15. Everett
Everett
SEVEN YEARS AGO
“Are you sure you’re ready for this?” Songbird called through the hole in the wall.
I nodded, then remembered she couldn’t see me. “Ready.” I kept my eyes trained on the hole. In the next second, a peanut came racing through. I opened my mouth and ducked low to try and catch it, but it fell short and hit me on the chin.
“Missed again,” I called. “How many has that been now? Five?”
“Oh, like you could do so much better.” I heard the eye roll in her voice.
“I mean, I can. Obviously.”
“Prove it,” she taunted. Her gold eye found mine right before she backed away. All I could see was a flash of blonde hair as her head tilted back.
I took one of my peanuts and closed my left eye, aiming at the hole in the stone. When I had it lined up, I flicked my wrist and sent it flying. There was a scuffling sound, then a pause. “Got it!” she exclaimed.
“I told you,” I said. “We’ve almost gone through all my nuts.”
She chuckled, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
It had been four weeks since she was brought here and her mother was captured trying to rescue her.
It took me nearly two to get her to talk again.
With some coaxing, I finally got the songbird to come out of her silence.
We started playing this game a few nights ago when the guards brought dinner.
Food in the cells always varied. Tonight was a cup of water and a plate of peanuts with moldy fruit on the side.
I took a small rock and carved another crude line into the floor. One thousand, six hundred and nine now. All identical, except for the line from twenty-eight days ago, where I’d drawn a star next to it.
“I’ll just have to give you some of my nuts next time, Swift,” she remarked, her voice muffled as she crunched on a peanut.
I shook my head with a smirk. “You’re ridiculous.”
But then a clanging sound came from her cell, and her eye quickly disappeared from the hole.
“Songbird,” I hissed. No reply. Then a different voice echoed off the stone.
“Hello, little bird,” Mortep purred at her. Dismay crashed through me. He hadn’t come to her cell since the breakout attempt. He’d taken me back to his labs several times, but never her. I hoped maybe she’d be spared.
“Mortep,” she said, voice sharp. I pressed my ear to the hole to hear better. “What are you doing here? Where’s my mother? I swear to the Fates, if you hurt her—”
“Me? My dear, I believe it was your mother who mutilated our men,” he said, tutting. “Her actions warranted the ultimate price.”
Songbird choked through her words. “Is she—did he—”
“However, Lord Scarven has pardoned her actions, as a birthday present to you. She has been banished from Drakorum and allowed to keep her life.”
“He did what?” she barked. “Where did she go? I have to see her, please. I have to make sure—”
“You should be thanking Lord Scarven for sparing her,” Mortep said coolly. “Now, no more questions. Come here.”
I looked through the small opening again, but all I could see was the back of her head. There was a scuffle, and then she snarled, “Get away from me!”
“I’m simply unlocking your handcuffs, unless you’d like to keep them on?”
A pause. “Are—are you letting me go?” And then, in a small, hopeful voice, she added, “Can I go with her?”
Mortep chuckled, and my lips curled in disgust. I hated that sound. “Not quite,” he said. Chains rattled when he took her cuffs off. A bright flash of light made me rear back from the hole in surprise.
Then Mortep said, “Good try, but your magic won’t work on me, little bird. I’ve placed a protective charm around myself.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised that the second she got her cuffs off, she attacked him. A smirk crept up my lips. She was such a fighter.
Songbird growled, and I heard feet slapping on stone before—bang. Her body shot back into my line of sight and slouched against the wall with a groan. I wished I could see clearly what was happening. All the sounds with no visuals made the suspense much worse.
Mortep tsked. “That won’t work either. You’re stuck in here, I’m afraid.”
“What do you want?” she asked, more pained this time. “What else can you possibly take from me?”
“I just need to run a little test. Your magic is unprecedented. Lord Scarven and I want to see how strong it’s still measuring after a month in the containment cuffs.”
“Why don’t you take your little charm off, and we can test it right here,” she bit out.
“I admire your spirit,” Mortep crooned. “But this will be unpleasant.”
A sharp crack echoed through the cell, followed by her cry. I jerked away from the wall like I’d been burned, fingers clenched in a ball so tight, my jagged nails cut through skin. There was another crack, and Songbird groaned.
“Three and a half seconds. Very impressive,” Mortep said. “Your healing abilities are quick, but I believe I retrieved enough of a sample. Your blood will be very useful to our analysis.”
He always did this. It was as if he was so fascinated by his own Alchemy and hypotheses that he couldn’t help but share it out loud, talking us through his process like we were nothing but property or an interesting piece of rock he was studying.
“Does that mean it’s over?” she croaked.
“Almost.” The cell bars clanged again, and Mortep said, “Give it to her.”
More wrestling. I switched to press my other eye against the hole. There was a dark outline of three figures on the opposite side of her cell.
“What do you mean?” she asked frantically. “What are you giving me?”
“Ground wormwood and hemlock soaked in spring water and strained. I’ve found it to be far more effective when administered straight into the bloodstream,” Mortep explained in his clinical demeanor. “Now, hold still.”
“Effective for wh—” Songbird’s question was cut off by a loud cry. “Wh-what’s happening? What are you doing to me?”
My stomach churned. I had a feeling I knew what was coming.
“Your Shifter blood allows you to heal too easily. This will temporarily disable those abilities,” Mortep said. “Bring me the brand.”
I closed my eyes and swallowed. I wished I could say something, do something, or get far enough away to block out the sounds of what came next.
