Chapter Twenty-Five Arion
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
ARION
The world unfurls slowly before my eyes. Hazy. Dense and wet. Strange.
I blink rapidly, shifting beneath an unfamiliar weight as my wings try to stretch, to relieve a cramp in their leftmost ligament, but… they can’t move. I can’t move either—not beneath whatever is atop me.
What happened?
I glance down to find Gavriall sprawled out on my chest, one arm wrapped around my neck while his lips brush my throat.
Soft snores rumble from him. His eyes are closed.
And—I don’t understand. I jab him in the ribs, but he doesn’t so much as stir.
Sleeping softly. Cuddling me as if I’m a gods-damned teddy bear.
I raise my foot between us and, with all the force I can muster, kick him off me.
He wakes with a gasp, landing like a roach on his back and swiping at the air as if to fight it. “What—where—who—?”
“Be quiet.” I glance around us. An attempt to orient myself and answer the questions still bubbling from his lips.
Because I don’t know. I don’t remember. Gavriall and I have been tossed onto a soft mattress adorned with half a dozen blankets, each a different, richer texture than the last. Wool to silk to velvet trimmed in fur.
I force myself to sit, an excruciating task as my bones creak and my muscles ache.
Even my veins feel desiccated, as though I’m a husk of who I was hours—Days?
Weeks?—ago. No. No, that can’t be right.
I snarl. “What the fuck is going on?”
Gavriall rolls onto his belly, peeking at me from behind a mountain of velvet throw pillows. “You mean this isn’t you? It’s not your magic?”
I thought we discussed no more decimation? You don’t have enough left—
That wasn’t me.
It wasn’t me. It’s not me. I grind my teeth, jaw clenched as anxiety curdles in my stomach. I recall the squid. I recall Zephyra and Vesper being tossed around like sacks of potatoes. I recall grabbing the trident and trying to fight it. I recall lightning and viscera and holding Zephyra. And then—
Nothing.
My head begins to pound.
I am with Gavriall. In a bedroom.
Enchanted storm clouds form a canopy over the lavish bed, the four posts surrounding it carved into whirling tornados.
Midnight-blue tapestries drape along driftwood walls, sea-glass wind chimes ringing softly from an icy breeze that stretches across the whole of the grandiose room.
Thunder booms. Distant, a mere echo of reverberations that only gently quake the floor.
There are desks, chairs, even a small bench in the corner sculpted in the shape of a chest overflowing with gold, and every single one of those surfaces is buried beneath treasure.
Crystals. Gemstones. Silver and gold coins.
Rings and necklaces and—an ancient skull that rattles its teeth.
“Kill the spare to grow more fair, but if he’s dead, mind your head. A crack. A splat. Blood, blood, blood,” the skull chitters. Seconds later, it adds, “Everyone who draws a breath will eventually draw their last. How are you to know which is which? Breathe in. Breathe deep. Die, die, die.”
“Right.” Gavriall peers overtop pillow mountain and stares straight at the cursed artifact. “Time to go. Magic us out of here. As in expeditiously. Immediately. With great haste. Preferably before that thing tries to eat us.”
I glare at him, and even my wings seem annoyed by his unnecessary presence. The right reaches out and smacks his spine. Gavriall grunts. “I did not kill a giant squid to be abused by your feathers—”
“You did not kill a giant squid. You were shaken around like a baby’s rattle while the rest of us tried to murder it.”
He frowns and sits up, his jet-black hair matted in a gnarled bird’s nest and sticking out at haphazard angles. “I believe I was an equal participant, thanks very much.”
“Then the siren song must have melted your brain.”
“Ah! Siren song!” Gavriall rises onto his knees. “I remember that. I remember the silver-haired mermaid and her trident, I remember besting a giant squid, and I remember… I remember…”
“Nothing,” I answer for him. “There’s nothing after the attack.”
He swears, then raises his conjoined arms. They’re bound together at the wrists with obsidian rope.
For a split second, I think I remember the swift impact of a gnarled net.
The sharp injection of a syringe. But the memory vanishes sooner than it appears, and my gaze drops, instead, to my own hands. Also bound.
