10. Chapter 10
Chapter ten
T he city is in chaos as Adira and I duck out of the tavern and onto the cobblestone street. Smoke billows from the harbor, obscuring the vibrant colors of the night sky in muddied shadows. When Niko and I first arrived at the Pixie’s Hollow, I’d thought it was odd how many ships were anchored in the harbor—so many the water is hardly visible—but now I see it for the true nightmare it is. Flames leap from deck to deck, crawling up masts and sails, eating up vessel after vessel in seconds.
Screams pierce through the roar of fire as Adira grabs my arm and steers me toward the carriage. I try to gather my bearings, to see past the destruction and find a path to freedom while the king is distracted, but the princess’s grip is surprisingly strong. She whips open the carriage door just as something explodes nearby, rattling the world around us and throwing us to the ground.
I scramble up, my heart lodged in my throat, as another blast tears through the city. The Pixie Hollow’s sign sways wildly as the quaint buildings lining the harbor reverberate with the impact. It’s the last thing I see before Adira shoves me into the carriage and slams the door.
Neither of us say a word, our labored breathing the only sound as the carriage lurches forward. There are no horses pulling it, nor any visible engine, but I don’t take the time to wonder how the carriage moves. I’m only thankful it does. Whatever is happening in the city—whether it’s a power struggle against the Carrion King’s rule, or something worse—I have no interest in getting involved.
“What was that?!” I demand breathlessly, laying the gladius over my lap.
“The Strayed,” Adira replies serenely. As volatile as the last few minutes have been, Adira doesn’t appear to be at all winded. Indeed, she doesn’t even seem slightly upset, going so far as to shoot me a small, unnerving smile.
“So you said,” I mutter irritably. Adira turns to gaze out the window, under no apparent inclination to provide any sort of information. Rubbing my eyes with my palms in an attempt to soothe the rapid rise of my rancor, I ask in an overtly pleasant tone, “I don’t suppose you’d like to explain what the hell a ‘Strayed’ is?”
Adira runs her fingers absently over the ivory handle of her spear, watching the subtle movement as she considers her answer. Or whether to answer at all. “There is a plague in your world, is there not?”
I nod, mulling over her words. If Adira knows the conditions of my world, maybe the wards aren’t as solid as Niko insists. Maybe there’s a way through them that doesn’t involve spending one more moment with him.
“There is a plague in this world as well. It’s of a different sort, but it is killing this kingdom just the same. And has turned many of its inhabitants into monsters.”
“Yeah,” I scoff, picturing the cruel twist of Niko’s mouth. The anger he keeps lashed beneath his skin, building and building, until it explodes out in the form of sentient death. “I’ve noticed the one ruling over the kingdom.”
Adira tilts her head, her expression suddenly grave. “Niko is a vicious monster indeed,” she agrees, “but you are a fool if you believe him to be the worst.”
Her words send shivers racing down my spine. What could be worse than an arrogant man wielding the power to kill anyone he likes? I’ve seen what men in my world do when they feel rejected or belittled, the atrocities committed in the name of their gods or their goals—and the Carrion King is capable of far worse destruction with less than a thought.
“You defend him often for someone you supposedly hate,” I observe levelly, still unsure what to make of their relationship.
“It was not a defense, only a fact. And hatred and understanding are not mutually exclusive.” Adira smiles softly. “Niko and I have a long history. I understand him far better than most would ever get the chance to. But there are some angers that even knowing cannot ease.”
My brow knits together. For all she speaks of anger, she appears to be the calmest person I’ve ever met. Even as the carriage shudders with the reverberation of another explosion, Adira gazes out the window with a dreamy expression, her hands laid loosely in her lap. Only her eyes betray her peace, that turbulent gray reminiscent of a storm on the sea.
I feel none of her peace, only her storm, as I remember the heat of the flames over the harbor and the desperate screams. And Niko out there somewhere in the midst of the chaos.
Adira snaps her eyes to mine, her sudden grin so vicious, it makes my skin itch. “Worried about the monster, are we?” She laughs, leaning back onto the satin seat. “As I said before, Willa…you deserve each other.”
My irritation flares like the spark of a match. “I don’t know what the fuck you mean by that, but stop reading my mind before I render you incapable of it. It’s a violation.”
