Chapter 54
Lilias
THE PRINCE OF VSENROG
“Stop,” I cry.
Both men freeze. Syvan has his back to me. I try not to stare at Zarek, at the cut running down his neck or the blood on his lips or, gods, the mess of his face.
No. I focus on the tip of my blade as the prince of Vsenrog turns around to face me.
I don’t know what I was expecting. Fear, maybe? Or perhaps, after an entire life as a princess, I was expecting obedience.
But Prince Syvan laughs when he sees me. He laughs, Zarek stares at me with ragged desperation in his one eye that isn’t swollen shut, and fear wrestles with rage for control of my mind and body.
“Oh, fuck,” Syvan finally spits. “This is gold. This is really fucking rich.”
He steps toward me. I step back, keeping my knife pointed at his eyes.
“Look at you,” Syvan sneers. “So tough, are we, fat little princess? Did you steal that knife from your slimy bastard of a husband? Or did you fuck one of my men to get it?”
Rage wins.
“Let him go, you asshole,” I scream.
And I lunge forward, my knife aimed at the base of his throat.
Syvan moves like smoke. One minute, he’s in front of me. The next, he’s twisting to the side, then behind me. I stagger as Syvan’s arm closes around my neck, pressing my back against his chest.
“Whore,” Syvan says.
His breath is hot against my skin. I gasp, but the breath can’t reach my lungs.
“I’m going to fuck you hard,” he growls. “While your husband watches.”
Zarek screams like he’s in pain. Petrys’s calm voice whispers through my mind, and the hours we spent in that little meadow come rushing back to me. Petrys’s arm around my throat, his chest at my back. Twist, he whispered, don’t pull.
“I think the whore might even like it,” Syvan says in a rough growl.
Use your opponent’s weight against them, Petrys said. They’ll expect you to panic. Don’t.
My pulse thunders through my skull. Panic howls like a wild beast, and I fight it down, even as my lungs scream for breath.
I won’t panic. I won’t.
I close my eyes and twist my hips. Syvan’s arm tightens around my neck as I shove my fists against his chest, throwing my weight into him, just like Petrys taught me during our practice sessions.
Syvan grunts as my hands slam into him. His arm falls away from my neck. I gasp, finally filling my screaming lungs, then twist, pulling away from him. But my hand is stuck.
My hand. The knife.
Everything suddenly feels very slow and very clear. My eyes trace the path of my arm. To my hand. To the hilt of the knife my husband strapped around my thigh in some other time, some other life. I forgot it was in my hand.
The hilt of that knife is now sticking out of Syvan’s chest.
The prince of Vsenrog makes a strange noise, like bubbles through mud. Blood seeps out of the corners of his mouth, and some insane part of me wonders if maybe he’s been eating fresh meat, because there has to be some explanation. That can’t be the blood of the prince of Vsenrog.
My fingers are still wrapped around the knife. I yank on it, but there’s some resistance, it’s stuck.
Stuck inside the body of a son of the king.
Panic screams inside my ears. I tug the blade back and forth until it comes loose, then stumble backward. Blood bursts out of the front of the prince’s body, rushing forward like it’s trying to reach me, trying to drown me.
Syvan stares at me like he’s not sure who I am. There’s more blood coming out of his mouth now, and my gods, the entire front of his body is dark with it. I gag as the smell hits me. How much blood does a prince have? Is it more than a regular person? Is it—
“Fucking whore,” Syvan growls. It sounds like he’s speaking underwater.
He lurches forward, spraying blood on the ground like a monster. I pull back.
Shouldn’t I be trying to help him? Shouldn’t I—
Syvan falls to his knees. He’s still growling, his eyes fixed on me with the sort of rage I thought only existed in stories. His face has gone very pale. Like a ghost. Or a demon.
I raise my hand to reach for him, because I should do something, right? I have to do something.
But the knife is still in my hand. And the knife is covered with blood.
I drop the blade. There’s a loud clang when the metal hits the stone beneath me.
Surely it’s so loud that all of Syvan’s soldiers will hear it.
