38. Maren
Maren
Brido coughed.
Emilius still held only my hand, and we watched as Brido barked a gasp low in his throat, as though he’d inhaled dust or flakes of pepper. I pulled away, and Emilius’s grip closed like a vice, the sharp jolt of pain flying to my elbow.
“Let go of me,” I hissed. But the King wasn’t looking at me.
He was still absorbed in the footman, who had taken a long, shaking breath and began coughing again.
Brido gulped, his hand flying to his mouth, eyes unfocused like he was alone in the dark.
He took a step and fell to one knee, rasping and rattling.
“No,” the man moaned, fingers splayed between the long fibers of the carpet. “No!” Black liquid dripped from his mouth as he said it, from his nose and eyes a moment later, heavy and viscous like sludge or oil, until it flowed thick enough to drown out his voice.
I gritted my teeth, knowing Emilius waited for my reaction. “You’re killing him.”
Emilius didn’t blink. “Indeed.”
I’d hoped to avoid singing, but I didn’t enjoy watching innocent men die, especially one with young children. Mouth parted, I sang a whispered tune, not wishing to incant Kye all the way across the King’s quarters and through that stupid, monstrous door.
Emilius yanked my arm, forcing me to face him. The cool humor laced across his mouth eroded into something dark. “Lady Selena used to do that to me. Long ago. I suggest you don’t.”
My eyes widened as I stared at him in shock. I’d always assumed Thaan incanted the King to control him. Could I not?
He smiled as if he understood, pulling me into his side and angling my head back toward the footman.
The man sputtered and spat. He began to crawl, belly flat against the floor, but with no sense of the room he simply curled into the wall and writhed like a fountain of tar.
Until he lay completely still, eyes wide and unmoving.
Black liquid covered his chin and chest, staining his skin like blood, his hair a dark, stringy tributary over his motionless face.
My fingers curled into my palm, revulsion thick in my belly. “I suppose you killed your own servant to impress me?”
From the corner of my eye, Emilius’s mouth curved. “Right now, off the western coast of Leihani, nine of my armada sit poised to launch their trebuchets at the great lord of the island’s estate: a little dirt-soaked shack housing one little fisherman who eats, sleeps, and breathes all alone.”
“You dare—” I wrenched out of his grasp, stealing a step away from him, the corner of the table a blunt stab against my hip.
I’d spent the last few minutes tempering disgust and annoyance, but rage leapt against my walls like climbing fire, slamming flame and light and reckless heat from the depths of my chest. “Touch my islands and it will be the last thing you do.”
Emilius didn’t chase me. His voice lowered, calm and controlled, though something vibrated within it, a monster lurking beneath a still surface.
He leaned forward. “There were, for a brief few weeks before you married Nikolaos, reports that you were a witch. Let’s not pretend he’d marry so far beneath him out of affection.
Out of love. So let me say this once and let me say this very clearly. ”
He licked his shiny lips. “If anything happens to me, Thaan will give the order, and your father will be buried under a river of iron so deep and fast he’ll never even miss the light as it extinguishes from above.”
My vision vibrated like waves of heat over burning sand, the room torched with the color red. A vein pulsed angrily in my forehead, aching under the sudden rush of blood, the bitter tang of silver washing over my tongue.
Emilius stepped closer. “You will go to Leihani, and you will convince no less than one thousand islanders to join my armies.”
I bared my teeth at him, thoroughly finished with the one meal I’d ever share with the King of Calder. “Convince your own people.” The table lurched as I shoved myself away from it.
“Open that door”—Emilius’s voice followed me across the room—“and I’ll kill him.”
My hand had already landed on the door latch, already rotated the bolt to unlock it. I froze.
He hadn’t moved. I’d thought he meant Ano.
But I turned slowly to look at him, exactly where I’d left him.
Emilius’s arm casually draped across the back of my chair, he slid his black diamond back and forth over his finger, gaze slanted at the door to my right.
Cold water dumped into my belly, heavy and sick.
“You’d stoop low enough to threaten your own son?” I asked, the hair at the nape of my neck lifting.
The King’s eyes met mine. “He’s not my son,” he replied, the words quiet but hard.
I stared at him, unbelieving, unwilling to believe, pressure building in my chest like a river against a dam. Vast and wide and unforgiving, pummeling against my walls with a sudden wrath I couldn’t unleash fast enough.
Wrath like smoke and stone and molten fire, the taste of it hot on my tongue.
I didn’t count my steps. One moment I was almost out the door.
The next, Kye’s knife was in my fist. My fingers wrapped over Emilius’s wrist, slamming it to the table. The blade severed it with a single slice.
Screaming erupted in my ears. Blood sprayed hot across my arms, slippery between my fingers. The taste of copper peppered my face, in my nose and lashes.
“What—what have you done?” Emilius’s voice shook with rage.
Black tinged the tiny veins under his ring like ink. I tossed the limp hand away, shoving the knife under his chin. “You have two options. I can staunch the flow of your blood until a physician can tend to it—” A deadened clang as his diamond hit the rug. “Or you can bleed out now.”
The unlocked door opened behind us, Kye and the guard stationed outside the King’s door.
“Attack!” the guard bellowed, already reaching for his sword. “The King is under—”
Kye grabbed the man by the neck, ramming his head into the nearest beam of wood. The guard collapsed in a pile of leather and cobalt blue. From across the room, golden eyes trained on the back of my head, a gaze as scorching as the sun itself.