Adira's laughter ceases, but her amusement is still apparent. “Do you know how this island grants magic to its inhabitants?”
Her question makes my heart leap into my throat and I’m almost ashamed at how desperate I am for any morsel of information. The need has me gritting my teeth and swallowing down my most bitter responses.
“It amplifies what is already inside us. What is at the base of our bones, in the threads of our hearts. My heart was an empathetic one—I could read others’ emotions and thoughts by the small changes of their faces, the little shift in their tone. It was a natural progression to actually hearing them.”
I stare at her, absorbing her words. “So, Niko’s heart…is death?”
“There are worse things,” the princess replies with a noncommittal shrug.
I don’t want to think about those things, the intimate horrors I know to be far worse than the promise of relief death holds. I latch onto her other words instead. “The island grants magic…Does it—well, does it grant power to everyone?”
“No. Though no one knows exactly how it chooses. Perhaps it’s entirely random.” Adira cocks her head thoughtfully. “Or perhaps…it’s something in the blood.”
I shudder to think what my own power would be if I were reduced to the blood and bones of me. Pain. Cowardice. Abandonment. None of them very powerful at all.
Adira makes a humming noise, and I blush at what she’s heard in my thoughts. But rather than digging into my humiliation, she only says, “There is power in all things. We can never know how it will manifest.”
With that, she looks back out the window and refuses to say anything else.
A few minutes later, we arrive at the great stone gates of the Lunaedon. Just like everything else in the palace, the gates are intricate and beautifully macabre. Flowers as exquisite as the ones on the beach are carved in such detail, they appear to be growing through the orifices of the many stone skulls lining the archway. The castle itself is framed perfectly in the towering arch, its dark facade striking against the swirling sky beyond.
Adira palms her spear and opens the carriage door, stepping out into the dark. I rise to follow, but she shakes her head and nods to the winding drive. “This is where we part for now. The carriage will see you safely up the drive back to the palace.”
We’re far enough away from the city to no longer hear explosions nor see any of the flame, but the idea of Adira leaving me alone makes me oddly nervous. The palace grounds are surrounded by dense woods, the depths of which are so dark, any number of things could be hiding in their shadows.
And god only knows what’s lurking on the Lunaedon grounds themselves. Knowing the Corpse King, he probably keeps hellhounds, or something equally ridiculous, as pets.
“You’re not coming to the palace?”
“I make it a point never to step foot inside that monstrosity,” Adira replies, wrinkling her nose in disdain. She follows my nervous gaze to the trees with a soft laugh. “Don’t worry. As dangerous as Letum is, nothing would dare go near Niko’s home.”
“Because he has a heart filled with death and rot?”
“Because he protects what’s his.”
I give a small shiver. “What about you? Will you be okay alone with…everything that’s happened?”
Adira’s returning grin is rather alarming, and irritation rankles in my chest that I’ve inadvertently said something na?ve. I’ve always been a clever observer of people, reading them before they can see to the heart of me, but since I arrived in Letum, I’ve been tumbling untethered in the air, unable to regain my bearings and find the ground.
Feral woman. Niko’s words echo in my mind, and I hate that in this, he’s right. I’ve spent so much time here railing against the unfairness of my circumstances, rather than thinking my way around them. Perhaps I’d have learned the way of the land far faster if I’d shown an ounce of kindness to any of these people, but there exists a part of me that instinctively fights anything that dares come too close. Thorns have covered my skin for longer than I can remember, spearing for the soft parts of others before they can find the soft parts in me.
I know Adira hears my racing thoughts, but thankfully, she doesn’t acknowledge them. Instead, she grips her spear and says, “Don’t worry about me. I am wilder than the wood itself.”
Somehow, she’s right. The forest winks emerald in the dark—all sprawling vines, and thick, moss-covered trees—and the colors of Adira blend in seamlessly. The gray of her eyes is the same shade as the shadows between the trunks, her onyx hair the same hue as the pieces of night sky peeking between the leaves. The painted designs on her skin appeared abstract and odd in the dim light of the tavern, but now, it’s apparent they mimic the sprawl of the forest, their glowing spirals both as beautiful and brutal as the wood.
