Chapter 3
Three
“Honestly, you should get into the shade, or you’ll burn.”
Yet another familiar voice greeted Lory as she woke up in the same cell in the brig where the guards had dumped her with a complimentary punch in the face.
“Come on, come on, woman. Move your ass into the shade right now. You wanna look pretty for your execution, don’t you? Not that a black eye like that would allow for proper prettiness.”
Did she ever. Stop. Talking?
“I’m sure Eroth won’t mind if I look like his children spat upon me.” Lory rolled to the side with a groan, focusing her gaze in the general direction of the babbling, all-too-cheery woman in the cell next to hers.
“There’s a spot of shade right here. I’ll even share the water they brought me earlier. That is, if you want to be conscious…”
“All right, I’m coming.” With a push of her hands against the dirt that she wished she hadn’t performed the moment it happened, Lory got into a sitting position. Every part of her body was sore—from the beating, the heat, the lack of food and water.
“Great, because I’d like to see you from up close this time before they take you away again. I need something exciting to tell my next cellmate.”
A groan escaped Lory’s mouth as she wished for the ringing in her ears to soften so she could be certain the woman really had just said that.
“Tell him I was an old hag who spat into the king’s soup; that will entertain them for sure.”
A surprised laugh bubbled out of the woman as Lory got to her feet and stumbled toward the blurry gray area by the bars separating their cells, struggling to remain upright.
“They got you good, didn’t they? Did the same with me when they caught me.”
With a grunt, Lory dropped back onto the hard ground, leaning her good side—not good, really, but at least better than the other—against the fist-wide metal sticks.
“Either they’re really scared I’ll hurt you, or they usually keep leonthors in here.”
A deep sigh fell from the woman’s chest. “I wish. If mythical creatures like that existed, I might believe in miracles again.”
Lory thought of the statues of horned, winged, lion-like horse beasts she’d seen in the city, the creatures of people’s imaginations and of Brestolyan fairytales.
The strength of a wild cat, paired with the speed of a horse and the deadliness of an eagle, not to forget the variations of horns atop their heads.
“Miracles—” she mocked, spitting blood onto the sandy ground by the bars. “If those existed, I wouldn’t sit here alone.”
“You’re not exactly alone,” the woman pointed out, gesturing at the guards in the corners of the yard and then at herself.
All Lory did was shake her head. “What’s your name, anyway?” Not that it mattered when she’d be executed in a few hours’ time. The sun was already declining, creeping closer to the shimmering white and gold roof of the outbuilding behind the wall.
“Anees—pleasure to meet you.” The woman inclined her head in a bow too practiced for someone locked in the brig. “You?”
“Lory.”
Anees peered at her with clear green eyes that spoke of an alert mind and—unlike herself—definitely no concussion.
“That’s a pretty name.” Anees sat down against the bars at the other side, the folds of her skirt catching Lory’s attention as they shimmered in the sun wherever the dirt cracked and crumbled off.
“You’re from a noble family?” That was the only reason someone would wear expensive fabrics like that, and in a dark blue-green that reminded Lory of how people described the ocean surrounding Brestolya.
Anees shrugged. “Not anymore, apparently. If anyone in my family cared about me, I wouldn’t be sitting in this cell.
” A flicker of hurt crossed Anees’s face, the first real emotion Lory had spotted on those dirt-smeared features.
“Not that it says anything about your family,” she quickly added.
“I don’t know anything about your family, obviously. ”
Lory bit her lower lip, falling into silence as she watched the guards in the corners of the yard observe them from a distance.
“Execution at sunset,” she whispered to herself after what felt like hours but could only have been a few minutes because, miraculously, Anees had remained quiet, too.
“They made up their minds quickly about you.” Anees twirled a strand of black, dust-crusted hair between her fingers.
“Do I even want to know if that’s good or bad?” Lory didn’t care that she came across like she couldn’t give a shit.
“Good for you because it will be a quick execution without extended torture. Bad because you’ll be dead in”—she glanced at the pyramid rising in the distance as if she could read the time there—“two hours.”
