Chapter Four
As much as she promised herself she wouldn’t fight back, she couldn’t help but curse and spit as they came at her with a blindfold. It took three of them to tie it on. Her performance earned her a gag, and then they threw her belly down over the back of a horse.
Deprived of sight, Solana began to panic. The horse shifted, and then a body slid on beside her. Knees dug into her side. A hand pressed into her bound hands, holding her steady as the horse was spurred on.
The lack of freedom, the jostling of the horse underneath her, the loss of her eyesight, it made her wild with dread.
Every shift of her body was met with a firm press of his hand, a reminder that she was, quite literally, underneath his thumb and completely at his mercy, until she gave up altogether and let her body go slack.
Suddenly, it was much easier to breathe. There was no point in fighting if there was nowhere to go.
At least, not physically. Mentally, the dark called to her. She had lost too much blood. It was possible she’d die from it, and she realized there were much worse things than dying and becoming a muki, like dying and leaving Sami to an uncertain fate that her recklessness had gotten him into.
Not all muki returned, but Solana knew she would.
She was too full of wrath and resentment.
Too restless to accept her fate. Too hungry.
If she died, she would come back and eat these Masters with their dramatic cloaks and fancy shackles and shiny, useless badges.
She wondered what gift they had mastered at the Academy.
It was the only place in all of Supay that taught and practiced gift manipulation, and it cost just as much as, if not more than, a Medallion to attend.
Those that survived training were granted the honor of serving King Killian and paid handsomely for it. The privileged grew more privileged while the rest of them worked themselves to a cursed death.
But even privilege was not enough to save them. In the end, they’d all end up as muki forever tied to the Uku Pacha without any chance of ascending to Hanan Pacha. The thought was both comforting and terrifying, knowing that nothing she did or could do would change anything.
Staying would see her turned into a monster, but leaving would turn her into something else. Something selfish and unforgivable.
The decision was being made for her. The shackles around her wrists were unyielding, digging into her bones and tightening with every move she made.
The gag pressed against her tongue and made her stomach roil.
If she vomited, she would choke on it, and she refused to die that way.
Instead, she focused on the burning pain in her side, the pressure of a large hand against her back, the wind that whipped her face, the rhythm of the horses’ hooves over cobbled streets.
It was several hours before their party slowed.
Solana had managed to stay awake, somehow.
At some point, they would have to be off-loaded from the horses, and they hadn’t bothered to bind her legs.
She could take off and create a diversion so that Sami could make a run for it.
With him gone and safe, she could focus on saving herself.
As long as they had Sami, she was as good as clay in their hands.
And she really wanted her dagger back.
The horses came to a stop. “Master Reyes,” she heard someone say. “Welcome back. Fruitful evening?”
“We’ll see just how fruitful soon.” The voice came from above her. Already, she could picture his eyes as he said it, glittering sharply, pinned to whoever he spoke to. Reyes. Now that she had a name, perhaps she could appeal to his humanity. If he had any left.
Metal gates clanked open, and then the horses started forward again.
The man’s chuckle faded away, and the sound of the horses’ steps changed from clops over stone to thuds.
Dirt, perhaps, or grass. They were most likely in the outer ward of the castle grounds and on their way to the dungeons, which meant they were surrounded by stone walls as tall as trees.
Walls she had climbed as a small child, before she had begun to climb the walls of the callejon.
Solana steadied her breathing and pushed the memories of this place away. There wasn’t any time to get sucked in, to allow herself to remember and wonder and wish. If only her father had stayed with them. If only he had listened to her mother. If only—
“Take him to the dungeons,” Reyes ordered. She was jostled and then cool air replaced where Reyes’s body had been. Firm hands grabbed her waist and tugged her down.
This was her chance. But when her feet hit the ground, she was betrayed by her own legs folding underneath her.
It was only Reyes’s arms that held her up.
Under the blindfold, tears gathered and leaked from the corners of her eyes.
Everything hurt. Solana couldn’t swallow the bile that rose in her throat and she instinctively folded over to expel her insides.
Fingers touched the back of her head and Solana flinched away. “Stay still. I’m only removing the gag. We don’t want you dying just yet.”
