Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Brannik heard them before he saw them. He’d long since memorized Krebb’s heavy uneven tread—the male favored his left leg when he was nervous—and the second gait was slow and even and unhurried, the walk of someone who had never in his life needed to hurry for anyone.
He let his head loll to one side and his eyes fall to slits, the way a broken thing settles.
He let his breath go slack and let the chains take his weight.
He was a beast in a hole, dull-eyed, and half-gone.
He’d worn this skin since he’d been taken.
Then he caught the scent. Grorn. Cold and dry, dust and metal with something reptile beneath, a smell he knew from dozens of missed encounters.
He kept his face empty and his eyes half-lidded, but every muscle was strung tight beneath the stillness.
A Grorn priest had walked to the end of this corridor at last, and this was the moment Brannik had let them chain him in order to achieve.
The priest stopped in the passage. He didn’t come into the cell. He surveyed it from the threshold the way a male surveys a stall of livestock, and his black eyes moved over Brannik with the assessing look of someone inspecting something he didn’t consider a person.
Good. Look at me. Ask your questions. Tell me where you’ve been looking.
The priest’s nostrils flared slowly, and he turned his head back the way he’d come. Not towards Brannik, but back the way he’d come. Back down the corridor where he’d passed a small bundled shape trying to be invisible, and Brannik’s heart dropped straight through the cold floor.
No.
He’d forgotten. In all his careful patient scheming he had let himself forget the one thing that mattered more than anything now—a Grorn’s nose was as keen as a Tuori’s.
Keener, some said. And Amy had knelt in his cell not a hundred breaths ago.
Her scent was in the air, in the very stone of the passage.
A human female. A scent the priest had probably never in his life smelled before, and the Grorn catalogued everything unfamiliar.
He forced himself to remain still because moving now would kill her. He kept the beast’s slack face and he watched, and inside him something roared so loud he was amazed the priest couldn’t hear it.
The priest turned back to the cell. He seemed almost bored.
“Your kitchen worker,” he said to Krebb. His voice was low and smooth, as cold as the wall. “The slight one in the corridor.” A delicate pause, almost pleasant. “Why is a female being wasted carrying food to a beast?”
The silence that followed was heavy enough to fill the cell.
Krebb’s head swung around. “Female?” The word cracked. He looked back down the corridor—though the alcove was empty now and Brannik prayed she’d fled—and confusion twisted the heavy ridges of his face into something faintly comical. “The kitchen boy? That’s Pelloq’s boy, that’s—”
Krebb stopped and recalculated. Brannik watched the greed do its cold arithmetic behind the male’s small eyes even as the fear caught up.
“I didn’t… Forgive me, holiness, I hadn’t…
She’s not mine. An Ordanian owns her, one who runs an eating-house at the edge of the market.
I only take his deliveries.” He wet his lips.
“I never knew. Under all that cloth no one would know—”
“I knew,” the priest said mildly, “from twenty paces.” He let that sit. “But then, you are not built to notice much, Krebb. It is why you are useful and it is why you remain what you are.”
Krebb swallowed the insult without any reaction. He’d clearly had practice. “Even if she’s female, she’s nothing, Lord Thressk. A scullion. If it displeases you I’ll have Pelloq turn her out. I’ll—”
“You misunderstand me.” Something in the smooth voice sharpened by a single degree, and even Krebb heard it.
“I do not object to her presence. I observe a waste.” The priest tilted his scaled head, and the pale skull at his shoulder caught what little light there was.
“A rare thing hidden under rags, disguised and hauling meal-pots. An unknown species. I have never smelled her like, and I have smelled a great many things. Do you know what an unknown female is worth, Krebb, to buyers who collect the unusual?” A dry, patient pause.
“More, I should think, than you clear in a season of this squalor. She has considerable trade value. You should look into who else might want her. I suspect there is a market you have never even glimpsed.”
Brannik’s control broke.
It broke for the space of one heartbeat, and in that single beat a white rage threatened to consume him.
