Chapter Four
We travel to Seth’s camp by boat, moving swiftly upstream with a wind-born at the sails.
Nithyria controls this section of river, and the traffic on it is heavy during the day.
I’m allowed to walk the deck freely, having come of my own accord and there being nowhere I can run except into the crocodile-infested waters.
My brother’s people never lose sight of me, but they largely leave me alone, likely on Seth’s orders. All of them except for one, that is.
He’s a brutish man with flat, squished features that seem too small for his broad face, one of the fire-born that attacked the Umbra. I hate the leering way he looks at me, the way his eyes linger on my body as I walk by him.
And I hate him even more when he opens his mouth. “Heard you like the taste of Selaran cock,” he says. “What’s the matter? Sucked off so many Nithyrians you got bored?”
The others just laugh as he mocks me. I know his opinion is the common one even if he’s the only one brave enough to voice it.
“It’s hard to get sick of something that barely exists,” I say. I hold up my pinky finger. “When this is all you’ve got, no wonder I had to look elsewhere.”
He barrels across the deck and backhands me hard for that one. My jaw burns from the contact as my head jerks to the side, and my lip splits from impact with my teeth. I spit blood from my mouth and then stare back up at him, defiant.
It was worth it.
Seth’s camp is upriver from Adria’s by several miles, perched just on the edge of the Machair Wastes.
The rear legions of our troops complain loudly about the hard riding they’ve done to cross the mountains and the Wastes in just a few short days, and I understand why, having completed the same journey in a carriage a few months earlier.
I have no doubt that Seth’s pace was even more relentless.
Seth’s lackeys bring me to a tent of green canvas with a number of decorative flourishes that seem wholly unnecessary for the battlefield: scalloped edges, sashes, golden trim.
This can be none other than Seth’s tent itself—no one, not even our fallen minor nobility, would go to the trouble to show off during a war except Seth.
I expect him to greet me and then chain me up with the dogs like Adria did, but he isn’t inside.
The tent is furnished as finely as the antechamber to Ronan’s throne room and in a similar style—heavy Nithyrian wood chairs around an intricately carved table, rugs woven in deep blues, shelves stacked with books and scrolls, and even what appears to be a full-size feather bed at the back.
Gods, he made someone carry all this over the mountain for him.
There’s a pillar in the center to hold the canvas up, and that’s where Seth’s men chain me. The brute that slapped me takes his time with it, grabbing onto my legs to hold me still while I struggle away from him.
“Quit squirming, cunt, or you’ll get what’s coming to you,” he says, grabbing at his crotch. He leans close enough that I can smell the stench of his breath and says quietly so that only I can hear, “Or maybe I’ll give you that either way. Teach you what a real man is like.”
“Well, this is unfortunate,” says a voice from behind the man.
I know that voice. It’s cold, slippery, and laced with malice.
“Sir, I was just—”
“I can see what ‘you were just’ about to do perfectly well. Hand, please.”
Seth strides into the tent, letting the curtains fall closed behind him. He flicks his hand towards the candles around the room in turn, lighting them without even looking to see where his flame goes, and then he lights a fire in a wooden stove not far from me in the same way.
The flames dance as they come to life, casting strange shadows on the brute’s face, which has drained of all its color.
Seth doesn’t look exactly like me, as the twin from Octavia’s crew claimed.
In fact, the older he gets, the more he looks like my father, sometimes so much so that the only thing that stops me from believing that Ronan lied and that Father truly survived their duel is his brown eyes. None of us got our father’s blue.
He isn’t quite as tall as Father was either, but he’s close, and his hair is a little darker, an ashy color that’s brown in some lights and blond in others.
But the way he stands now in his Nithyrian chainmail with an effortless authority is Father through and through.
There’s an unwavering confidence to him that can seem charming at first, but that becomes more and more alarming as you realize just how far he intends to go.
“Hand,” he says again, his voice almost bored.
The brute pulls himself up gracelessly, stumbling back and nearly knocking over a stack of books on the floor. “Please, sir—”
The man is considerably larger—both taller and broader—than Seth, but when Seth takes him by the right arm, he does not resist. “I think you ought to address her. Ask her. See what she says.”
The brute hunches under Seth’s cruel grasp as Seth slams his arm onto the table in front of me so that the hand dangles in the air. Oh, gods. I know what he’s going to do.
“Please, miss,” says the brute, unable to even look at me.
He’s crying now, tears streaming down his flat cheeks, but I feel no pity for him.
I doubt I’m the first woman he has threatened in such a way.
“I’m a good fighter,” he says to Seth, not to me.
“You need good fighters right now. And I need my hand to fight.”
“He’s got a point,” says Seth with some mirth. The whole situation seems to be amusing him greatly. “What do you think, little sister? Do you think if I let him keep the hand, he can keep it to himself?”
Truthfully, I doubt it, but I can’t stand to see this kind of brutality. “Just—can you put him on the front lines or something? And get him away from me.”
“Hear that?” says Seth. “She’s willing to let it slide. How nice of my sister. How noble. Tell her thank you.”
The brute is sobbing too hard to pay Seth any attention.
“I said, ‘Tell her thank you.’ Do it now, before I change my mind.” Seth rolls his head back with all the drama and ennui of a child being asked to put their toys away, as if he had big plans today to play outside and the man is inconveniencing him by making him do this.
“Thank you, oh gods, thank you, miss—”
The brute’s words are cut short as Seth slices his hand off clean at the wrist, the movement of his sword so brutally quick I barely see it. The man screams and thrashes, and Seth releases him, blood squirting everywhere.
“She’s my FUCKING SISTER, you imbecile! You laid hands on my fucking sister.”
There’s that rage. Seth’s shoulders shake as he yells, his anger reaching its full potential in mere moments.
Or at least, I thought it was his full potential.
A splash of the man’s blood lands on Seth’s face, and I watch as another level of malevolence reaches his eyes.
“And now you’re making a mess of my tent!
Apologize to her right now, and I’ll cauterize the wound before you die. ”
I suspect this request is less for my benefit or the man’s and more for the benefit of Seth’s tent not being completely drowned in the man’s blood.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry—” the man shouts in a voice that’s more a squeal than anything recognizably human. He sounds like a pig trying to escape the slaughter.
“You better fucking be sorry,” says Seth, grasping the stump on the man’s arm with sealing flame.
I turn from the horrible sight, my stomach sickened by the smell of burning flesh.
“You better fucking remember this. Because next time, it won’t be your hand.
” I’m not certain the brute can hear Seth over his own cries, but Seth continues anyway.
“The next time I get so much as a hint that you’ve laid your hands on someone, I’ll take your cock.
Do you hear me? Right down to the root. I’ll cut your fucking cock off, and we’ll see how much of a prick you are without it.
Now, get out of my fucking sight, or I’ll take it right this instant. ”
The man stumbles from the tent, clutching at his ruined wrist and knocking over a chair as he goes, sobbing all the way.
It was horrible to watch, but there’s a cruel little part of me that can’t help but feel like he got what he deserved, even if I wouldn’t have done the same myself.
With the man gone, Seth turns to me. Slowly, he withdraws his handkerchief from his pocket, methodically wiping the blood from his face. “What a fucking mess. Gods, doesn’t anyone have manners around here?”
He looks around the tent for a response, but we’re the only ones in it now. When no one answers, he turns his cruel eyes to me.
“Now, sweet sister,” he says. “I’ve heard you’ve been quite the busy girl. But before we get into all of that, tell me something, and answer me truly now. I’ll know if you’re lying.
“Did you miss me?”