“How do you know that?”
Anees shook her head, fingers running over the length of her skirt in the practiced motion of a lady smoothing a silk dress. “The guards talk.” Her gaze strayed this way and that as if to avoid meeting Lory’s.
“They talk to you?”
“Obviously not.” Anees snorted. “But I do have ears, and I do listen—occasionally.”
Lory didn’t ask.
“They said that there wasn’t any point in trying to get you to speak. Better to shut you up forever instead.” Anees shrugged while bile rose in Lory’s throat.
“Shut me up,” Lory repeated to herself in a murmur.
“I have no idea what you saw or heard that they don’t want you to know, but if they prefer not to torture you, it’s probably important.”
The Almelyte, whatever that was, but she hadn’t even known until they questioned her. They had given her information about something she wasn’t supposed to have ever known existed.
“Probably.” Resting her head against the iron bars, Lory closed her eyes, relishing the breeze blowing through the cell.
“What is it they brought you in for? Stealing?” Anees mirrored Lory’s posture, leaning against the bars from the other side. “Did you steal anything noteworthy?”
“I wish I knew. They said something about an Alme—I can’t even remember the full name of the thing.”
Anees was silent for a moment as she pondered. “Alme—? Is that some sort of gemstone or even a magical artifact?”
Almelyte… It did sound like the name of a gemstone, but something told Lory Anees’s guess was probably a lot better than hers, only—“Magic is forbidden, Anees. The king is known to have magic wielders tortured and killed.” As if on a cue, a scream echoed from beyond the wall, where the city lay at the foot of the hill the palace was built upon.
“More reason to kill you for just knowing about something magical, isn’t it?” The excitement in Anees’s voice didn’t match the dire subject of their conversation.
“If I had any clue what that thing was, I sure as Eroth’s Veil wouldn’t be telling you. No offense,” Lory added when Anees huffed her upset. “I don’t usually go around telling other people’s secrets.”
Not that she had many secrets to tell. Lory’s life was as simple as it was lonely, despite the other street rats she occasionally hung out with.
With a sigh, she glanced at the merciless sun, how it dipped toward the horizon.
Sunset—not enough time to say her prayers to Eroth and the Guardians for a swift passing, but more than enough time to allow panic to flood her veins like lifeblood and knock out all rational thoughts.
Lory supposed that was what facing one’s timely end would do to a person.
“They also said you stole whatever it was you stole right off Lord Ycken’s back. Is that true? Because if it is, you’d be the first Dunaii lowlife I've met who has stolen from one of King Ulder’s close circle.”
Slowly, Lory rolled her head from side to side. The air was cooling down with the decline of the sun, and breathing seemed easier, despite the metaphorical avalanche of sand sitting on her chest.
“You know a lot for someone locked up in the brig,” she noted without looking at Anees. “Or is that perhaps the reason you are in here?”
Anees’s uncomfortable shifting was enough of an answer for Lory to scramble to her feet and put some distance between her and the fence separating the two—just in case.
She made it all of three steps before the same guards as before strode over, unlocked her cell, and dragged her across the yard into an archway carried by limestone columns with palm trees providing a modicum of shade where the sun did her best to break her path into even the remotest of corners.
Lory didn’t have the strength to carry her own weight, her mouth parched and her stomach hollow, but she kept putting one foot in front of the other as they shoved her along, each of them hoisting her up by an arm.
At the end of the archway, a narrow, wooden door guarded by two men in beige and black blocked their path.
“Last one for today,” the man holding her right arm announced, apparently a cue for the guards, who stepped aside, to let them pass.
As they dragged her into another courtyard, the distinct smell of iron and salt hit Lory’s nose, and when she scanned the square space holding a butcher’s block and gallows on a wooden pedestal, she spotted the source of it.
There, on the sun-bleached wood, lay the headless body of the woman whom she must have heard screaming before.
“More merciful than the gallows,” the guard to her left said, his breath hot at her ear, and she couldn’t help the feeling he was enjoying her terror.
