CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“I am ready,” I insisted. I was eighteen—how much longer did Bellan intend to wait before unleashing me on the fools stupid enough to murder my family?
“No,” he said, sparing me a cursory glance over the document he was perusing. “You are not.”
My gaze darted between Griffon and Davina, my mouth going dry.
One of the males who had been on my guard gripped Beck around the elbow.
His protests were wholly ignored as they filed out with Laney and a couple other guards, leaving me alone with Griffon and our archon.
I shuddered at the realization that this female I barely knew was now my sovereign.
Griffon joined me to face Davina. He had schooled his expression into boredom, but his body was drawn tight.
The Archon leaned back on her throne. “I understand you stole a pair of rounders,” she said calmly. Her gaze pointedly shifted to me—my eyes—and I stiffened.
Griffon inclined his chin. “I did.”
She glanced between us. “Given you were gone for five days and left Laney behind, I can only assume you saw fit to provoke who is arguably the most powerful human in Privalt on her behalf. And without my blessing. Correct me if I am wrong.”
Silence so thick I could drown in it was her only answer.
She sighed heavily. “Were the rounders at least successful in preventing further damage to our relations with humanity?”
“He believes Lydia a human,” Griffon replied.
I almost laughed at the evasive answer. Not untrue, but there was the little nugget about him blowing said relations sky-high. Clearly, he didn’t recognize lying by omission to be a lie at all.
Her onyx eyes shifted to me. “Were you aware of the value of what you accepted?”
I froze. Shit. I knew so little of their laws and the punishments for breaking them. Had no idea how deep the sea of shit we were wading through was. The little box tucked into my pocket burned like a hot coal.
I straightened my shoulders and opened my mouth to accept my fate.
Griffon beat me to it. “I explained little of what they were and nothing of their value.” Or…perhaps he knew exactly what lies he spun.
I whipped toward him. “What?” I snapped.
Both of their heads turned to me.
“Are you saying he is lying?” Davina asked. Her tone was deathly calm.
Griffon eyed Davina’s averted gaze before giving me a tiny jerk of his head. My breath left me in a rush. It would be worse—so much worse—if he were caught lying.
“No.” I returned my attention to the Archon. “I’m just confused. I was under the impression you fuckers were crawling around every city and village like rats with these things. Now they’re something valuable?”
I kept my face somewhere between neutral and bewildered as she glanced between the two of us, her eyes narrowed. They settled on Griffon again. “Ten lashes,” she said. “To be administered in the courtyard in an hour.”
“What?” I barked again. “You adopted that barbaric practice?” I’d seen enough whippings to know how awful they were. How deep the whip could bite.
Davina turned a knowing smile on me. “You will find that things common between our two peoples originated with us, not humans. It is difficult to punish a gargoyle without resorting to outright cruelty, given how quickly we heal. As I’m sure you realized after your ordeal in the gatehouse, broken bones heal the quickest. But a flesh wound?
Not so much, unless it is likely to be fatal.
Our bodies know what is important to heal—what is necessary to keep fighting—and what can wait.
We discovered long ago that a whip carves a deep enough wound to serve as adequate punishment for minor infractions.
” Her gaze swung back to Griffon. “I would not consider what you did minor. My sentence is a boon.”
“Thank you.” Griffon dipped his chin again. Submissive bastard. But he’d lied to her. For me. “May I speak with you, first?” His eyes darted to me. “Alone.” His fingers danced at his sides.
“You’re dismissed,” Davina said to me.
I stared at Griffon for a second longer, my brows knitted from his acceptance of a punishment I’d earned just as much as he had.
He didn’t so much as glance at me. Without another choice, I turned and left.
My footsteps echoed through the chamber all the way to the wing doors.
I shut them softly behind me and flattened my palms against the cool wood.
Their muffled voices reached me, but I couldn’t decipher the words.
I tossed a glance behind me. Beck waited in the corridor with two of my former guards flanking him. Graham and…Jude? Beck’s face was twisted with something between fear and impatience, his arms crossed over his chest. Laney leaned against the wall behind them, her features drawn tight.
I held up a finger to Beck’s guards. Their expressions shifted into something that was far closer to pure annoyance.
“Tirian,” Davina’s voice called louder.
The gargoyle stationed to my right peeled off the wall and eyed me pointedly. I backed up so he could open the door.
“Bring me Cade,” Davina ordered.
Tirian nodded and set off down the hall.
It was a veritable eternity before he returned, a third from my guard in tow.
Cade went inside, while Tirian resumed his post. I mashed my ear against the door but was still met with a steady stream of garbled words.
I growled my frustration at not knowing what was happening. Silence fell and I stopped breathing.
The wet thud of a whip cleaving flesh shattered the quiet. I jerked back. Griffon’s soft grunt filtered through the door.
The whip sang again, its harsh tone truncated by the staccato notes of Griffon’s splitting flesh and his pained grunts.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Whoosh, thud, grunt.
