Chapter 43 #2
The plate of food—the bread, the fruit, the meat—turned to spoil in the depths of my stomach.
I thrashed against Lycandor, his body as hard as the First’s, and what was spoiled turned rancid.
“With her eyes”—he jabbed at the part of his veil beneath which his own likely blazed—“she bore witness to treason, yet did nothing to hinder its path. With her ears…”
The shuffle of chainmail heralded each of his steps as he descended the stairs. An inky shadow against the pale grey of her gown, he approached her. Demetri gaped, his arms limp against the acolytes’ hold.
“Present her to the sanctum, Your Eminence.” Lycandor’s rumble rolled over my shoulder to spill on the marble, its swell enough to smother all else.
I followed the sound, my heart edging ever closer to topple from its small height.
“So all may better come to know the face of one who feigned to be a rock of devotion, yet is the spider beneath it.”
In lieu of my heart, a taper in my chest smoked: hot, hot, hot. I recalled the swat on his chest as the sister stood in the door, the familiarity of it, the comfortability in their exchange.
They turned her at his request, the nod of his father enough to will them so.
A terrified, rounded face scanned the sanctum, her brown eyes shifting over the sea of faces, resting only when they found Demetri.
Woken from his reverie, the shape of him thrashed, all elbows and knees as he fought the acolytes’ grasps with every breath of his strength.
She shook her head, her small mouth downturned.
I emptied.
It was a mouth I had kissed goodnight, wiped at with a cloth, smeared with the last of the sloe berries until her lips were stained purple.
“Adelaide?” My question died under the boot of the sanctum, their chants and heckles an impatient leather sole.
I charged for the dais, my feet squeaking on the marble, rendered useless by the druid caging my stomach.
I wanted to touch her: skim the curve of her cheeks, trace the outline of her lips, count her eyelashes, kiss each of her eyes, a shade darker than Demetri’s but no less warm.
Yes, it was Adelaide, but her buttons. I slumped into his arms, chest heaving, stitches straining.
Her buttons were gone. Every last one. The glare of the sanctum shadowed her skin, her face marred by pinkish scars that dipped like someone had taken a spoon to the butter. Her beautiful buttons.
I sobbed, an ugly, wretched thing.
Her buttons. I’d counted them once. All twenty-two of them.
Her eyes left Demetri’s, and for a breath, landed on mine, their edges crinkling, her dark eyelashes webbed with tears.
I screamed, or at least tried to, but his hand was a bridle, cloaking the sound.
“Look,” came a breath from behind. “Look.”
The High Druid’s hands loomed over her shoulders like storm clouds. His gloved fingers found her ears, shifting her headdress to trace the curve of her lobes—lobes I’d once pierced with a pin. The acolytes to her sides thrust her into his touch, her jaw trapped by their crimson-tinged fingers.
“With her ears, she listened to plots and whispers and schemes, yet chose to do nothing.”
The hand at my mouth vibrated, a bumblebee wing, not an earthquake, but there.
With my one free hand, I reached behind me, finding a small patch of flesh between his vambrace and elbow.
I poked at it, prodding and pinching, but he held on even more firmly than before, my teeth pressed hard against the crush of my lips.
“With her lips,” his father continued, voice quiet, the creak of bodies leaning forward to listen, overlaying the clicking in her throat, “she allowed breath into her lungs that gave her life to defy every single demand expected of her.” With a pitying tap to her cheek, the High Druid’s shadow left her, turning to clamber back up to his throne.
“And so, what must we do?”
Silence.
I longed to break it, my tongue near bleeding from the force of my teeth as they bit down, unable to pry my jaw open to gnash at Lycandor instead.
“We shall take them all. For Him.” He gestured towards the lower steps, seating himself once more in his throne. “Druid Falstaff.”
Falstaff seemed to appear from the shadows, his hand already poised with a scalpel. With his back to us, he aligned himself with her front.
From behind, Lycandor’s knee jostled my gown.
I peered up, his hold loosening to allow me to do so.
His helm flickered from me to the line of seated druids, to Capriche, draped in his chair, shoulders slumped, like this was simply another day of the same old bird shit.
I pinched once more at the gap of his armour, hard enough to blister or bruise.
Do something, I screamed into his palm, the sound nothing more than a gurgle. Please, please, please.
But I had long since learned the price of placing one’s faith in druids who demanded you put it there.
I closed my eyes.
Wrath, I internally begged, lids swelling with bubbling tears. Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?
