, it sounded like, disapproval even—though the words were not quite distinguishable in my condition.
The world shifted and rearranged around me, jarring and uncomfortable.
Something dug into my stomach. I didn’t know what, but it was enough to alert me that I was belly down …
and upside down, the blood rushing to my head.
I felt sick and pressed my hand to my lips, stif ling the urge to retch.
I opened my eyes to a hazy world of snow and … horses. Soldiers on horses.
Me … on a horse. But not sitting upright. I was draped across the beast like a sack of potatoes.
Then suddenly I was not.
I was grabbed by the hair and flung roughly from the horse’s back to land hard on the ground. The air escaped me in a groaned whoosh. I blinked. Looked up at the crowd of faces staring down at me. My gaze zeroed in on the one.
Stig.
I had not dreamed it possible. It had not been some apparition or cruel trick of my mind.
He was here. Again. How could I be so cursed?
I knew I should be afraid, given the last time I saw him.
He broke my body with unimaginable pain—and the way he looked at me with such hostility right now warned me that he was still bent on destroying me.
I inhaled a careful breath and managed to push up onto my elbows, rubbing the back of my head where he had pulled my hair so viciously. “Stig, how nice to see you again.”
“On that point I agree.” His nostrils flared. “You escaped me before, but it won’t be happening again. Alise is not here to save you.”
“How is my sister?” I asked, angling for time, anything to stall him from hurting me as I knew he could. And it wasn’t an empty question. I did want to know about Alise. The last time I had seen her she had been decidedly unwell.
“She is not your sister,” he snapped.
I shrugged as I got to my feet. “You know we were raised as sisters. It’s not so easy for me to shut off emotions and forget about old bonds.” I narrowed my gaze at him. “Unlike you, I am loyal.”
“You know nothing of loyalty, dragon bitch.”
With another shrug, I asked, “What are you doing out here?”
He smiled then, thin and cruel, the line slashing through his neat beard.
“Why, looking for you, of course. Did not expect it to be so easy, though. We’ve scoured the Crags countless times.
Never expected you to fall into our laps like this.
After your last capture, I assumed you’d go to ground.
Did you enjoy your whipping so very much? Care for a repeat?”
Some of my bravado slipped at the memory of the piske tearing into me.
“Yes, where have you been?” another soldier demanded. Havard, an officer I recognized from the City and one of Stig’s closest friends. He shook his head as though truly marveling at my sudden appearance.
“With my husband,” I said. “Where else?”
Stig paled around the edges of his beard. “Dryhten?”
I nodded. “And I believe he wants a word with you. He’s not too pleased about your actions.”
The soldiers behind Stig broke out in murmurs.
“Settle yourselves!” Stig twisted around to glare at them all. “She lies! Dryhten is dead!”
Havard looked genuinely curious. “And where has he been all this time?”
“His lordship”—I stressed the use of his title—“was taken by raiders. I only just secured his return.” This was the story Fell and I had concocted to explain his long absence.
It was far more plausible than the truth.
I had not worried too much about the details, knowing Fell would be the one to do most of the explaining.
It would be his people wanting answers, after all, and they would be so overjoyed to have him back, they would likely not scrutinize his narrative of events.
And it didn’t matter what Stig thought, as Fell was determined to see him dead.
I didn’t expect that I would be without Fell—or be the one pressed for information—but here I was.
Havard motioned around them. “Where is he now?”
“Damn you,” Stig cursed, glaring at Havard. “She lies! There were no raiders. And there is no Dryhten.”
I blinked and reached deep inside myself for equanimity in the face of his fury. I resisted taking a step back, refusing to show weakness. His deep brown eyes that once brimmed with warmth and affection for me were now all reproach and bitterness.
“Change now, damn it. Show them what you are!”
An overwhelming sense of being here before, doing this, living this moment, washed over me, and I suppressed a tremor, pushing back the swift bite of fear.
I clenched my jaw and spoke loudly enough for all to hear. “I can’t be what I am not.”
He reacted then, hand lashing out to slap me soundly across the face. The action was so unexpected, it snapped my head back on my neck and cost me my balance, toppling me off my feet. Foolish, perhaps, that the blow unmoored me. I should have been ready and braced for it given what I knew of him.
I looked up at Stig, at his seething expression, his relentless gaze. I could not find my breath as I felt myself skinned beneath his hard eyes, all of me stripped bare, exposed to him. He saw me. He knew. And he hated.
He stabbed a finger at me. “You will not do that. Do not lie to me, Tamsyn. I saw you as you really are—a dragon! Admit it.”
“How can I admit such a thing? It’s absurd!”
His face was mottled red, and he shook his head slowly. “It has been lies from the start. I see that now, and I’ll have no more from you.”
Lies from the start? The start of my life in the palace? Was that what he thought? Is that why he was so bitter? So … changed?
I considered the version of myself I had left behind when I married Fell. I could see me now so clearly as I faced Stig. The royal whipping girl, lost and forlorn, searching for her place in the world. So oblivious to her value, so accepting of punishments she did not deserve.
I recognized all that now. I couldn’t before, but now I did.
Now I felt right in my ever-altering skin.
Now I felt right looking Stig squarely in the face and lying. Lying to protect myself and Fell and all of dragonkind. I clambered back to my feet and spoke through clenched teeth: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You continue to make a fool of me.”
You continue to make a fool of me.
I lightly fingered my cheek where I could still feel the sting of his handprint, those words running over and over in my mind. “You don’t need me to do that, Stig.”
He lifted his hand again, but Havard stepped forward and blocked me before Stig could bring it down. Where was Havard the night of my whipping? He would have been nice to have around then.