My fingers traced the rough edges of the scar on my forearm.
The burn had healed eventually, but the 72 was still etched into the skin, now a dull pink over the years.
Her whimpers were the first sign. “Please, no—please don’t do this—pl—” Her words turned into a scream, and even through the stone, I heard the sound of sizzling flesh.
The scent of hot embers and iron coated the inside of my nose, and her shrieks rattled around in my brain.
I had to grit my teeth to refrain from shouting, knowing anything I said or did could be used against either one of us.
When the sizzling sound faded, her screams dissolved into pants.
“There we go. Perfect,” Mortep said. “You and I are going to make such progress together, little bird.” More metal clattered, and suddenly her silhouette was back in my field of vision as Mortep chained her to the wall. Her body was limp, her hair hanging down and shielding her face.
“Rest,” Mortep said, his voice unnaturally soft. “You’ll need your strength for what’s to come.”
Footsteps padded from the cell, until the only sound was her frantic breaths. My head was glued to the hole in the wall like my stare would magically make her move. “Just breathe, Songbird,” I whispered. “Breathe with me. It’ll pass, you just have to breathe.”
She inhaled and exhaled in choked spurts as I guided her in deep breaths, in and out. Slowly, they became steadier, and she seemed to settle.
“Can you talk?” I asked.
There was nothing at first. And then, “I—I’m okay.”
I exhaled slowly. That was the furthest thing from the truth; nothing about this was okay. Closing my eyes, I leaned my forehead to the stone above the hole. “I’m so sorry.”
After four years down here, I knew that was the least helpful thing someone could say. My sympathy didn’t make anything better. It didn’t change the fact that her mother was banished.
I stayed there, pressed to the wall. “Mine took a couple months to heal, but it stops hurting in a few days,” I said quietly, thinking of the magical brand. “I promise, it gets better.”
“Why have you been so nice to me?” she asked. “From the very first day, even when you didn’t know me.”
The question caught me off guard. “Good people don’t need a reason to be kind to those who are hurting.”
“Anyone who’s kind to me always wants something.” She sniffed, then winced with a sharp inhale. A moment later, she added, “My brother always said not to trust someone unless you know exactly what they’ll gain by betraying you.”
“I don’t want anything from you, except…I don’t know, just someone to talk to.” I shrugged. “It’s been nice.”
“You like talking to me?”
“It’s slightly better than the wall.”
At that, she actually chuckled, which took a weight off my chest. “And throwing peanuts at myself wasn’t nearly as much fun,” I added.
“Well, I may not be able to beat you at that, but at least my number’s higher.” She sighed. “Mine says one hundred ninety four.”
My humor faded into the shadows. “I’m sorry, Songbird,” I murmured. “About today and about your mother. What she did was so brave. I can see where you get it from.”
She scoffed. “Look where that got her. It wasn’t worth it. She should’ve stayed away.”
“She’s your mother. She loves you, and a love like that…it defies logic. It defies your own sense of survival. You can’t blame her for trying to rescue you.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But it doesn’t change the fact that if it weren’t for me, she’d still be home with my brother. She’d be safe.”
I shook my head, even though she couldn’t see me. “You can’t let them convince you any of this is your fault. If you want to be sad, be sad. If you want to be angry, be furious. But not at yourself. At them. You don’t deserve any of this.”
“Neither did she,” she whispered. “Neither do you.”
We sat in the quiet for a few minutes. That was one thing that had gotten better since she arrived—the silence. Before, it was always filled with dread. The passing of time between moments where I’d feel more pain. But now, sitting in silence with her on the other end made it not seem so bad.
“He said something about a birthday present,” I said slowly. “Is that today?”
“Mhmm,” she hummed. “My sixteenth. Mama was planning a party. Nothing fancy, of course. We aren’t allowed to have much to ourselves. But she was so excited.” She cleared her throat, but it didn’t hide the sound of her tears.
Another beat of silence. “What did you do last year? For your birthday?” I asked.
“I went flying.”
“Flying?”
“Yeah. My Shifter form…” She paused again, the way she always did when we talked about her magic.
“I’m a type of bird, like my mother. Scarven wouldn’t let us leave the property, but I got to fly around in the nearby fields last year.
It’s the most incredible feeling.” She took a deep breath, then let it out slowly.
“What about you? What’s the last birthday you did something for? ”
I thought about it for a moment. “I was thirteen. My mother made the pear and vanilla cake I asked for, and friends from the village came over to race rowboats at the shore.” I pressed my lips together, desperate for a taste of that cake or to see my mother’s smile again. “That was back before the epidemic.”
“The epidemic?” she asked. “Is that what killed your parents?”
“Yeah. It hit fast, too. Wiped out so much of Iluze. They think it was some sort of pollution in the seawater we all used, but I guess I’ll never know for sure.
Sometimes, I—” I cut myself off and scratched the back of my neck.
She was so easy to talk to that I forgot I was speaking out loud, letting words I’d never voiced before come to the surface.
“Sometimes, you what?” she prompted.
I straightened my back. “I wish—I wish I’d died with them. It would’ve been better than this.”
Silence. The awkward, heavy, stretched-too-thin kind that made me wonder if I said something wrong.
And then her finger appeared in the hole, barely sticking out past the stone in my cell.
I blinked, slowly raising my finger to touch the tip of hers.
Warmth spread over my arm from the point of contact.
“Well, I’m glad you exist, Swift,” she murmured. “Whether it was five years ago, today, or a decade from now. I’m glad you existed at all.”