“Does it matter when the outcome remains the same?” Lory might have been going to her death, but she wouldn’t allow some sick shit to take pleasure in her fear.
They made it to the pedestal in time to see the group of people from the room with the trees and the stage to march into the courtyard from a side door that seemed to melt back into the wall as it closed behind them.
“On your knees,” the guard barked as they forced her up the two wide, wooden stairs and stopped right before the butcher’s block.
They didn’t need to command her; letting go of her arms was enough to make her collapse to her knees.
Someone grabbed her by the neck, shoving her down until her throat lay flush against the blood-smeared limestone boulder.
Her left knee slipped, hitting something soft—the corpse of the woman whose head was still lying in the basket she was looking into.
“Any last words?” Top Knot prompted as he stepped to the front of the group, his voice dripping with anticipation.
Lory swallowed the lump in her throat. Last words—too many. So many things she’d never seen, so many places she’d dreamed of once visiting. She hadn’t even left the city the way she’d hoped to one day do, and she hadn’t spat in King Ulder’s food the way she and Evven had joked.
Glancing at the unseeing eyes of the woman who had preceded her on the butcher’s block, Lory asked, “What did she die for?”
“She was Flame-born.”
Lory didn’t care who’d spoken because, behind her, the sound of metal scraping across wood informed her that the axe taking her head was approaching.
“Elory Vednis,” Gray Braid solemnly said, “you have stolen from King Ulder’s personal advisor, Airmal Ycken, a crime that can be punished by death. You have been found guilty and sentenced to die at sunset on this day.”
She closed her eyes.
This was it—this was how Lory would die. Sweat trickled down her temple, blending with the tears collecting in her eyes.
“Your punishment will be carried out by a cut of the axe to sever your head from your neck. It will be quick, unless you try to fight your way off the butcher’s block and the cut is partial.
Then, it might draw out into the worst kind of torture until you bleed out.
” Footsteps rushed across the sandy ground, and Gray Braid paused for a moment before continuing her speech.
“No one will hold you down on the stone, Ms. Vednis. It is up to you whether you choose the painful path or the quick one.”
‘The coward’s path’ was what she didn’t need to add.
Lory swallowed for what she believed would be her last time.
A draft of cool air brushed her shaking body as the two guards silently stepped back, making way for her executioner.
Lory held her breath.
For ten long seconds, she held her breath, waiting for the blade to fall.
She held her breath as whispers carried across the courtyard, sharp as the hiss of a snake.
Until her head swam and her pulse threatened to leap out of her throat.
When she finally opened her eyes, glancing over the basket with the blood-smeared head, a pair of cold gray eyes set in a sharp-cut olive face was staring back at her.
Falcrest’s hair moved on the air like liquid silk, and his mouth was a tight line as he stared back at her like he was going to give the command to execute her any moment.
Lory was aware of the rest of the group—of Top Knot and Gray Braid, even Observant Eye was there—but she couldn’t take her eyes off the man around whom the desert might begin to freeze.
“It has been brought to my attention,” Gray Braid said, her tone less solemn and more irritated, “that you might be of more value to this kingdom alive than you are dead.”
Lory’s heart gave a painful jolt in her chest, and her gaze finally sprang free from the storm-colored magnets that were Falcrest’s eyes to find Gray Braid standing right next to him, her lined face unreadable.
“Ashthorn Ward is accepting new conscripts.”
Anees’s words of caution flew through Lory’s mind—that most of the conscripts didn’t survive their education, that no one really knew what happened at Ashthorn Ward.
For all that it was worth, it sounded more like a prison than an academy, but something inside Lory had begun to hope, and fear of certain death was stronger than fear of the unknown.
“What do I need to do?” The words were a mere breath, heat and exhaustion doing their part in making the world sway before her eyes, even as she was kneeling down.
Lory grabbed the bloodied stone left and right from where her throat lay in the carved curve made to fit the broad neck of a muscled warrior.
Gray Braid’s mouth tilted up on the side with the opposite of kindness. “Oh, it’s not what you need to do, Ms. Vednis. It’s what you’ve already done.”