Stig’s eyes widened, and he swept a wild glance over his soldiers. “You don’t know what she is!” In a lower voice, he growled at Havard, “She’s a monster. She changed to a dragon right before my eyes. You must believe me. Dryhten was there. He saw, too.”
“Then when he arrives, we shall ask him,” Havard said evenly. “You idiot! He’s not coming.” Stig’s eyes shot back to me. “She likely killed him, fiend that she is! Did you?” This he shouted at me. “Did you kill your husband, Tamsyn?”
I shook my head. “No! Of course not!”
Havard’s eyes brimmed with sadness as he looked at his longtime friend, and I could only think this helped my defense in the eyes of these soldiers.
The more unhinged Stig looked, the better. Fell’s appearance alone would do much to undermine him, and when Fell challenged Stig, it would seem logical—the honorable thing to do after Stig had abused me. Fell was simply protecting his wife.
“Stig,” Havard murmured, just his name softly spoken. No more than that. As though that were enough to call him back to himself. If only it was.
If only saying his name would break the horrible spell trapping him and bring back my childhood friend, the man who had claimed to love me … the man who, once upon a time, I had contemplated loving back.
Stig lifted his hand to strike me again, his eyes wild and bloodshot.
I held my ground and forced myself not to flinch.
After a moment, Stig’s hand lowered, arm falling listlessly to his side. His eyes appeared darker than I remembered, the light from them gone as he looked at me. Finally, he moved. Clearing his throat, he gave a single nod, as though indicating to Havard that he was now composed.
Stepping around his friend, Stig reached for my arm and clasped it, leading me away. I went. No sense fighting. Fell would join us soon. I knew he lived. He’d survived the harpies. I could still feel him alive and breathing in me. He would find me wherever I was.
I glanced over my shoulder in the direction I’d come, as though expecting to see Fell and Magnus emerge and put a stop to all of this. Another glance at the trees.
“In there with you.” Stig shoved me roughly toward a wagon I had not noticed before, but now I looked at it … and the large cage that occupied its frame.
“In there?” I queried, my throat tightening at the sight of the cage with its chalky-white bars. I peered closer at the strange contraption, noting the lack of uniformity in the bars. No two were alike. They almost resembled—
“Dragon bone,” I breathed, dread sliding through me.
A cage of dragon bone. There would be no slipping away under cover of night.
No escaping from this.
What if Fell did not come? What if something had happened to him? Not death, but something else to keep him from me.
I surged against Stig’s hold, trying to break free. I backed away warily, feeling myself going cold, the heat within me banked, my heart cracking like a great block of ice as I faced that cage.
“Please,” I murmured. “Don’t put me in there.” A box, much like Fell’s prison, from which I could never break free. He could keep me there forever if he liked, and the monster he had become would do just that.
I pressed a hand to my aching chest, to the heart galloping within.
With a brutal squeeze of my arm, he gave me a shake hard enough to rattle my teeth.
“You don’t like that, do you, hmm?” His eyes gleamed with satisfaction, and he nodded with a cruel twist of his lips, his mouth hot against my ear.
“That’s because you’re a dragon.” I marveled that he had once kissed me with those lips.
That he had wanted to—and that I had permitted it, liked it even.
“I had it crafted especially for you. For when I found you. I knew I would. I knew you were not dead.” He frowned slightly and leaned forward to hiss into my ear.
“Did you burn Dryhten with your fire or eat him?”
I gasped. Was he serious? Did he not recollect that Fell had saved me from him that day in the woods? Why would I have killed him? Did he think that even as a dragon I lacked any sense of loyalty or conscience?
“Why would I kill my husband?” I boldly flung this in his face, my fear manifesting into a need to antagonize him. Then, knowing how these words would anger him, I added, “I love him. The Lord of the Borderlands is the best man I know.”
Stig’s nostrils flared. “I am Lord of the Borderlands now,” he growled, his white teeth flashing amid his close-cropped beard.
“The north is mine now. The Borg is mine, your sweet Alise is mine, and you, you …” He looked me up and down, and for a moment there was something deep and needy in the brown depths.
Just a flash of how he had once looked at me.
It was like a window into a past you missed and mourned and could never get back.
A trick of the light. No more. In a blink, it was gone.
His eyes went back to being cesspools of hate.
“You,” he continued, “shall confess.”
Confess. Such a dirty word on his lips, in this context. As though I was guilty of a crime. And in his eyes, I was. My mere existence was a crime. An abomination. I no longer possessed a soul at all.
I was forced into the cage. It was a tight fit, impossible to stand or stretch my body out within. Several of the soldiers sent me pitying looks.
Lifting my chin, I tried to hold on to the fleeting scraps of my dignity as the wagon started rolling along the bumpy ground.
I grasped the bars—the bones of my brethren.
The echoes of their strength pulsed through me.
I looked out at the press of woods surrounding me.
It lived and breathed around us, and I understood better than these soldiers just how alive it was, that it possessed teeth ready to sink and tear and devour.
The distant mountains of the Crags rose up along one side of the woods, beckoning with both a sense of security and a threat as we progressed at a steady pace.
That was the dual nature of the Crags. It was a beautifully dangerous place riddled with wild and deadly things.
My heart thudded heavily in my aching chest.
I rubbed at the X in my palm, feeling the whisper of Fell there, and it was a comfort. He was still out there. Not dead. Close by.
Perhaps even closer than I realized.
The trees to our right stirred, leaves rustling from sudden movement.
The soldiers heard the noise, too. They shouted and turned, taking position facing the tree line and this possible threat, drawing their rapiers in a hissing song.
My grip tightened around my bone bars as I strained forward.
No one breathed. No one moved. Even the trees stopped rustling. All eyes stared straight ahead without blinking.
A great breath escaped me as Fell stepped from the woods.