No warmth. Just the frigid chill of metal at my back and the frost of druids to my front.
Shake the earth. Crumble rock. Make them stop.
Make them stop.
Make them stop.
Make them stop.
Nothing. No preternatural heat, only the burn of a fury entirely my own.
I opened them, abandoning Lycandor’s mesh to look upon the dais.
Adelaide’s eyes were on Falstaff. They were puffy and pink, the markers of tears trailing her face like the line of a snail on a cabbage leaf. There were three of her now, my vision distorted by tears. Three crooked Adelaides, their edges blurred and bent.
The three of them swept their gaze across the crowd of men baying for blood, a longing in them, as if awaiting one last chance of mercy. Anything. A crumb. A morsel of it.
I unlatched my pinched fingers still clasped to his arm and reached for my stomach, nails digging into the wool as if I could claw it open, reach inside, and give her my blessing—pry it from the very core of me where it hid like a coward. Instead, I was useless. All of us, useless.
Demetri’s cries, his curses, his threats, wove with their cheers, their baying, their demands.
With a small nod, she sniffed, rolling her shoulders and lifting her chin as she met Falstaff’s veil. He crawled closer, blade winking in the candelabra’s light. The acolytes pried her arms wide, like the owl upon the Doors of Judgement, her sleeves hanging like wings.
Don’t look.
Don’t look.
Don’t look.
Lycandor’s hand drifted from my mouth to my eyes, eyes I’d only just closed. He coaxed them open, nudging at my lashes with his finger.
“Look,” he murmured, helm bent. “We must look.”
Though his grip relaxed, I didn’t run. To her. Or Demetri. I stayed, like a dog, or a tree, or a godsdamned relic. It was inevitable. Always inevitable. And there wasn’t a damned thing we could do.
Falstaff made the first slice.
Her ears first, one after the other, thrown to the floor like offcuts.
The acolytes supported her arms, refusing to let her slump to her knees.
The sounds… Unable to speak, she gargled, the agonies trapped in her chest, stoppered by her throat.
The sisters observed unflinchingly, the sheen of tears filling some of their eyes, all of them watching, like we all did.
All except the one with her back to us, tending to the babes who gaped with open mouths, uncomprehending of what horrors they witnessed.
Someone should cover their eyes. I wish someone would have covered mine.
Her lips next, then eyelids, falling to the ground like down from a pillow.
A puddle of blood spread around her feet, dripping from the weeping holes in her face, her ears, her mouth.
The urge to crawl inside Lycandor’s armour, despite everything, or to bury my face in Demetri’s chest, was overwhelming.
But I did neither.
I looked. And I looked. And I looked. Each part of her taken adding to the tally etched in my bones: the dues of Falstaff, the dues of the High Druid, the dues of the Dendralis, and perhaps, the dues of Lycandor himself.
They left her hands for last, small and chubby, like they’d always been, sliced from her body by two pairs of druids, armed with swords, not scalpels.
It wouldn’t be long now. Not with how much blood had drained from her, the pool of it glistening on the marble.
It spread outwards, reaching for our toes like a plague.
“Druid Vetrius,” his father commanded from his perch.
With a parting squeeze, Lycandor left me, unsheathing the long sword at his back without pause. The acolytes tugged at the knot at her throat, her scarf unravelling to drape over her shoulders. Shoulders that were limp, her life flowing from her with every weak throb of her heart.
In the space of two blinks, Lycandor severed her head from her neck in one clean swipe. My hand reached for my throat, brushing over the place where the kiss of his blade had parted her flesh. I forced my eyes wide, lips trembling with the effort to keep them open.
Look.
Look.
We must look.
It rolled, tumbling back until her head lost momentum, the pad of her pocked cheek resting upon the marbled stone underfoot.
Her boxy headdress, now crimson with blood, had fallen to the wayside.
Brown, brambled hair, the front of it plaited, haloed around her.
I’d taught her how to do that a long time ago.
She’d styled it that morning. A secret braid, one only for her.
Lidless, her brown eyes glowed, the pall of death not enough to rob them of their gleam.
In them was the child who’d begged us to let her join us in the meadows, who’d made me flower crowns of daisies, their petals half crushed and bruised by her small, clumsy hands.
Her mouth was all teeth, lipless and scissored, the flesh like torn fabric, ripped crudely by hands instead of the neatness of shears. It was still beautiful, though. It was still Adelaide.