Chapter 49
F ootsteps echoed on a rough marble floor leading to dark stairs flanked by tranquil azure flames. It was empty at the top, and he was alone. Councilor Vainir had his back turned to her and was lost in quiet reverie to the gaze of a majestic blue flame, the largest in the sanctum.
Her stiletto weighed so little she couldn’t feel it in her hand, yet it carried with it a great weight, her intent to kill. Fyn crouched behind her, silent and fluid, like her own shadow.
She concentrated on the councilor’s back with his broad shoulders and long, pale golden hair. She needed to get close to deliver the killing blow. The stiletto was long enough to pierce his heart from behind, if she got close enough, if the angle was right, if her hand was steady.
Her legs crossed one over the other as she snuck up behind him, the stiletto at her side. She got closer and raised it.
Then came agony, blinding and sudden.
The stiletto, now a molten orange color, dropped from her hand. She gasped, trying to hold in the scream, but it was too much. Her knees gave way .
Her hand was burned where it had once held the stiletto, the skin blistering red. She started screaming despite herself.
The eyes gazing at her from above were the same color as the seer’s flames, and they burned into her. Cold blue eyes from a haughty, shrewd face.
What happened?
She couldn’t think … the pain … the fire …
Fyn.
As if on cue, his cries sounded behind her. She twisted her body around. Fyn was struggling. Chains were binding him to the floor, chains that were glowing orange as if they’d been cast into a furnace, and they were burning his skin.
He writhed, fighting against the fiery chains that bound him. The sound of his screaming sliced through her like a blade. She had never heard him make a sound like that before.
Her own pain subsided, or because of the adrenaline, she couldn’t feel it anymore. She realized she had no chains holding her down, and she could move. But Fyn was still struggling. Her pain faded, maybe it was adrenaline or shock.
She forced herself up but stumbled and fell again.
Her ankle screamed in protest, but she gritted her teeth and pushed through it, crawling to him.
The chains pinning him down were blisteringly hot, wrapping his limbs, searing his skin, eating through his leathers.
As if forged from the fires of the underworld.
She grabbed at them to wrench them from his body, but withdrew her hands with a yell of frustration mixed with pain.
The fiery chains had scorched her flesh, and that was when the genuine pain came. Searing, excruciating, and raw.
She recoiled with a cry. Her palms were charred, raw, and blistered. Tears welled in her eyes, not from the pain she was experiencing, but from the horror of what they were doing to Fyn.
Another harrowing wail woke her from her stupor.
“Please,” she gasped, turning to Vainir. “Please stop it.”
Fyn groaned through clenched teeth, each breath a labored, painful effort. The air reeked of scorched flesh.
“I’m begging you! Make it stop!”
Vainir’s expression didn’t change. Cold disgust flickered in his eyes, but not even that lingered. He didn’t even flinch at Fyn’s cries from the torture he was going through, even though each cry shredded her heart to pieces.
“Please,” she begged him again. Her hands trembled, red and raw. But she didn’t care. The only thing she felt now was his pain.
Vainir Neverwinter made a slight movement with his hand, and the chains disappeared around Fyn, but there was so much red, too much red.
Fyn collapsed. He was freed but broken. His body was a ruin of red lash marks and exposed, blistered flesh. The burns festered, pulsing with heat and pus. He barely breathed, clinging to consciousness by sheer will.
She dropped to his side and pressed her hands to him.
He must be struggling with immense pain from his raw flesh exposed to the air, but he was fighting through it because Fyn was strong; any other elf would have succumbed to it by now.
Her healing powers surged into him. It didn’t matter that her palms were burned raw, as she healed his body, her wounds healed as well.
Slowly, the red parts faded to pink, and, finally, a great relief to her battered heart, his gray skin began to show once more.
She was busy focusing on healing Fyn that she didn’t notice other elves had come into the sanctum. It was only from hearing Vainir’s eerily calm voice speaking to another that she realized this.
Hands grabbed Fyn, chaining him again, but this time with cold metal. They dragged him away.
“No!” she cried, scrambling up, reaching for him. Her magic still charged through her fingers. “I’m not finished! Let me finish healing him!”
But a hard shove knocked her back.
Vainir towered over her, his expression commanding. He turned to speak to another elf, Nerilion.
Anger coiled inside her. They used them; both she and Fyn were pawns in their game, whatever they were playing.
Her stiletto was gone, but she still had the dagger she requisitioned from Falco, the one with the pretty handle encrusted with a ruby. It was small, but it would work. She just needed to get close enough to him to use it.
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Councilor Vainir said with his back still turned to her. “I needn’t remind you what happened the last time you raised a dagger behind my back. ”
The memory of the pain came back to her. She did not know what kind of magic that was; she’d never heard of it before, but it was powerful. Her head lowered, and so did her dagger.
“Give it to me,” he ordered with his hand outstretched. “My wrath is not meant for you.”
She stared at the hand offered, perfectly soft with manicured nails on lightly golden skin, an illustration of nobility underneath a silken robe. His qualities of being highborn belied the truth. He was vicious and cruel, yet with all the genteel calmness of an elven prince.
He took the dagger from her hand and hid it inside his robe. She lowered her hand, but then he took it, turning it every which way, inspecting it. “As we thought, her healing power is exceptional,” he said to the elf behind him.
Nerilion stepped out as the councilor showed him her hand. The high priest’s eyes grew as they inspected her hands, which were unblemished with no traces of scorched flesh, not even redness.
Vainir’s eyes met hers, and a smile crossed his lips. “I have you at last, Aelrie.”
He knew her name?
Her mouth dropped open as she tried to form a question, but her arms were pushed behind her, and her hands were clasped into chains like they had done to Fyn.
“Take her to my room,” Vainir told them before they dragged her away, too .
She paced in circles around the bedchamber, which was larger than her family cottage.
She was in the Neverwinter family estate located outside the walls of Alfheim beside the river, which flowed south, and she was locked in Vainir’s bedroom.
Many of the Light Elven highborn had both family estates outside the city when they wanted peace and quiet and to live lavishly, and town homes inside the city, equally as lavish, though on a smaller scale, mostly needed when they were in town to conduct business.
But the plushness of her surroundings didn’t comfort her; they intimidated her. This was no doubt what Vainir intended by bringing her here.
She couldn’t sit still ever since they threw her in here. The room with its marble statues and even a fountain made of silver antagonized her with its ostentatious displays of wealth, and the open veranda to the gardens below teased her with freedom, but only after a quick fall to her death.
Fyn was the only thing that mattered to her. And she would do anything to ensure his safety.
She would take the blame for the councilor’s failed assassination.
Fyn would not be safe in a Light Elf dungeon.
The Dark Elf who murdered the high priestess would be too tempting for the guards.
They would say it was an accident, or that he fought back.
The way the guards at the gate acted proved this to her.
As she continued her pacing, she formed a proposition.
Vainir could pin the blame on her. She could say that she was jealous of the high priestess and murdered her to be freed from her service.
Then, she could take Fyn’s place and go on trial instead of him.
As a Light Elf and a female, the court would not be so harsh on her as she’d seen this played out multiple times before.
In fact, many Light Elves considered the court to be a joke most of the time.
But something about this plan nagged her.
Vainir’s assassination was a setup by Vainir himself, it seemed. All to get to her. And as her head spun and she had to sit on the edge of the canopied bed in this ridiculous display of wealth awaiting the councilor’s return, she had to wonder why.