“Go straight to the palace and wait for Niko inside. You can never be too careful in Letum…what does not exist one day may appear the next. It isn’t safe to wander.”
“It isn’t safe with him either , ” I mutter.
“Ah, but who better to protect you from monsters than another monster?” she says with a wink. Before I can respond, Adira has melted into the shadows of the trees.
Turning back to the carriage, I examine its gilded facade. I could climb back in and go sit in the castle like a good girl, waiting for king’s return. If he returns. I still have no idea what a Strayed is, but whatever was happening in the city seemed like far too much for one man to handle. There’s been no sign of an army or a royal guard, nothing that would indicate there’s anyone to help him defend against those wreaking havoc in the harbor.
Maybe I’ll get lucky, and they’ll kill him off before I have to.
I unsheathe my sword and close the carriage door, patting it on the rear like I’m sending a horse off. The carriage doesn’t move, so I elect to leave it behind as I step up to the stone gate. There is no door, and though I tense, waiting for some unseen force to throw me backward, I breeze through the archway with no resistance.
I’m done cowering. Done worrying for my sanity, and hoping the entire experience just disappears from my mind. It’s time to learn more about the world I’ve fallen into, and what better way to get a feel for the world than a walk? The palace grounds should be safe enough. And if they’re not, I’m adept with a sword.
It only takes a few moments to realize walking was a mistake. The stupid silk slippers do nothing to shield my feet from the black gravel of the drive, the sharp little stones piercing through the flimsy fabric and digging into my soles with every step. Cursing them loudly, and King Bastard for dressing me like a doe-eyed damsel, I begrudgingly move off the path to trek through the grass.
Unlike the beach or the forest—or even the mist-soaked city harbor—there are no bright plants or flowers on the grounds. There’s nothing but a long stretch of neatly clipped grass and the black drive winding lazily up the hill toward where the palace looms. It’s an odd dichotomy—the complete lack of anything living when the world surrounding the Lunaedon is thriving and lush.
Then I remember the way my flower crumbled with one touch of Niko’s ribbons. The way he’d siphoned everything vibrant from it and left behind a rotting carcass. How those ribbons did the same thing to Jamie.
Suddenly, the lack of life around the Lunaedon makes far too much sense.
At the very least, the open grounds keep my imagination from wandering too far and imagining what’s lurking behind every tree and shadow. Before the plague, I lived with my family on an acre or so of land upstate that was bordered by a thick forest. I’d had to walk through it every day to get to school, and I never failed to terrify myself conjuring up what could be living in the trees. Sometimes the imagining had been based in reality—bears or mountain lions, mostly—but more often than not, my over-active mind would dream up fanciful creatures. Tigers with black eyes and fangs as long as my arm, that survived solely on human flesh. Banshees that could scream so loud, I’d go deaf and blind and never find my way out of the wood. Shadows that could pierce through your skin and take over your mind.
I shake my head pointedly, clearing the images away. My father had always told me there was no use in being afraid of the imagined—it was only the real things that could hurt me. In the end, it was his fear of both that damned me. And mine…mine kept me alive.
My stomach lurches as a savage snarl rips through the night. I whirl, all thoughts of my father, and the resounding pain of his memory, dissipating as I stare up in frozen shock at the creature stalking toward me.
Heart thumping painfully against my chest, I blink in an attempt to clear what’s surely a hallucination. For there is no living creature with eyes that glow red or fangs so enormous, they hang from its glistening maw like razor-sharp stalactites. Nor any whose body is so powerfully muscled, whose head towers at least ten feet off the ground.
But no matter how fiercely I rub my eyes, the beast becomes no less real. And as I take in the creature’s beautiful fur, striped in a unique pattern of black and orange, and the looming, skeletal wings that sprout from its back, dread drops into the pit of my stomach like hot iron.
Somehow, it’s the creature I dreamed up in childhood, the one I’d imagined on all those walks home. The one I haven’t thought of in years until a few moments ago, now stands before me, lowering its giant head in pursuit of the hunt.
How?
The question has barely formed in my mind when the tiger-beast lunges for me with a terrifying snarl. Panic surges through my veins like icy water, because however this creature is here—whatever the magic of this fucked up kingdom—if it truly is the one I dreamed up as a kid, it means one thing: it eats humans.
