Chapter 22
DAWN
Hakan
The screaming never stopped.
I had cataloged the gallery of sounds over the course of what I estimated was several hours—the distant tenors, the mid-register shrieking that had long since become white noise, the occasional low moan that cut through the rest simply by being different.
I had counted the columns in the obsidian hall.
Thirty-two, stretching up into darkness so complete the ceiling might as well not exist. I had examined every inch of floor within my reach, looking for a seam, a weakness, anything at all.
There was nothing.
My mother slept against my side, her breathing finally evened into something almost restful.
Whatever he had done to her in those first moments—rifling through her memories like a man emptying drawers—had exhausted her completely.
I had arranged her as carefully as I could on the cold floor, taken off my coat and folded it beneath her head, and spent the hours since cataloging the room and hating myself for not finding a way out of it.
Not afraid. I want to be precise about that.
I was not afraid. I was furious in the cold and focused way that tends to be more dangerous than fear, and I was thinking very hard about what I had.
My shadows were diminished, sluggish, like commands given through water.
But I was thinking. And Erlik wanted something—he had not killed us, had not broken anything yet, which meant he wanted something.
The thing about people who want something is that wanting makes them manageable. Even gods.
I was still working through the angles when consciousness left me.
I didn't feel it go. There was no warning, no slow dimming at the edges. One moment I was thinking. The next, the floor was against my cheek and the screaming was louder and the light—such as it was in this lightless place—had changed.
I pushed myself upright.
My mother was standing twenty feet away.
Not the way she had been standing before. Not the careful, controlled stillness of a woman managing her own exhaustion. She was held upright, her arms pinned at her sides, her head—
Her head was caged.
Black iron, bars thin as fingers, fitted to her skull from collarbone to crown. I could see her face through the gaps. What I could see of her face.
The blood on her temple had dried and crusted at the edges.
Her dress was torn at the shoulder, the skin beneath mottled deep purple in the pattern of fingers—deliberate, methodical, not the bruising of a struggle but of something applied with patience.
And her hands. Her right hand hung wrong at the wrist, the last two fingers bent at angles that made my stomach drop before my mind had fully processed what I was seeing.
The kind of angles that didn't happen on their own.
The skin was already swelling, tight and shiny, the fingers immobile.
She had been here while I slept.
Erlik was circling her.
Not quickly. Every step deliberate, hands clasped behind his back, his gaze taking her apart piece by piece. He had all the time in the world and he wanted her to know it.
He glanced up when I scrambled to my feet—registered me the way you register a sound you were already expecting—and said nothing.
My mother's eyes found mine.
"What the fuck did you do to her."
It didn't come out as a question.
"Good morning." Erlik sounded genuinely pleased.
"You slept for six hours. I was starting to think you'd opted out of the rest of the proceedings.
" He glanced at my mother with mild appraisal.
"She's been remarkably composed, actually.
You should be proud. Most people start making considerably more noise much earlier. "
I hit the barrier so hard my shoulder went numb.
It didn't move. It never moved. I hit it again and my shadows tore out of me in every direction and dissolved against it like smoke against glass and I hit it again anyway because there was nothing else to do—
"Careful." He didn't stop walking his slow circuit. "You'll hurt yourself. And then we'll have matching sets."
"Get her out of that—"
"I'm walking," he said patiently. "I've been in this room for some time and I need to move. It's a very large room. You'd understand if you hadn't spent the night unconscious on the floor."
I slammed both fists into the barrier. The impact split the skin across my knuckles — I felt it open, felt the blood come, felt the shadows surge through the wounds like they could succeed where bone had failed. The barrier swallowed everything. Gave nothing back. Not even an echo.
My mother had not looked away from me since I woke. Her jaw was set so hard I could see the muscle working in her cheek. She was not looking at him. She was staring directly at me with the focused, inward expression of someone whose concentration was the only thing keeping them functional.
Don't look down. I understood it suddenly—the angle of her chin, the rigid hold of her neck.
She was keeping her head deliberately level.
The cage sat at her throat with its inner collar of short angled thorns—I could see them now, the way the lowest row was positioned—and the calculation was simple and merciless.
Any downward movement of the chin. Any drop of the head.
Any bend of the knees significant enough to shift the angle.
I looked at her broken fingers and understood that whatever he had done to them had not been enough to make her fall.
"The agreement," Erlik said. "From last night. I believe we were in the middle of a conversation before you decided to take a nap."
"Let her go and we can talk."
"Let her go and we can talk." He repeated it thoughtfully, as though testing the sentence for structural integrity.
"No, I don't think so. I find the current arrangement focuses the mind wonderfully.
Yours specifically." He tilted his head.
"My offer still stands. I'm generous to a fault—Kaan always said so, right before he told me to go straight to hell, which I found geographically confused but emotionally coherent.
" He paused. "You remind me of him sometimes.
He had that same expression. The one that says you've decided to be difficult as a matter of principle. "
"There's no agreement."
"Hm." He looked at my mother. Said simply: "Down."
Something happened that I didn't see him do. My mother's knees buckled—violently, involuntarily—and she wrenched herself back upright with a sound that came out of somewhere below language, raw and stripped of everything, and the thorn-collar—
She recovered. She held. She stood.
Her broken fingers had hit the side of her thigh when her knees went and the sound she made told me exactly how much that cost her. She stood.
"Nothing to agree to," I said. The words came out steady. I made them steady. "You want leverage over me, you've wasted your time. My mother ran from you for two hundred years. You think a cage changes—"
"I think," he said pleasantly, "that you've been awake for less than three minutes and you're already making speeches.
It's very endearing. Kaan did that too." He began walking again.
"The problem with speeches is they require a conviction that you actually have options.
You don't. You've established that. Your shadows can't reach me, you can't reach me, you spent all night looking for an exit and I suspect you've concluded there isn't one.
" He glanced at me sideways, almost amused.
"So the speeches are really just a way of telling yourself you're still fighting.
Which I respect. But they don't change the room. "
"Then what does."
"Agreement." He said it simply. "That's all.
We're not enemies, Hakan—that's not what this is.
I don't want to damage you. You're too valuable and frankly too interesting.
" He stopped walking, turned to face me fully.
"But you need to understand something about the way things work here, in this realm, in this family.
So." He spread his hands. "We're going to continue your education.
And you're going to tell me when you've learned what I need you to learn. "
He crossed to my mother.
"Don't." The word came out before I could stop it—not a threat this time. Something rawer than a threat. "Don't touch her again."
He looked at me over his shoulder with an expression that was almost kind.
"I told you," he said. "I'm not teaching her. I'm teaching you."
He put two fingers against my mother's broken hand.
She made a sound that lasted less than a second before she killed it — bit down on it, swallowed it, forced her face back into stillness through sheer will while her whole body shook with the effort.
It was the most controlled thing I had ever seen a person do and it destroyed me more completely than any scream would have.
I was hitting the barrier. I know I was because my hands were bleeding—the skin split across the knuckles, the impacts going numb past a certain point—and I know it wasn't doing anything because it never did anything and he had told me it never would, but I kept doing it anyway because the alternative was standing still and I could not stand still.
"Stop. Stop it. Stop. I'll—whatever you want—all of it—just stop—"
He stepped back from her. Just stepped back, hands loose at his sides, and watched me with those bottomless eyes.
"Tell me that again," he said. "Slower."
I stopped hitting the barrier.
My hands were shaking. I looked at them and made them stop and looked back at him.
"Whatever you want," I said. "All of it. Your terms. I won't fight them."
He studied my face for a long moment.
Then he said: "Not yet."
I stared at him.