Chapter 49 #2
His eyes slide to the man to my right, and Chryse fidgets in his seat. “He is my contribution.”
My father sees the question in my eyes. “Each of the leaders must provide a person of interest as a symbol of their loyalty to the new alliance. Chryse wanted a particular gift, and I wanted Vad. For you.”
I don’t like this. Either the way the room is eerily quiet as they watch me, or the way Vad is cowering before me.
I’ve had enough run-ins with him to know the man is as arrogant as they come.
But now, kneeling before me, his eyes are lifeless when he looks up at me, as if he’s already accepted his fate.
“How gracious,” I say, dismissing him with a wave of my hand. “Put him in the dungeons.”
Chuckles sound from around the room, and my father smiles indulgently as he leans forward. “That’s not how it works.”
He crooks a finger and the soldiers jerk Vad away, pressing him across the low-lying table before us, making drinking glasses rattle across the surface.
Only then does fear register on Vad’s face, head hanging off the side of the table, eyes wide as he looks at me.
He throws his gift at my mind and I startle at the unexpected pressure as he tries to get inside.
He’s weak. I’ve struggled to keep him out when he’s tried in the past, but this is a pathetic whisper in comparison.
My father stands. “Millenia ago, Heirs were worshipped as gods,” he says, striding toward the hearth.
“The bloodlines were pure and cross-breeding with the giftless was considered a crime against Mother Nature.” He lifts a hearthstone dagger from the mantle.
A long blade with an ornate handle carved from an elk’s antlers.
“And the more diluted the blood became, the weaker the gifts when they awakened. As magic became more and more common, Heirs weren’t held with the same regard as the rulers of the past.” He turns and looks at me.
“We’ve become so fixated on fighting among ourselves, we forgot who we are. ”
Vad’s gift continues to slam into the barrier of my mind. “Heirs,” I clarify.
“Kings,” my father says.
I lift a brow. “Are queens not allowed?”
“Absolutely,” he answers, as if my question is ridiculous. “Of our choosing, of course.” He moves around the table toward Vad, sitting on the table beside him as a soldier keeps a hand on the back of Vad’s neck. “You see, when Heirs reigned, their magic was the ultimate currency.”
Someone hands my father a bowl and he places it beneath Vad’s hunched form. Vad’s magic claws at the outside of my mind, desperately digging to get inside.
“A trade of gifts,” I say.
“Yes,” my father answers, pleased by my deduction. “But by our design.”
He produces a stone from his pocket that fits in his palm, a mineral I don’t recognize.
There’s no metal in it that I can identify.
Then the light hits it just right, and the green swirls luminate in the otherwise gray object.
There’s only one place I’ve seen the same colors and patterns before.
It’s the same mixture of green that was in the slab the healer in Roison forced me to hold Jovie to when she was bleeding out in the middle of her awakening.
Somewhere deep in the forest of Roison, under the illusion of the healer’s husband.
“This is a slatstone,” my father says, rotating the rock in his hand. “The most valuable and rare stone found on this earth.”
I’m careful to remain stoic. “Doesn’t look like much.”
My father’s smile is wicked. “It can draw out someone’s magic if you know where it’s at.”
No one would give up that information unless … “Torture?” I ask.
He nods. “Usually.”
“He wouldn’t give up that kind of information easily,” I say, motioning to Vad with a tip of my chin.
“No, he wouldn’t,” my father agrees, holding the tip of the dark blade to the side of Vad’s neck. “But thanks to your sister, she was able to tell me exactly where to look.”
Horror settles in my bones at the realization of why, exactly, my father wanted Beau. Only she has the ability to identify the location of a person’s magic, as evidenced when she told Jovie where to aim her own hearthstone blade during their betrayal.
But I didn’t hand over Beau. I handed over Irina, and she has no such ability.
My heart skips a beat when my father pierces the skin of Vad’s neck, the edge slicing across his jugular, sending blood spraying from the laceration. It splashes across my shins before the pressure reduces to a steady flow to the ground, pooling inside the bowl.
With a sickening horror, Vad continues to fight to get inside my mind, all the while knowing he’s going to die. It terrifies me enough that I let him in. Not all the way, just enough to know what he’s so adamant to tell me as he spends his dying breaths.
And it’s an image.
Wait. A memory.
His own as he looks up at Beau. She’s chained in the dungeons.
But he, too, knows it’s not my sister but Irina, his gift as an oracle able to see the truth inside her mind.
The guard yells at her to hurry as my father stands to the side, watching.
She flinches but doesn’t look away from Vad’s stare.
