Chapter 50 The Two Necklaces
The Two Necklaces
Telly’s feels smaller than I remember. It is as if the ceiling has dipped in my absence and the smoke hangs heavier in the rafters. Laughter spills from one corner, rough and familiar. Tankards knock together. The hearth breathes warmth into the room.
Hidden beneath my shirt are two necklaces tonight.
My mother’s pendant, and the ring he gave me, threaded onto its own slender chain.
The gold rests cool against the silver. Past and future touching at my throat.
The ring, a deep blue diamond, is far too flashy for a tavern, even concealed.
But I cannot bear not to wear it. And I want Torsin and Emva to see it.
I know Torsin will laugh and say something inappropriate about royal tokens and dramatic romance.
I sit at our usual table and fold my hands together. I am early and can't wait to brag about being the first one here for once.
The tavern door explodes inward, a gust of wind tearing through the room.
The sound is wrong. Laughter does not follow.
No bright call of Emva’s voice, no familiar argument over bread.
Instead, the room falls abruptly silent, the light seeming to dim with it.
Cold air slips across the floor, and then three men step inside.
They do not look around the way strangers do.
They do not scan for ale or empty seats. Their eyes move with purpose.
The room erupts into chaos all at once. Conversations break mid-sentence. A mug slips from someone’s hand and shatters against the tavern floor. A chair scrapes back too late. A look of horror passes over the bartender's face as he realizes at the same time as me what has just walked in.
The Threns are here. They are beautiful in a way that feels wrong. Their faces are almost delicate. Eyes too bright. Lips shaped for poetry rather than slaughter. They look like princes carved from ivory and moonlight. And they move like something out of a nightmare.
Steel sings and a body falls before anyone understands what they’re seeing. Another follows. They do not shout demands. They do not bark orders. They do not search for valuables, they simply begin cutting people down. Their hands are soaked red to the wrist.
A blade slides free of a man’s ribs and one of them glances around the room with faint irritation. “I thought there would be more.”
“There would have been,” another replies, wiping blood from his cheek. “One of the royals lost her favorite bracelet.”
Soft, cruel amusement.
“The palace sealed itself over it. Servants can’t even step into the streets for a jug of ale.”
I do not need to hear the name. Yvara, of course. She loves to hide her own jewels and let the court scramble. Tears. Accusations. Apologies. All for the thrill of being the center of it.
A third snorts. “Fragile creatures.”
“Ah well,” the first says lightly. “They got lucky.”
Steel flashes again.
Another body falls.
A man near the hearth lunges for a poker and loses his arm before he can lift it. A woman tries to run and is dragged back by her hair, her scream swallowed by the wet sound that follows. Blood spreads across the tavern floor in widening crescents, creeping beneath tables, soaking into sawdust.
My magic rises before I consciously call it. It surges beneath my skin, straining toward my palms as one of them turns toward me.
He is close enough that I can see the flecks of silver in his irises. Close enough that I can see his expression change when he recognizes the light gathering in me. He moves with inhuman speed, his hand closing around my throat and lifting me from the floor as though I weigh nothing at all.
And then I feel it. A violent, invasive drag at the center of my chest, as if invisible fingers have pierced straight through bone and are clawing at whatever lives there.
He is trying to siphon my magic. Trying to draw my magic from me the way carrion birds strip flesh from bone. The sensation makes my vision blur, but I almost laugh.
My magic barely listens to me, do you think it will listen to you, fool?
Confusion ripples across his face. Then disbelief. Then something that looks almost like terror.
“What are you?” he whispers.
The light answers for me. It erupts from my body in a searing, blinding surge that throws him backward. His scream barely has time to form before it is swallowed in white heat. The scent of burning cloth and something fouler fills the air as he collapses in a heap of ash and bone at my feet.
Then agony. A blade slides beneath my ribs. I drop to my knees as the steel is wrenched free, blood spilling warm down my hip. Rough hands seize my arm, jerking me upright. I try to summon the light again, but it flickers now, weaker, dragged thin by pain.
Someone grips my wrist, then pauses as my ring hangs from my shirt in the struggle. Suddenly I see what he sees, the Rathmor sigil engraved on the inside of the diamond.
“Look at this,” a voice murmurs, low and interested rather than enraged.
Fingers yank me by the neck, rolling the ring between their fingers so that the others can see. The sigil gleams unmistakably.
A slow, ugly smile spreads across one of their perfect faces.
“Well,” he says softly. “This changes things.”
Another laughs. “Royal.”
I try to wrench free, but another blow slams into my shoulder, sending me down hard enough that I taste iron at the back of my throat.
My vision sweeps across the carnage, bodies strewn between overturned tables, broken lanterns casting uneven light against walls streaked with blood.
But there is no Emva. No Torsin. Relief surges through me, so intense it is almost indistinguishable from pain.
Hands drag me toward the ruined doorway.