“Either the word Leihani never leaves your throat again,” I growled, the knife still aimed at the soft hollow under the King’s jaw, “or I’ll carve the air from your lungs so you won’t even have the breath to speak it.”
Emilius was already paling, eyes already drooping, a thick sheen of sweat shining across his brow. “You island whore,” he panted.
“Leihani,” Kye said, a note of alarm in his voice.
I stretched, letting the blade press into the King’s skin. “Island witch.”
He licked his lower lip, which dragged under his tongue as though his mouth was already dry. “You think separating me from my ring will protect him?” His gaze slid to the man standing behind me.
Where a cough broke the silence.
“Fuck,” Kye choked.
My heart stalled at the sound. I turned to look at him—
Something in my head tingled, like an itch or a shiver. A voice inserted in my thoughts, my voice, that shouted to move—
Stars exploded across my field of view, as hot and bright and merciless as they’d been as I crossed the sea of them.
Pain flared from the side of my skull, my teeth clanging oddly together, a sharp, flat crack against my cheek.
The stars dulled, the whirls and knots of warm oak sharpening into focus.
His strength must have evaporated after slamming my head against his table, because rather than holding me there, Emilius smothered my body with his weight, a blanket made of stone. Then ripped away, fast and hard and violent, like a tornado had thrown him across the world.
Dizzy from the blaring sunlight and the hammer pounding against my temple, I slid to the floor.
Emilius had fallen beside me, his skin ghostly white, the river of blood from the stump of his hand slowing to a smooth trickle.
The collar of his lavish shirt was torn, a scrap in Kye’s fist. He sat over his hands and knees, a harder cough thrust from his chest. Black liquid hit the rug beneath him.
“If I die,” the King wheezed, “he dies.”
Pain and rage whirled into panic, my vocal cords locked as I heaved to them both.
The King lay in a pool of his own blood—enough of it I wasn’t sure I could save him.
I’d created blood before. But healing with water was an act of balance, a measured scale of blood and bone and tissue and against time.
The King’s stump of an arm was limp when I grabbed it, already cold and sagging like a dripping sponge.
I wedged it into my palm, sealing muscle and skin, my teeth grating together.
Kye’s breaths grew ragged. He slumped down to an elbow, blinking furiously at the pitch he’d spat the moment before, a black shine that clung to his lips and chin.
“If Kye dies, your death will be slow and agonizing,” I snarled, my voice a low, brutal whisper.
“You’ll wish you’d perished here on the floor.
” Blood hid between my teeth, metallic against the tip of my tongue.
The bright windows flared into my eyes, warping light into long, distorted flashes that grew hazy and smudged.
Water lingered in the air. It had always been easy to find, here in the castle by the sea.
Sometimes it hovered like fine mist, so thick it was like breathing a damp cloud, like walking through heavy vapor.
It stirred to lift at my call, seeping into his skin and sinking into the marrow of his bones.
The King closed his eyes.
Kye inhaled, thick and wet and desperate.
I glanced at him. And then I couldn’t look away.
Even though I wanted to. I couldn’t watch, except that was all I could do, the shape of him hazy around the edges.
He lay on his side, black leaking from his eyes, gasping for breath as it streamed from his mouth, as if he couldn’t expel it fast enough to inhale.
My blood ran cold, terror winding its way around me like a biting, twisting rope. I grabbed Emilius’s torn shirt, shaking him hard enough to make his head knock like a coin in a jar. His heart flagged. Slowed.
Electricity leapt into my hand, ready to zap him back to life if it stopped.
“Leihani,” Kye gurgled. “It’s all right. I’m okay.”
No, he wasn’t okay. He’d said the same thing on Darkness’s Hourglass, when we thought Captain Kriska would kill us both. And in Winterlight, when I’d lost him between the shouts and blades and bodies of soldiers, he’d said those words.
It’s all right. I’m okay.
There had been too many moments between Kye and me that had smeared the line between life and death, too many times we’d flirted with that sullied boundary without knowing where it began and where it ended for him to mollify my fears now.
But I glanced at him, and he was straightening, curling his knees underneath him to push upright. The olive flush of his skin was returning in vibrancy, and his breaths evened, the black tar wiped from his eyes and mouth.
Eyes closed, Emilius smiled. “You thought I’d kill him,” he laughed softly.
His heart continued an unsteady beat, and he looked as though he’d stepped into Death’s realm already, hanging onto the realm of mortals by a finger.
But his heart had steadied, and the soft whoosh of his blood, though thin and slow, was enough.
The blunt end of his arm was sealed, and as sloppily and hastily as I’d done the job, he wouldn’t die today.
At least, not from this wound.
I shoved him away, letting him roll onto the floor among the muck he’d just forced out of Kye and Brido.
“You’re not finished,” he slurred. “Come back and mend my hand.”
“I can’t,” I snapped, reaching to help Kye onto his feet. “I spared your life. Touch my husband again and I’ll burn this palace to the ground.”
“How clarifying,” Emilius wheezed, “that you’d save an enemy for a human.”
The string of words came from Emilius's voice. But they didn't sound like they belonged to him.
The hair lifted at the back of my neck. Almost to the door, I slowed to glance back at him. Just once. Just for a moment.
Then I opened it, and Kye and I left the King of Calder stretched across his tower floor, covered in black liquid and a sea of his own blood.