Chapter 20
Chapter twenty
Ashara
The Lick
“Take me back,” I begged into nowhere. “Take me back!” The words rebounded inside the pit of me, trapped, unable to breach my lips.
When I glanced down, there was nothing. No matter where I looked, it was always the same.
Empty, empty, empty. No shadows, no darkness, no light.
Only a void, a lack, like water without the sky, sun, or moon to imbue it. Strange, then, that it was still warm.
“To where?” a voice asked from the abyss, its cadence layered. I heard in it everyone and anyone who ever would be and who ever was. It came from above, below, from me, and from them.
“To him,” I said, unsure of who he was. “Take me back.”
“You do not need him, not anymore. Go to the land I will show you.” Something crested ahead, contained within a quivering fleck, so similar to a raindrop on glass. In it, a sprawling meadow, rolling hills, sturdy oaks.
“Take me back,” I repeated, not knowing what it was I longed to go back to.
The scene melted, and the greens, browns, and yellows swirled to grey. To nothing.
“You are as the dust that coats the earth, absolute as fire’s fury, inevitable as a plague. Going back is fruitless, child. You must come. Now, step towards the light.”
A thin band of sun lanced through the emptiness, staking itself between where my eyes should have been. I could feel its heat.
“Come,” the voice whispered and shouted, vowels dragging but the consonants short.
“But I have no feet,” I realised, trying to wiggle toes that did not exist.
“Then crawl.”
“I have no legs.” I made to kneel, but all my bones were gone.
“Climb.”
“I haven’t any arms,” I sobbed, unable to swipe away the tears that rolled down a face that wasn’t there.
“Overwrought and useless,” it said, some of it soft and kind, parts of it harsh and stern. “You have no need of them. Now, come.”
“I cannot!”
The nothingness pulsed, the thump of a heartbeat smothered under a breast. The warmth swelled with it. “You will come, eventually. You must.”
“Who am I?” I asked, an ache to know coursing through whatever was left of me. “What is my name? How did I come to be here?”
“I will wait,” they answered. “We will wait, though our patience is finite.”
“Take me back.”
“As you wish it.”
The warmth ebbed, and first to return were my fingers, returning one flake of skin at a time.
Then came my hips, waist, elbows, each part of me stitching together as if they were never parted.
With my body, so too came my memories, swarming and layering atop one another, broken and bleeding, congealing into a single great mass.
Needles and whips. Pyres and trees. Iron and curls.
Sifting through them, I tried to pull one free from the wreckage, but I was blinded.
My new eyes smothered by a thickening smog, plumes upon plumes rising until nought was left but the grey.
I sputtered, lungs singing with acrid fumes.
Alone in the smoke, alone in the ashes, I lay atop the pile of memories and sank into their jagged edges. They poked at my ribs like knives.
Dreaming, dead, awake, whatever I was, I managed to lift a hand to my chest, counting the boons within.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The smoke eventually cleared, and as it did, the edges digging into my sides grew rounder, plumper, as the char of ash shifted into the scent of metal and parchment.
It was undercut with something almost floral.
Patchouli, perhaps? Jasmine? I inhaled deeply, recognising it from one of the many flowers Mother and I had planted in our courtyard.
Mother.
I could practically see her, elbows deep in soil, dark hair fighting to escape her bun in loose, wild curls. It was a familiar smell, a soft, addictive smell—a smell that reminded me of home. My eyes opened, and I was anywhere but.
Vision adjusting, the only light came from the glow of a fire, flickering somewhere near the foot of the bed I was prostrated upon.
I pulled at my wrists, the cool bite of metal digging into my flesh.
Grunting with the effort, I grasped at the bonds and hauled myself upright.
The tension bit deeper, my shackles linked by chains and clasped to the posts on either side of my head.
Carved from redwood, the colossus of a bed sat squarely in the middle of a vast chamber, its canopy above embossed with an olive tree, dripping in blood. I gasped as other memories gushed back in a single, mighty swell, pulling me under.
A tree. The needle. Falstaff. My blood. Tremors, ash, and tumbling rock… Demetri.
A sob bubbled from my chest, from the same place where that strange warmth had bloomed under the Blood Tree. I drew my knees towards it, unable to hold them close.
By the Other, Demetri was alive.
A throbbing from the base of my neck to my temple drove all thoughts of him away.
I nestled my head in my skirts, fighting against the spike of agony, and it was all I could do not to vomit.