His claws bit into his own palms and his lips drew back from his fangs and the beast that was not a performance wanted, with everything in him, to tear this cold grey male’s spine out through his throat and paint the cell with it.
Considerable trade value. Amy. Amy who fed him by hand and kissed him with her whole trembling heart and had spent four years making herself invisible precisely so that no cold black eye would ever weigh her like a jar on a shelf—
He crushed the rage. He’d spent his whole life learning to crush it.
The undersized boy among Tuori males had learned to swallow every insult because raising a fist only got him broken.
The grown warrior had learned that a still face won more fights than a loud one.
He poured the rage onto the roar that wanted to emerge and drowned it.
What came out of him instead was a low, dull, animal growl, the one they expected, the one that meant nothing at all.
It cost him more than any blow he’d ever taken.
The priest’s black eyes came to him at the sound, and his face had already gone slack and dull again, already staring at nothing with the loose jaw of an animal who had been beaten hollow.
“Ah,” said the priest. “The specimen wakes.”
Thressk crossed the cell in three unhurried steps and crouched, and this close the dry cold smell of him was thick enough to choke on.
Brannik kept his eyes down, his gaze unfocused and mindless.
He let his breath rattle in his chest. He was very good at this.
He had to be, because his eyes were about to betray everything.
“Krebb, show me the eyes that brought me here,” the priest ordered.
Krebb hesitated. “He bites, holiness—”
“He is chained to a wall and half-starved on the wrong food, and you fear his teeth.” The priest didn’t turn. “His eyes, Krebb. Bring the light.”
A pause, then the shuffle of boots before Krebb’s thick hand grabbed Brannik’s hair and yanked his head up into the beam of a hand-lamp. He let it happen. He let his head loll where it was pulled. He kept his gaze wandering and vacant as he opened his eyes into the light and let it flood them—
And he caught the priest’s sudden stillness.
His mother’s eyes, in his father’s brutal face. The one thing about himself he could never disguise, the beacon that had drawn every wrong sort of attention his whole life, that had drawn this.
“There,” the priest breathed. All the boredom had gone out of his voice, and in its place was something Brannik liked far less—hunger dressed as faith.
“There it is. Do you see, Krebb? Do you even begin to understand what your net dragged up?” He leaned closer, and Brannik smelled the eager quickness of his breath.
“Aurelian. Not full. The frame is Tuori—the size, the horns—but those eyes…” He leaned closer. “A crossing. A living crossing.”
A soft, delighted sound came from the priest’s throat. “I have chased this bloodline across four systems. Rumor and ash and empty rooms. And your idiot guards find one for me in the reeking dark of your warehouse and did not even know what they’d caught.”
Four systems. Brannik held the vacant stare and let the words pour into him and burned them into his memory. Tell me where. Give me the systems, the routes, and the empty rooms—
“He’s simple, holiness,” Krebb offered, still holding Brannik’s hair. “He doesn’t speak. He just growls. Whatever he was, there’s not much left.”
“Whether there is a mind behind these eyes hardly matters.” Thressk studied Brannik the way Brannik had seen males study a locked mechanism, seeking the catch.
“What matters is what sleeps in the blood. The old blood remembers what the mind forgets.” He straightened at last, and Krebb let go.
Brannik let his head drop forward under its own weight, panting soft and slow like a spent animal.
Hidden beneath the fall of his hair, he kept his eyes open, watching and waiting.
Because the priest had told him what he’d come to learn—that they hunted his kind, that they’d been hunting for years, and that they came smiling with soft words and cold black eyes. But he still hadn’t said the one thing Brannik needed, the thing worth every day of these chains.
Where. Where do you look, priest? Where are the empty rooms? Where did my mother go?
“Ready him for transport,” the priest said. “Carefully. I want the blood unspoiled.” He paused at the lintel, and half-turned, the pale skull on his uniform catching the light one last time.
“And the female,” he said. “See that she does not leave this port.”