Janos Rivel
Janos awoke to water rushing in.
His coffin was tight, but finally the Wyvern Sea had wriggled her way inside. His sarcophagus was large, but he could barely pull his arms away from his sides. He turned to his right, and there she was.
Pomena.
Dead. Her eyes pits of black and wiry hair a mess on her bare skull. Her skin dried to the bone like leather. Her nails grown out to talons.
Janos screamed. He screamed for Lukas, for Urias, and then he found that there was no one else to scream for. There was no one who’d come. He knew his funeral was over. No one would have stayed to watch him sink. No one would hear him scream.
Still, he wailed. He cried like all hell could hear him. And surely, it could.
Hands of bone ripped up from the bottom of his coffin and grabbed his legs, his wrists.
Pomena’s skeletal fingers slapped over his mouth.
He screamed silently against her as hand after hand scratched through his sarcophagus to drag him under—more hands than had bodies, more hands than existed in all the world, wrapping around him in their death.
The water level rose to just over his nose. His last words were airless as the Wyvern swept into his lungs, tasting like bitter wine.
He jolted upright in a bed swamped with sweat. Every muscle in his body screamed awake at once, sore beyond sore. Even his eyelids hurt as he pried them open for the first time in spirits knew how long.
“Are you sick again?”
Janos whipped his head to the side to find Urias standing up from a chair he’d pulled near Janos’s bedside. The Wraith had bags under his obsidian eyes and was clothed in the same outfit he’d worn on Wallain.
Urias tried to coax Janos to his side, but Janos just blinked at him.
He wanted to cringe at Urias’s hands patting around his naked chest and waist, but instead he just caught them in his own.
They were blisteringly warm and running with sweat, yet he pressed them to his skin, unable to believe they were real.
He expected them to shrivel to bone and burlap at any second, to grab him by the throat and hold him under until he drowned. Instead, they shook.
Janos’s mouth moved over something he was too shocked to put together.
“Can you speak?” Urias asked. “Does your throat hurt?” He took a seat at Janos’s side, with the prince still pressing his hands to his chest.
“Why are you here?” Janos’s words might have been made of gravel and pine needles, pushing up his throat with the tang of blood.
Urias’s brows drew in. He pulled his hand from Janos’s to hold the prince’s cheek. “You came here alone. You needed someone here, but you didn’t have anyone.”
Janos’s lip wobbled. Urias’s kindness dripped into his stomach like poison.
Before Janos could send him away, the Wraith stood and disappeared into Janos’s living room. Janos prayed he didn’t return, but the bastard returned with a tray of food.
Poison again.
“Your throat is dry,” Urias said. “You need to eat and drink before you hurt yourself.” He set a tray of gruel and a cup of honeyed water on Janos’s bedside table, pushing an empty wine bottle aside. “Can you eat by yourself? I can feed you if you need.”
Poison. Deadly fucking poison.
Janos’s stomach roiled. Urias didn’t know. That’s why he was being so kind to him. He had no clue what Janos was.
Janos’s dream rushed back into his lungs. No, not a dream. That was some slip into a world where he got what he’d earned. A living death, being dragged to hell by all the people he’d slaughtered.
Urias didn’t know.
The Wraith’s eyes thinned as Janos edged away from him. Then he grabbed the gruel and a spoon and tried to bring them to Janos’s mouth, but Janos smacked them from his hand.
He was supposed to be dead. Why wasn’t he fucking dead?
“If you don’t eat, it’ll be worse,” Urias said in a careful, calm voice. Not a thread of anger or annoyance. It settled on Janos like a coat of thorns.
“Stop it,” Janos growled. “Why didn’t you let me die?”
Urias’s eyes trembled open. He set his jaw before standing up straighter. “Isobel commanded you be saved, so you were,” he said. “What’s wrong, Janos?”
What’s wrong? Janos had finally done the right fucking thing, and he couldn’t even do it correctly.
“I was supposed to die,” Janos rasped. His eyes dropped to Urias’s belt and found the dagger slotted on his hip.
Urias slowly moved a hand to his weapon and unholstered it. Janos’s eyes stuck to the shining edge, and his chest warmed at the thought of it stabbing true.
The Wraith grabbed the blade and bent it, then tossed the useless dagger into the corner of the room. Blood dripped from between his clenched fingers, but he didn’t seem to mind.
“Well, you’re not dying today.”
Urias didn’t know. He didn’t understand.
Janos’s stomach dropped as another opportunity was stolen from him.