I turn to the tunnel, waiting for the army to drag me away.
Syvan makes another gurgling, gasping sort of sound.
The smell of blood sticks to the inside of my throat.
Slowly, almost gracefully, the prince of Vsenrog falls forward onto his face.
He hits the ground with a wet sort of thunk, and for just a moment, I can pretend that he must have tripped over something, that he has the wind knocked out of him, that the dark pool spreading across the hungry ground isn’t the blood of royalty spilling from the hole in his chest I just created.
And then I start sobbing. It sounds like screaming.
“Lilias.”
The sound is distant, like wind through the trees.
“Lilias. Listen to me.”
There’s something on my hands. I stare at them in the weird, shifting light of the torches as sobs tear the breath from my lungs. I dropped the blade, but there’s something dark spilled across my fingers that might never come off.
“I need you.”
I turn and stare at Zarek. A thin red line stretches from his chin to his collarbone. Dimly, I remember watching Syvan drag his knife across Zarek’s skin, making blood bloom in the darkness.
I swallow hard. One of Zarek’s eyes is swollen shut, his lip is split open, and his chest is a patchwork of bruises. Gods above, what have they done to him?
“What just happened,” Zarek says in a low voice, “we’ll have time to deal with. Later. Right now, I need you to help me.”
I nod, then wipe my hands on my skirt. It’s filthy anyway. Zarek tilts his head to the side.
“There’s a body over there,” he says. “In white robes. It’s got the key to these locks.”
He glances down. For the first time, I notice the silver cuffs around his wrists.
“Lilias,” he says, speaking slowly and softly. “I need you to find that key. It’s on a ring, and it’s in a pocket in those robes. Can you do that?”
I nod again. There’s a pile of white cloth on the floor of the mine that I thought was laundry, although why would anyone keep their laundry in a mine?
But it looks so very much like laundry, I tell myself as I step gently over the rocks. Like white sheets scrunched in a pile, stained with dirt and darker liquids.
Just laundry, I tell myself as I begin to sift through the folds of the fabric that used to be white. Laundry with a human hand attached.
“Does it help if I talk?” Zarek asks.
I make a strangled sort of sound in the back of my throat. I’m not even sure if I’m agreeing or not.
“We were having such a lovely journey,” Zarek says, as if he’s not beaten and bloody and in chains, as if instead we’re sitting together in the palace gardens, enjoying a cup of tea in the afternoon.
“I’ve never been to this part of the Marion mountains.
I didn’t realize how beautiful they are in the spring. ”
Some part of me realizes he must be trying to keep me calm, to distract me as I run my hands through this pile of laundry, looking for something metal. There’s an odd, thin chain, a dagger—
“Do you remember the sunrise when we left Detec?” Zarek asks. “Gods, it was glorious.”
I do not remember the sunrise. The soldiers forced us to leave early, which was quite a slight on Detec’s hospitality.
Not that I noticed; I was still in a haze from the magic Zarek worked that morning with his fingers and his mouth.
Hells, the mayor’s villa could have been burning down around me and I might not have even noticed.
My fingers brush something cold and hard. I pause, afraid to grab another body part. Behind me, Zarek is talking about the sunrise and the mountains and the gods only know what else, acting like all of this is normal.
I clench my jaw and pull the thing out of its nest of laundry.
It’s a key ring.
My hands are shaking so badly that it takes several tries for me to find the right key and unlock the cuffs holding Zarek to the chair.
When they click open, his skin is bloody beneath the metal.
I stare at the blood and wonder if I could have stopped this.
If I’d come earlier, or if I’d told Zarek not to leave the tent, or—
Zarek comes to his feet. His arms close around me, holding me tight to his chest. His heartbeat sounds like the ocean, like the crash of waves against a distant, wild shore.
“Lilias,” he whispers. “Princess. You saved my life.”
Something raw and horrible trembles inside me. For a moment, panic yawns its great, black mouth, and I waver on the edge of collapsing entirely.
And then the moment passes. I take a deep breath, safe in the circle of Zarek’s arms. For just a heartbeat, it’s enough.