Whoosh, thud, grunt. Over and over, like the melody of some fucked-up song.
I dropped my forehead to the door and counted. Five. Six. Seven.
By the eighth I couldn’t listen anymore. I spun around and grabbed Beck’s arm, ignoring the pointed question posed by his gaping mouth at what he’d just witnessed. His two guards fell into step behind us as I dragged him back to my room.
I tugged him through the door and slammed it shut on the guards. The moment I turned around, Beck tugged me into the circle of his arms and crushed me against his chest.
I don’t know how long we stood there. Ten minutes.
Fifteen. Just breathing in each other’s air.
His fingers brushed the back of my skull in steady strokes as mine kneaded into his back, a constant reassurance that he was real.
That he was here. I relaxed with every moment I spent in his arms, but it had the opposite effect on him; his breathing grew more and more rapid the longer we stood there.
He squeezed me hard enough to hurt, and there was an odd sense of finality in the gesture. He extricated himself from the tangle of our limbs and darted for the window, his strides stilted. The panes rattled in their frames with how hard he flung it open.
I cocked my head as he leaned out far enough to topple. “What’re you doing?” Enough of his scent—that comforting concoction of parchment, leather, and ink—lingered that I could smell him from across the room.
He didn’t bother to answer before whistling, two short, quick bursts that were lost in the wind and snow. He rose to his considerable height and held out his arm. It was a pose I’d seen a thousand times.
“Oh,” I muttered. “Of course.”
Astra, his pet hawk, swooped through the window and landed on his forearm.
Her slate-gray feathers blended with the monotoned mountains well enough that I’d be shocked if anyone had noticed her.
Beck untied a bundle from around her leg and scratched into the feathers around her neck.
She tilted her head and chirped before nibbling on his finger in greeting.
“Good girl,” he said. “Now, hold.”
She hopped around and launched out the window in a flurry of feathers.
Beck crossed the room in a few long strides. His fingers shook as he fumbled with the knotted twine that was wrapped around the bundle. “Come on, come on, come on,” he murmured. A noticeable sigh sagged his shoulders as it rolled open in his palm. “Here.”
He shoved a sprig of annuleaf into my hand and popped another in his mouth.
“I don’t know what in all the Fade is going on here, or what half of what they said meant, but you can tell me later.
Do you know your way around this place well enough to get to the ground level without being seen after you kill the two guards outside?
” His eyes narrowed on my torso. “What the hell are you wearing? Where is your armor?”
I ignored his slew of questions and stared at the herb in my open palm. My gaze flicked to the door, then up to Beck’s expectant face. “I can’t.”
His mouth fell open. “What do you mean, you can’t? Lydia, let’s go!”
“I mean, I can’t!” I set the annuleaf on top of the comically large mound in his palm. He balked, the color in his cheeks fading to an ashen gray. “Beck, they know something about Solstice. I can’t leave until I find out what it is.”
He schooled his expression into a blank mask. My nostrils flared. I knew that look. It was the same one he turned on an aid or an assistant who had just said something stupid. The one he wore when he knew he possessed the superior intellect, but was trying to be nice about it.
“Lydia,” he said softly.
“Don’t ‘Lydia’ me,” I hissed. “I’m not an idiot.”
“You can’t believe a word they say!” he pressed. “Especially about Solstice. You know that! What the hell has happened? Why weren’t you in the dungeon? I figured I’d have to somehow sneak you annuleaf through bars, if you were even godsdamned alive, not hand it over in some cushy bedroom?”
My voice dropped an octave. “You were held in the dungeon?”
He threw his hands up. “Yes! Why weren’t you? Where the hell were you the past day?”
Panic gripped my chest. But Beck had never left me.
Not after the people I’d killed. Or the times I’d pounded on his door in the middle of the night, drenched in blood and begging for the sanctuary of his body.
Not through the tears, or breakdowns, or the endless nights of plotting and scheming and vowing death on every last person responsible for Solstice.
But my blood? This whole mess? Would he even be able to look at me after this?
“Lydia?”
“Nothing has happened. I mean—fuck, that’s a lie.
” I met his light-almond eyes. So different from Griffon’s dark brown that gobbled up the light and sucked me in with it.
“A lot. A lot has happened.” I drew a deep breath and forced my lips to form the words that would condemn me. “I have to tell you—”
A sharp rap rattled the door and I whipped toward it. I snatched the pile of annuleaf out of Beck’s hand and shoved it deep into a pocket of my cloak.
“Wait, give me some!” he hissed.
I shook my head. The betrayal that twisted his face lanced my chest, but I turned away and flung the door open. Griffon lounged against the frame. The only indications of the ordeal he had just suffered were a tightness around his eyes and the new shirt that clung to his body.
He glared at Beck, then dragged that intoxicating gaze to me. “Just because your fuck buddy has come for a little visit doesn’t mean you get out of training.”