His breaths rushed out until they were stumbling over each other to escape him.
His chest fluttered with each ruined exhale and Janos grabbed it like he might reach in and squeeze and release his lungs by hand.
His vision doubled, tripled, blurred into colors and light.
His head hammered like his brain was throwing itself against his skull to break the door down and run.
Janos curled in on himself, aching still, each muscle screaming at him that it should be dead. He pushed his face into his hands, nails stained black from the aftereffects of the poison.
“I deserve to die.” The truth rushed out with his breaths.
“Janos…” Urias’s tone was so patient, so soft and loving, and Janos could just hear his next words: Don’t say—“Don’t say that.”
Of course.
“You don’t know me,” Janos said, dragging his own hand to his throat and begging it to squeeze. Fucking coward refused to wring his neck. “I did it on purpose. The poison.”
“I know. Hard to do it by accident.” Urias sat on Janos’s bed and leaned over his legs.
Janos looked at the Wraith leaning over him and did not see an old man that spoke to birds. His human head was gone, replaced with that of a raven with a long, glimmering beak and feathers groomed down the back of his head. Round, diamond-sharp eyes shone with arcane knowledge.
The King o’ Ravens.
This was his chance. If he couldn’t kill himself, this was his chance.
“I killed them,” Janos confessed. The King o’ Ravens could judge him. He could take Janos’s soul to the spirits that lived deep in the hearts of the trees. When it rotted them dead, Urias would know he was no good. “The people in the coffin—I killed them.”
He could smell the smoke from their burning still. It followed him like a funeral.
“I killed my first at fourteen. I killed my cousins, and I killed their mothers. I killed them because I was told to. I didn’t fight hard enough.
I didn’t try hard enough. I just did it.
And I keep doing it. I’ve done it every year for half my life, every day, every hour.
I rob them, I maim them, I throw them away.
I pile their bodies, and I burn them without pyres.
I let them suffer forever, lost in the fires, and I do it because I’m selfish.
I tell myself it has a purpose, but I know it doesn’t.
I know I should kill my father, but I can’t.
I love him. I love him more than everyone I kill. He’s not worth it. I’m not worth it.”
By the end of his confession, Janos’s words were mottled with anguish. He’d paid for his crimes with the rending of his throat, with the blood spilling up from his gut. With the blackness in his nails and the shrieking of his muscles. He’d paid in pain, but he was in debt up to his soul.
Janos felt the water rising again. Darkness swirled overhead and his vision cut out. Water filled his lungs and refused to be pushed out.
He was drowning. He deserved to drown. He screamed anyway. Soon, the water shut him up. His mind sloshed like a sea inside a sea. He felt himself flickering like a doused candle.
Finally.
And then, a slash of sunlight.
Someone pried their fingers under the lid of his coffin and tore it open, then dragged him free from his cast of bone, up through the miles of sea, out of his deathboat.
They delivered him to the surface again, bobbing in the waves meant to ruin him.
He cracked open his eyes to see Urias bent over him. Not the bird-faced spirit, but a man.
Janos’s face was wet and cold, but he hadn’t just been pulled from the Wyvern. He’d passed out in his bed, and Urias had splashed him with water from the bathing room to jolt him awake. His cheek stung, no doubt from the Wraith slapping him during his episode.
“Janos, listen to my voice.” It filtered in through ears half filled with water.
Janos grasped at reality. The slats of the ceiling over Urias’s shoulder.
The Wraith himself. Janos studied his every feature: the arch in his nose from an injury ages ago; the unevenness of his cheeks, one a tick higher than the other.
His lashes had a gap in them. A solitary silver hair was the only proof the man aged at all.
Janos’s chest slowed. His body was splayed flat with Urias’s hands pressed to the sides of his face.
There was a bed beneath him with sticky sheets.
His body was too hot to be steeping in the ocean, yet the waves still lapped at his sides.
He was half stuck lying on a beach, half in this room with Urias, and the juxtaposition of the two realities had panic leaping high in his throat.
There was no way to explain how his toes were wriggling in sand while his head was sunk into the pillow.
So he just cried. It was all he could do.
Urias cleared the hair from his face, stroked his chin. “What does the water feel like?” he asked.
Janos’s brows drew in, but he leaned into his sensations. “C-cold,” he stuttered. Half of him was shivering, the other half sweltering.
Urias nodded, his thumbs swiping over Janos’s cheeks. “Do you want to dry off?”
Janos blinked again. But… but there was no sea…
But Janos did want to dry off.