Chapter Three Blood in the Water #2
She nearly choked. Around her, the Bluehoods exchanged wide-eyed looks. Evidently, the Sage’s value had gone up since the king discovered what manner of power she carried.
“I can do it. You know I can.” Reya met his stare.
“Always so cocky.” He chuckled, but there was nothing humorous about it; the sound made her want to squirm. “One day, that tongue is going to get you killed.” He released her, and she fought the urge to touch her jaw.
History reminded her not to feel relieved by the absence of him. And history was right.
This time, when he went for her face, his fist was closed.
Reya’s mouth was still open when she hit the water.
The putrid taste pooled with the copper of her blood as it ran down her throat.
She pushed back onto her knees, teeth singing and throat heaving.
Lennox’s fingers dug into the roots of her braid, and he yanked her head up, forcing her watering eyes back to meet his, voice lowering to a familiar tenor. “This gives me no pleasure.”
He swung again, and her whole body jolted with the impact, knocking her ruby dagger from its holster.
Reaching for it would be counted as a threat, so she watched as it sank, disappearing in the brown water.
They’d been through this song and dance a hundred times. Reya knew better than to fight back.
Even if she could best him—and that was a big if—they had witnesses. If she killed him, a lot of dangerous people would be out of coin, and they would all be coming for her head.
The world changed color as her vision blurred.
When we’re finished, you will no longer be the girl you are, Lennox had told her the night he’d found her. But you will never go hungry again. What he hadn’t known was that the girl she’d been had died long before she’d ever learned to throw knives at a moving target.
As Lennox beat the air from her lungs and standing upright became as impossible as breathing, she tried to stay on the mountain, to cling to the memory of who she had once been—who she had killed to become the Crimson Dagger.
Whoever had brought Reya into this world had left her to die in a hollowed-out tree on an Etellinian mountainside when she was no more than a day old.
A woman in a nearby village heard the babe wailing.
Convinced the child was a gift from the All-Gods, she’d carried it home to her husband and given it an ancient name.
Reya hadn’t allowed herself to speak that name once in the last ten years. The sound of it was a sharp reminder of the ache in her chest that never seemed to go away, no matter how hard she tried to forget.
Reyanwyn. It was an Etellinian name that meant “of the Mountain.”
She was unworthy of that gift of a name. So she had buried it on that night ten years ago—the night everything had gone to hell—and had sworn to keep only a piece of it for herself. A tiny, precious piece.
Reya.
Only to Gwendolyn and Hector Connery would she ever be Reyanwyn of the Mountain. And they were gone.
Her eyes found Gavin’s over Lennox’s shoulder.
She knew she shouldn’t look, but apparently she was a glutton for punishment.
When Lennox drove his fist into her side and her ribs gave a faint crack, Gavin didn’t so much as twitch.
Reya wasn’t sure what she’d been hoping to see.
Something to prove she meant something to someone, if only in some small way.
Anything but mild indifference. They both knew how this game was played, though.
So Reya lifted her chin.
It would hurt. And she would bleed. But she would not cry and she would not plead. Because she was strong. And she could take it.
Every so often, Lennox paused to let her cough up blood, if only so she wouldn’t choke, and then he began again. Until there was no part of her that wasn’t in pain, until she was bowed over before him, bruised, torn, and soaked.
He always saved the worst for last. Right on cue, Lennox took the ring and fifth fingers of her left hand and bent them until they snapped.
The scream she’d been leashing since they started echoed down every tunnel, so loud she was sure Stellene could hear the price that was being paid for her freedom in Rudrock Bay.
Lennox’s voice was muffled. “You have until the eve of Lumus Day to mitigate my losses. I don’t have to tell you what will happen if you run.”
Sixty days.
He couldn’t be serious. She would have to move mountains to come up with that much coin in a year. Unable to manage a nod, she merely sank to the basin floor.
Words were exchanged and hands slid under her shoulders.
She came in and out of consciousness as Gavin and Zaim silently dragged her through the tunnels, up the ladder, and out into the night.
She savored the chill of her wet clothes, too tired to be bothered by the smell.
When they finally dropped her, her body hit the pavement with a watery smack.
“Let’s go, Gavin,” Zaim said.
Reya’s eyes were too swollen to see the expression on Gavin’s face, but his silence was deafening. Before he turned to leave, he tossed something into the gutter with her. She felt for it, and when her fingers curled around a ruby-encrusted hilt, a small, pathetic noise came out of her.
Their footsteps faded quietly into the night.
And then silence.
Minutes, hours, or days later, Reya woke to find a wild-eyed man sifting through her pockets.
“Hey!” The word came out as more of a rasp than a shout, and pain shot down her arm and into her stomach as she swiped for him with the dagger that by some miracle she still clutched in her good hand. The man screamed into her face and darted away.
One eye was swollen shut, but she could see through the other that two fingers on her left hand were bent at a wrong angle.
Judging by the sharp stitch she felt with every inhale, she had one or two fractured ribs to boot.
Reya didn’t even want to know what her face looked like.
Evidently, it was bad enough that she’d been mistaken for a corpse.
Nostrils flaring, she tried to touch her father’s sword, exhaling sharply when she felt it still in its sheath. Holding her chest as if to keep it together, Reya pushed up onto one elbow.
They’d thrown her in a gutter.
And not just any gutter. Clutching her useless hand to her middle, she used the other to climb out of the very dip in the street that Lennox had found her in ten years ago. His message was clear: I pulled you out, and I can put you back.
She hobbled along the side of the nearest building.
No one looked twice at her, not in the Heap.
If she met someone’s gaze, they quickly averted their eyes and increased their pace, giving her a wide berth.
She didn’t blame them. Someone with a bloodied face in this part of town was nothing but trouble.
Her braid had unraveled in the madness. The red waves were a wet, tangled mess plastered to her face and clothes—so long now that they fell to her hips, but horses would grow wings and fly before she ever cut her hair.
Men and women of Old Etellina let their hair be.
She might not have Connery blood, but her heart would always belong to the mountain.
The Etellinian people called the north home long before the Rhiterrans ever settled there.
Proud and ancient as the Sages, the mountain folk were expert craftsmen.
Their world-renowned blacksmiths—warriors and artisans known as the Steelborn—forged weapons that were lighter and stronger than any in the world, impervious to magic and the ravages of time.
The sacred craft had been all but lost after the conquering.
But the heirlooms of the Etellinian people still remained, passed down through the generations.
Reya squeezed the worn leather hilt of her father’s Etellinian steel sword like she always did when she needed a reminder that it was still there, still safe.
It took her forty-five minutes to limp the sixteen blocks to her flat in the West End. At some point, the skies cracked open, soaking her to the bone again, and she tipped her head back to feel the rain on her face.
Hers was the oldest building on the street.
The sight of the four-story townhouse made her eyes burn, but she refused to cry out in the open.
Worn and fissured with age, its stone exterior was cloaked in ivy and wisteria, and every blue stained glass window boasted planter boxes overflowing with herb gardens.