The Bloody Sheets
King Orsin’s Castle
Ivanoxa is younger than I have ever seen her. Her pale gold eyes wide in a face that has not yet learned to keep everything out of it. She is talking to the girl on the bed in a low voice. Something reassuring. Her hands are in her lap.
The girl is young. A woman, barely. She has Nox's coloring, the same gold eyes, the same dark hair, but everything else about her is softer.
Where Nox is sharp, this girl is open fear.
Her hands grip the bedsheet and her eyes keep moving to the door the way eyes move to doors when you are waiting for something you do not want to arrive.
"Nox," I say.
She does not look at me.
I cross the room and put my hand on her arm. She does not react. Does not turn. I am standing beside her with my hand on her arm and I do not exist to her.
I pull my hand back.
The girl does not see me either.
I look between them. The same jaw. The same way they hold their shoulders. Sister. She is Nox's sister.
I am here and I am not here and I do not know what that means and I do not have time to work it out because the door opens.
A man walks in surrounded by advisors, a crown on his head.
He is handsome. Advisors follow behind him.
A sentinel, guards lining the walls. He is clearly the king.
A seer trails in behind them with cold eyes.
She moves to stand over the bed and begins to speak words that make no sense, a low rhythmic sound that fills the room in a way that makes my skin pull tight.
Then another man.
Hooded. Dark robes. Standing just inside the door with his arms at his sides.
I open my mouth.
The king speaks to the girl on the bed.
"Sweet daughter," he says. "There is only one way to siphon correctly."
The girl looks at him. "I do not understand."
"You are nineteen, far old enough now. You must do as a wife does," he says, "though you are my daughter."
She says it again. "I do not understand." She says it twice and her voice is very young and very calm and it breaks something in me that she is trying to be calm.
A guard comes in and binds her wrists to the bedpost.
The king continues as though she has not spoken.
“If I can siphon you, you will be the hero of Yorali.” His voice remains calm.
“If I cannot, and you survive, you will join your sisters in the North Tower. If you please me, you will bear my children. And if you go mad…” He pauses. “You know the consequence.”
"Please, Father," she says. "No."
The king pats her knee gently, slowly sliding his hand up her dress. Her lip trembles as she stares around the room frantically, searching for her sister who she can no longer see behind the guards and advisors.
“I have told them already, sweet Sadie, that if you fail me but manage to live, you will be in the best room of all. Do you know what room that is?”
I feel sick.
“It is the Yellow Room.”
I am already moving.
A deathmage steps in front of me.
I am now annoyed that it can see me but that Nox cannot.
I push my lightcraft at it. It does not move.
I push harder. It stands there with those gray-tipped fingers and that empty face and does not move and does not flinch.
I go left. Another one appears from the shadow by the wall.
I go right. Another. They are everywhere, between me and the bed, between me and her, between me and every point in the room that matters.
I press my lightcraft at each one and each one holds and I am screaming at them and at the guards and at the men who cannot see me and nothing I do changes anything at all.
Then the wardrobe door slams open.
Nox comes out with everything she has.
The room lurches. Two guards go down hard. She is at the bed in four strides and the ties are off and she says run, just that one word, run.
The girl does not run.
She stands there.
Nox screams at her. The king’s power is overwhelming, so much so that I bend over in pain. He uses it to throw Nox against the wall before she finishes the word and the sound that goes through the room makes me press my hands over my ears and it does not help.
Nox's power throws him across the room. He rises slowly.
"This is why you are my favored. You are strong." He came closer. "But even favorites must learn."
He makes a motion with his hand. A chair appears. Cuffs close over Nox's wrists. I recognize them. Aunt Petunis had taught me that the Yorali court uses dampening cuffs to mute magic as punishment.
They turn the chair to face the bed and Nox sees what is coming and throws herself against the cuffs until I can see blood at her wrists.
Another motion of his hand, and the chair turns. The dampening cuffs tighten over her wrists.
"Originally, sweet child, the plan was only to siphon. To find the Key that keeps this kingdom safe for a hundred years." He paused. "But you interfered. So now the lesson matters more than the Key."
He turned her chair to face the bed.
"Now you will watch."
He took his time.
Nox could not close her eyes. He would not let her close her eyes.
When it was over he made a show of trying to siphon, though by then he had to know there was nothing left in her sister to take. Sadie lay in the sheets, barely conscious. There was so much blood.
"I have learned my lesson, Father," Nox whispered.
She seemed broken in a way I had never seen before.
"I fear you have not, sweet child."
He left.
She sat strapped to the chair and waited to find out what he meant.
Then the door opened, and three men filed in. Laughing, goblets in hand.
Nox screams. "Lord Varacry, Earl of Pertwin, Duke of Tinvan. All of you. All of you will pay."
Part of me knows that whatever is happening to me, I am not real. But I must know.
I throw myself at the deathmages with everything I have. Two of them stagger. I think this is it, this is working, and then the third one takes my arm and the fourth takes the other and I fight with everything I have left and it is not enough and I feel myself lifted and the door comes at me fast.
I am in the corridor.
The door is shut behind me.
I can hear Nox screaming from inside. I can hear another sound underneath it. Then Nox's voice goes out entirely and what replaces it is worse than the screaming.
I hit the door with both hands. I press my lightcraft into the wood and it cracks and holds and I hit it again and keep hitting it and I press my back against the wall and breathe.
There has to be another way in.
I start moving down the corridor.
A door to my left stands open.
I slow.
Inside the room a candle burns on a low table. A man sits on the edge of a bed with his back to the door, his hood down, his dark hair loose around his shoulders. Beside him, her legs folded beneath her, sits a woman.
I stop.
I have never seen her like this.
Maridale.
Her cheeks are rosy. Her brown hair long and loose down her back.
But this Maridale is different from the one I knew.
She looks certain of herself in a way the Maridale I knew perhaps was always working toward but never quite reaching.
She is laughing at something he has just said, her hand easy on his arm, entirely at ease.
He turns his face toward her and I see it clearly.
Tamal.
She reaches up and kisses him and he kisses her back and when she pulls away she is still smiling.
"I must get back to the ship," she says. "Or Eravic will be cross."
"Stay," he says.
"I cannot." She stands and straightens her dress. "You know I cannot."
He catches her hand. Holds it. "I am doing what is necessary," he says quietly. "To get the key."
She looks at him.
"I know you are," she says. She squeezes his hand once. "I know."
She turns toward the door. I press myself against the corridor wall. She passes within inches of me and does not see me and her footsteps fade down the corridor and are gone.
Tamal stays on the edge of the bed.
He puts his head in his hands.
I stare at him. I think about what he just said.
I think about Maridale laughing on that bed and about Eravic's ship and about the woman who brought me fresh linens and sat with me in the dark and told me I could trust her being here in Yorali looking rosy-cheeked and kissing the prince of Yorali.
I feel sick because the pieces will not form into anything I can hold.
From down the corridor, Nox has gone silent.
That is somehow worse than the screaming.
I push off the wall and run back toward the door.