It warred with a burning sting in my right hand, and I cracked one eye, beholding the ruin of torn flesh and barely congealed blood.
My mouth, gods… I swallowed, tasting only ash, my tongue dry and throat raw.
Sluggish and stiff, I turned my head, searching for water, for anything that might ease the thirst.
Chains rattled and metal scraped.
“Finally, she wakes,” a familiar voice drawled from the corner.
Firelight faded to shadow, a towering form blocking its glow that loomed at the foot of the bed. Shrouded in darkness, there was still no mistaking the three-pointed helm that jutted towards the beams, nor the clinking of chainmail that masked his face.
What little heat remained in my cheeks drained, along with any hope of mercy from whoever had chained me here. Armour clanking with each slow step towards the bed, his knees struck its base.
“Nought to say for yourself?” he taunted, tilting that monstrous helm. “Rumour has it you have quite the mouth, laurel. I’d advise you to put it to good use and confess the truth about what happened this morn.”
The truth…?
What was the truth? All the truths and heresies that had once spilled from my lips dried to nothing, cremated by the blazing pain in my skull.
I should be dead. My offering had come and gone.
A plague should have consumed me alongside the rest. The details blurred, disjointed and intangible, like a distant memory rather than something that must have happened only a few turns ago.
“The Blood Tree,” I started, voice husked and cracked. “It—”
“There is no tree, not anymore. Only ash and dust,” the Butcher interrupted, metal-clad arms lifting to grasp the bed’s upper frame. “Reduced to cinders and blackened bark, the templum’s Cor Tower now but a quarry of rubble.”
“The tower?” I rasped, recalling the bodies of acolytes crushed like grapes under the debris. Something jolted my stomach, a little too rousing to be sorrow…or guilt.
“Come now.” He leaned forward, the bed creaking.
“Don’t feign ignorance. I know you have more truths to give me.
You were so eager to lay them bare before, so why not offer another?
It’ll make what comes next a great deal easier.
” He gripped both posts at the foot of the bed, the points of his helm scraping the canopy.
The scratch of metal pricked my awareness, the reality of where I actually was snapping into focus.
I was chained to a bed. His bed, perhaps.
And we were alone. There would be no running, no hiding, no fighting him off.
I sucked in a breath, trying to tuck my ankles beneath me and keep my knees closed.
If he came an inch closer, I could try to bite him, I supposed, blunt teeth be damned.
Hands releasing the frame as if it were hot iron, not wood, the Butcher jerked back. In the same odd gesture I’d witnessed before, one of his hands cupped the back of his neck.
“I’m not going to… This isn’t… The bed was the only thing immovable in the chamber to secure you to.
” He cleared his throat, a rumble from under the metal.
“I am not going to hurt you.” I blinked, surprised by the earnestness of his tone.
“Not in the way you are thinking. You are safe here, for now.”
My mouth watered with the urge to sink my teeth into something anyway.
“Safe?” I scoffed, the words clawing up my throat unbidden.
“If I dared to chain you to a bed with no way to defend yourself and told you the same, would you feel safe?” I reasoned all wisdom had been knocked from my skull by whatever had struck me out cold.
That, or thirst had driven me mad—my dreams certainly suggested as much.
His hand left the back of his neck to toy with his veil, twisting and pulling the chain. “I might feel a great many things if you tied me to a bed, laurel.” He wiggled both wrists, jostling invisible shackles. “Though I’d like to see you try.”
I blinked. “What kind of druid are you?” I asked, voice like gravel.
“To speak as such, like a—wait, where are you going?” Before I could, ill-advisedly, call him every name I was thinking, he strode beyond my line of sight, disappearing somewhere behind the bed.
The glugging of water had my mouth parting, lips near cracking as they widened.
The mattress dipped with a boulderous weight, my chains the only thing keeping me from rolling into it.
“What kind of druid am I?” he repeated, holding something aloft. “The impatient kind. Now, drink.” With that, he shoved a chalice to the seam of my lips.
Without question, I gulped it down, lapping with all the grace of a dog, a small, niggling doubt that it might be laced with poison not enough to stop me.
Gasping for air, I lifted my gaze to meet his metal, searching for a gleam of eyes beneath the veiled shroud.
Were they warm, like Demetri’s? The colour of moss, like mine?
Or black, like Esioul’s, bottomless pits without beginning or end.
A cough.