The rope fell away from her mouth and she sucked in a sputtering, greedy breath. Rough hands grabbed her bindings to straighten her, and then she was airborne, thrown over a sharp shoulder as if she were nothing more than a sack of flour.
Solana screamed, the pain in her side searing, radiating through her body until it took her breath away.
The world went in and out of focus. Voices spoke, first quietly and then more intensely, until she was on her back on a hard surface, her hands trapped beneath her, the sky replaced with a low stone ceiling that seemed to press in closer with every beat of her throbbing pulse.
“She’s injured.” The voice wasn’t Reyes’s. It was softer and somewhat accusatory. Solana wanted to say, you should have seen the other guy, but nothing came out. There was a tug and the cool air rushed over her stomach and chest.
“Shit.” That was Reyes. She assumed it was his fingers that prodded the skin around the wound.
Solana tried to wriggle away from his touch, but he steadied her with that same unforgiving hand.
“Is this from a muki?” Gray eyes appeared above her.
His hair caught the light and shimmered as it dangled from his forehead.
Solana must have lost her mind, because she had the strangest urge to run her fingers through it and see if it was as silky as it looked.
“It has to be,” said the second voice. “Three parallel wounds. It looks like she was punctured and then tore free.”
That’s exactly what happened.
She must have said the words out loud, because Reyes was in her face again, his hands on either cheek, forcing her eyes to open and meet his stare. “Say the words. Tell me this was from a muki.”
Solana swallowed. She felt less like she was going to die and more like she wanted to punch Reyes in his stupid face. An improvement.
“It was from a muki,” she finally said, throat scratchy from screaming.
“There’s no reaction to the poison. How are you perfectly fine?” Reyes snatched his hands from her cheeks and leaned over to further inspect her side.
“I wouldn’t say she’s perfectly fine.” Remembering there was a second person in the room, Solana looked to her left and found a woman in a black cloak, her short brown hair slicked behind her ears and her bright green eyes pinned to Solana.
“You’ll have to heal her before you start asking any questions.
” Though she said the word heal, a foreboding feeling crawled over Solana.
“Close the door on your way out, Cora.”
“Reyes, I don’t think—”
“Let the king know we’re back. This won’t take long.”
“Wait.” Solana leaned forward, but Reyes pressed a hand against the center of her chest, pushing her back down to the stone table.
His skin was as cold as his eyes as he said, “This is going to hurt.”
Solana didn’t have time to consider his words before she felt the bite of something icy and foreign in the pit of her stomach.
It wasn’t awful, at first. She was used to pain, both physical and mental, as the muki’s emotions unleashed inside of her, but then it shifted.
An unnatural sensation that crawled beneath her skin, dug into the marrow of her bones, and sliced her open one thin line at a time.
She was pinned beneath it, trapped in her own body and scrambling to get away from it.
Her body stretched to its limits. Her back arched until she was sure it would snap in half.
All the while, Reyes’s hands pressed into her, his healing relentlessly burning her alive.
The pain disappeared, and Solana fell back to the table, gasping and gulping down air, her whole body shaking without Reyes’s hand to steady her.
Whatever was left in her stomach surged into her mouth, and she leaned over to vomit all over the floor.
Reyes jumped back with a hiss as she coughed and gagged and tried to breathe through it.
Finally, her stomach settled. She stayed on her side to give her blood the chance to return to her hands. Reyes watched her from several paces away, his arms crossed over his chest. A speck of vomit marred one of his shiny black boots. Serves him right.
“That’s a useful gift,” Solana said thickly.
“So is immunity to muki poison.”
Solana had never thought of it as a gift. More like an unexpected benefit that meant she could take more risks and had earned her more scars than was normal.
“Is that why you’re keeping me here?” she asked.
The room was dingy and small, with tables like the one she was lying on placed at odd intervals against the wall.
A cabinet stood farther to the side, but the door opened and a boy dressed in all black entered the room, stealing her attention.
Reyes nodded his head toward the floor and the boy followed his gesture.
He closed his eyes, but not before Solana saw a grimace flash across his face.
“What is he—”