My vision pulses at the edges. I know I will lose consciousness soon, I feel the blood still pouring from my side where I was stabbed.
I need to leave something so that he can find me.
Both necklaces rest against my chest. My mother's pendant, and Colsar's ring.
My past and my future. For a single fractured second, I hesitate.
Which do I lose? Which do I protect?
My fingers close around the pendant. Forgive me mother, I think.
I have carried you longer than I have carried him. But he is my future.
Then I tear it free. It slips from my fingers and falls soundlessly into blood and shattered glass.
I hope he finds it. I hope he finds me. I hope it is not too late to say the words he has never heard before. I clutch the ring instead as they haul me outside. The night air strikes my face. My wound burns. My magic stirs weakly, answering my desperation one last time.
Light gathers in my palm, but then a brutal impact explodes at the back of my head and the world splits open in blinding white. Sound dulls. Light fractures. Blood runs warm between my fingers as if it no longer belongs to me.
Boots scrape the ground. Rough hands lift me. The creak of a waiting wagon presses through the fog of pain. More conversation, in a language I do not understand. The same one I heard in the woods.
Someone laughs. “We’ll bring her to him,” a voice says. “He will be pleased. A royal. And a pretty thing at that.”
The word him barely registers before another voice cuts cleanly through the night. The sound catches on something in my memory. Familiar, but slipping away before I can grasp it.
“That one is mine.”
Everything stops as the voice carries without being raised, authority threaded through it.
“We were going to bring her to him,” one of them replies, uncertainty seeping through the bravado.
A soft sound follows. Amusement.
“And yet,” the voice answers smoothly, “who does he outrank? Certainly not me.”
Silence.
“This is my toy to play with,” he continues. “Leave her here.”
“She has royal blood,” another insists weakly. “The ring—”
“All the more delightful to destroy.”
A pause.
“Her magic did not feel right,” someone ventures. “It—”
The air shifts.
“Are you implying,” the voice asks, calm and lethal, “that I am not strong enough to take what I want?”
“No. No, I—”
The crack of bone snapping echoes across the cobbled street, followed by the dull collapse of a body. No one argues after that, and the others retreat quickly, boots scraping as they scatter into darkness.
Strong hands seize me, lifting me from the wagon before I fully understand what is happening. My head lolls against unfamiliar fabric, and through blurred vision I see the wagon ignite. Fire climbs its frame in hungry spirals, swallowing wood, swallowing blood, swallowing proof.
I think of him. I am terrified of losing you, he had said to me just hours earlier. I think of our time in the cave, the cakes, the darts, the ripped contract. I cannot let him believe I burned to death. I refuse.
Everything sways violently. “Please,” I manage.
The figure pauses. “What?”
“My pendant,” I whisper. “I dropped it. Out there.” My voice frays. “If you are going to kill me, let me hold my mother’s necklace.”
For a long moment, I expect laughter. Instead, he carries me back inside and lowers me near the hearth, the rough surface still warm beneath me. Then he turns and walks back across the ruined street. I hear measured steps. The scrape of metal over the cobbled ground.
When he returns, cold silver presses into my palm.
He has retrieved it. My fingers close around the pendant, and something inside me goes quiet in a way it hasn’t since the doors blew open.
For a moment, I hold it there against my skin, letting it anchor me.
I fumble the chain back over my head, the clasp catching against my fingers before it falls into place.
Before, I was trying to survive, trying to leave something behind that he could follow. Now I can feel it slipping, the strength in my limbs, the pull of my magic, the edges of the world itself. I do not think I am leaving this place alive.
He may not find me alive, but he will know where I was last conscious, and that it was him I thought of.
My hands move slowly, clumsy with blood, as I pull the chain from my throat and the ring he gave me slides free into my palm.
I turn just enough to press it into the thin gap beneath the broken edge of the hearth, where ash and soot have gathered thick.
Hidden where no one would think to look, but where something that hunts might still find them.
He will.
“Smart.” He stands over me, a mask covering his face, though I cannot make out anything beneath it. I wait for him to mock me, to take the ring for himself. Instead, he looks at the pendant still on my neck. “You chose well,” he murmurs.
He drags me through the shattered doorway and into the tavern’s darkened rear chamber. My head rolls weakly against the wall as he lowers me there. Outside, shouting rises, distant and frantic. The palace must have heard the explosion.
I cannot make out more than height and dark hair, black or perhaps dark red. I cannot tell.
My vision dims further. “Whatever you’re going to do to me,” I ask faintly, “will it hurt?”
He crouches before me. “It depends,” he says thoughtfully, “on how vivid your nightmares are, Princess.”
The shouting outside grows closer.
“I do not want you to die today.” His fingers brush my cheek. “Take a nap,” he says softly. “And wait to be found.”
Darkness presses inward.
As it closes, I hear him add, almost lazily—
“As I said last time, one day, you will thank me.”
And then the night crashes down over me.