I barely have time to raise my sword when the creature barrels into me. The breath shoots painfully from my lungs as I crash to the ground, so the scream of agony remains trapped in my throat as two claws pierce straight through my shoulder. Scorching pain radiates through my arm as I squirm against the beast’s heft, and my brain reverberates in my skull as it releases an ear-splitting roar.
Letting out my own scream of fury, I stab the small gladius upward with my uninjured arm. Blood sprays my face as the weapon sinks into its muscled chest, but the blade is far too short to have reached anything fatal. Hot breath buffets my face as the creature roars in fury, and it takes everything in me not to let go of the sword to cover my ears.
My shoulder throbs as I yank furiously on the pommel, but I realize quickly my efforts are futile, and the blade has stuck into bone. The tiger slashes its head, wildly trying to dislodge the weapon, and I take its momentary distraction to roll out from underneath it just as one of its giant wings comes slashing toward me.
Weaponless, my head swims as I scrabble to my feet and stretch my arms out as wide as I can. I have no idea how to kill the thing or if it can even be killed. Somehow, in all my imaginings of the creature, a weakness had never come up. I try to remember any of the wilderness survival my dad taught Celie and I, but as the tiger lowers its head and prowls toward me, red eyes glinting ominously in the dark, the thoughts come slow and disjointed.
Am I supposed to play dead? Be big and loud?
I grab rocks from the drive and start hurtling them at the beast with my good arm, screaming at it until my voice is hoarse. Suddenly it doesn’t even matter that the pebbles will do nothing against the magnitude of those claws. I’ve never been one to play dead, to go pliant and wait for whatever happens next. If this thing is going to gore me from throat to belly, I’m going to go out the same way I live—pissing it off.
Another snarl, this one so loud, I swear it vibrates my actual bones. The beast lunges, and this time, I’m ready. White hot bursts flare behind my eyes as my wounded shoulder collides with the ground, but I manage to hold tight to the small, sharp rock in my hand. I let the tiger lower its head toward my throat, and then, with a howl of rage, I drive the rock into one of its shining crimson eyes.
More blood peppers my face, blurring my vision as the creature screams in pain. It’s pinned me to the ground with one giant paw, and I writhe desperately against its hold, searching for another rock—for anything I can use to fend it off.
I let out a wild peal of laughter as its skeletal wings thrash above me, blocking out the night sky—blocking out everything but the pain burning through me.
The world around me narrows and warps, as the beast all but disappears beneath a rush of memory.
Only a bit more, Willa. You’re strong enough for that, aren’t you?
Are you so selfish that you wouldn’t endure a bit of pain to save your sister?
To save us all?
I scream in rage, ripping myself out of the past as the beast’s roaring face comes hurtling back into view. My momentary distraction has cost me, and it’s all I can do to squeeze my eyes shut and wait for those razor-sharp teeth to begin tearing at the flesh of my throat.
Panic squeezes my lungs, constricts my ribs, freezes my joints. No, no, no…
Abruptly, the roaring ceases, as if someone has cut the cord to a speaker.
And then the breath is knocked out of me for a second time as the huge mass of the tiger collapses on top of me. When I dare to open my eyes, it’s to find the night has gone even darker than before. It takes me another agonizing moment to understand—it isn’t darkness, nor even the wings of the beast.
It’s death.
The Carrion King’s ribbons slowly retreat from the tiger’s body, leaving only a decomposing carcass behind. The tiger’s remaining eye has gone gelatinous, it’s once beautiful coat now little more than decaying skin sloughing off bone.
Vomit surges up my throat as the putrid smell fills my nose, and by the time Niko’s ribbons manage to heft the massive beast off me, I barely have time to tilt my head sideways and heave.
The rum burns my throat as it comes back up, and my head swims as I gasp for air. My shoulder throbs viciously and my blood peppers the grass as I claw my way back up to a seated position. When I finally look to where the king kneels beside me, I expect to see something like concern. Pity, at the very least.
Instead, Niko examines me warily, his mouth turned down in a suspicious frown.
A long moment passes between us until finally, he lets a breath loose, and says in a dangerous voice, “I want answers, Willa. Now.”