In quick succession, her thoughts reveal our plans to him.
Our intentions to kill them all. Which, apparently, was Vad’s plan all along.
He had seen the depravity in the mind of one of the commanders when we were children.
When he escaped to Roison, he didn’t mean to give away our location. It was an accident.
All the while he’s projecting the truth to my mind, I watch as he struggles to breathe, the blood gurgling in his throat, and I know there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
I swallow the knot forming in my throat, the burn of emotion I work to keep down as I watch him struggle through his last breaths.
How did we get here? Why didn’t you show me then? Why now? I ask him from my thoughts.
He answers my unspoken and pained questions with an image of me at camp.
Standing next to my father who I was staring at in adoration.
Then again, as an adult, in the wood with Jovie when I wouldn’t let him into my mind.
Then we’re back in the dungeons, and it was there, on the soaked ground of the dungeons, that he made the decision to tell her the truth, knowing what would happen to her if he lied …
… and his hope that we can do what he’s been unable to achieve, and that’s kill every bastard in this room.
I promise him that I will. Swear it on my life from my mind to his. And it’s as if he finally relents to his fate, shoulders caving into the flat of the table. But there’s one more memory he sends me.
This time it’s mine. The memory he had plucked from my mind years ago, when we met in the woods and he asked to have access to my thoughts in exchange for directions to a healer nearby to save Jovie.
He chose a memory following my mother’s death, or, rather, what I believed was her death.
When my father called me into this very sitting room, having never done so before, and offered me my first drink.
It’s that memory that flickers through my mind until Vad’s heart begins to slow and he can no longer afford the energy to use his gift.
My father moves forward, motioning for the glass in my hand.
I hand the glass to my father and he holds it underneath the flow of blood.
Vad’s eyes droop closed, each breath slower and longer than the last, and I never thought I’d feel sick to my stomach watching the death of a man I’ve wanted to kill for nearly half my life.
It’s not until my father holds the stone over the wound, the drops of blood slowing in the crystal of the glass, that I catch the glisten in the light.
My breath catches at the beautiful tendril of essence flowing from the gash toward the stone like a living entity.
It encases the stone, swirling and pulsating with life.
Vad’s features begin to wither. Skin and muscle decaying and turning gray as the magic continues to be pulled from his body until there’s nothing left. Only then does his chest finally still, never to expand with breath again, the last drops of blood fall into the glass.
My father holds up the writhing magic covering the stone in his hand. “This, my son, is what separates the ones who make the decisions from those who abide by them.”
He drops the stone with the glistening flow of magic into the glass. He swishes the blood around before plucking the stone from the glass, now magicless. Then holds the glass out to me.
“I have no desire to hold the gift of an oracle,” I say, panic-stricken, but somehow emotionless. “I’d rather gouge my eyes out than read people’s minds.”
“Like all things of this world, it just takes practice,” he says, glass still suspended in his hand between us. “You’ll master it in no time.”
I don’t move. I try to conjure any excuse or way out of this, but this is very obviously an initiation of sorts.
Every man in this room is waiting for my decision.
If I don’t drink it, the consequences will be far-reaching.
The tamest thing would be the dungeons. The worst …
is chained to the bed in my godsdamn room.
Leaning forward, I take the glass from my father, and it’s as if he releases the tension in his body with a sigh of relief. I inspect the glass, half a finger full of blood. “Was wine not sufficient?”
There’re a few chuckles, my father’s grin when he tells me the magic won’t release from the stone without a host. The blood tricks it into letting go. I sniff it and my face contorts from the foul scent. More chuckles ignite around the room, the mood getting lighter as I accept the inevitable.
Fuck it.
Placing the rim of glass to my mouth, I toss the contents to the back of my throat and swallow, clenching my teeth to stop it from coming right back up. But after a few breaths, the same warmth that I’m used to accompanying my own magic makes my head spin.
They applaud.
They fucking applaud as they stand around to take turns patting me on the back, to congratulate me on my newfound power.
Vad’s body seems forgotten where it leans over the cocktail table.
I’m off-kilter and my father tells me it’s the effect of the magic entering my bloodstream.
It’s not long before they drag in another man.
The source of Chryse’s requested gift, I realize, and I watch as they hold the man to the same table beside Vad’s body.
I watch as Chryse digs the hearthstone dagger into the man’s chest and uses the stone to remove his magic.
It’s the correct location and I surmise it must have been given under duress.
I think I ask to be excused and somehow get my feet beneath me before I stagger out of the room.
The next thing I know, I’m puking behind a bust.