The silvered cord tangles with obsidian bonds, twisting around each individual knot, trying with palpable desperation to slice through the rope and free me, but it won’t be able to.
We are fucked.
“So?” Gavriall asks. “Want to cut us loose, Arion?”
“I can’t.” I stare at the rope—blackened not from dye, but from poison. A paralysis toxin. Magic threatens to roil in my veins, but it can’t. Exhaustion squeezes my lungs, my heart, in merciless claws. Someone kidnapped us. Someone poisoned us.
“Solar squid ink,” I say disdainfully. Gavriall’s eyes widen with instant comprehension.
The skull chatters pearl-white teeth, seemingly gleeful as it echoes, “Die, die, die.”
“I hate that fucking thing,” Gavriall murmurs.
But I ignore him, the skull, even the enchanted clouds spilling soft rainwater onto our skin now. We’ve been kidnapped, and I’ve been weakened. I am powerless. “I can’t use my magic when we’re bound by this rope.”
My strength is gone.
“Which is entirely the point,” a woman says. Her accent darkens the room first, a rasp to her voice I can’t quite place, before she swaggers out from behind a supernatural fog. I leap to my feet, hands bound and wings all but useless in this tight room—except for in a fight. And I will fight.
The woman picks her nails with a silver dagger, a belt slung across her waist stuffed with more blades than I can quickly count.
Small ones, curved ones, dual-sided ones.
She tilts her head, studying me like a cat as she prowls forward.
Her eyes flash cloud gray, auburn tendrils of hair dancing around her tanned, narrow face.
“Do you think you’ll send an elbow into my ribs?
Or perhaps you’ll bash my nose into my skull and shove me off-balance,” she says plainly, bluntly, as if discussing the weather.
She shrugs then. “No matter. Whatever you do, I will anticipate it. I will hurt you first.” She releases her dagger with an expert flick of her wrist, and it impales the bed.
Right between Gavriall’s legs. Less than an inch away from his dick.
Gavriall looks down in abject horror. “I shouldn’t have come,” he declares after a few seconds. “I should have stayed in Tower Historia.”
“The criminal waltzed into a ball, and he took a little fall. His head hit the ground; his brains splattered out. The criminal chooses a white, white pall.”
The woman laughs at the skull’s latest rhyme, but Gavriall seethes. “This place is barbaric. And that thing should be pitched into the nearest fire.”
“Oh, she can’t be,” the woman says, pushing treasure off a chair and sending gems and coins clattering to the wooden floorboards.
She plops down and throws her feet onto the nearest table.
“Queen Emilia’s soul has been preserved for eternity.
You can try to crush it, stab it, or set it on fire—but she never breaks. ”
“You’ve tried, then?” Gavriall asks with an arched, skeptical brow.
“Of course. What woman wants to live with their great-great-great-grandmother for eternity?” The woman nudges the skull away from her with her blade, but the skull—Queen Emilia—bites down on the tip.
She rends the blade in two. “You see? She’s the worst, and she can’t be defeated.
Unlike you two.” The woman gestures between us with her broken dagger before flicking the broken tip away.
“I assume you’re panicking now. The holes in your memory, the aches in your spines… you can’t be doing well.”
My hands clench into fists, and Gavriall grumbles as she pulls an empty syringe from her belt and tosses it onto the bed.
“If injected into the base of the spine, viper toxin and a dash of liquid mercury can knock anyone out and render them unconscious for two full days. The dosage depends on the size and build of the person, of course, and we really needed to be sure you wouldn’t wake.
We used a little extra. It’ll affect your memory of the capture, but it shouldn’t have too many lasting consequences.
” She shrugs. “If we used any more, you would have died.”
“Inspiring,” Gavriall spits. “I suppose you expect us to thank you?”
“Of course not.” She grins wickedly. “I still haven’t decided if you’re going to survive this.”
I glare at her, not giving a shit about her cursed grandmother, her toxins, or her threats. She doesn’t hold all the cards here, and I’m not a fool. I know exactly who she is. “Princess Amaya Frost,” I say, “Stormborn seventeenth daughter of Tempestas.”
“Please”—the princess waves the title away—“no one calls me that here. I’m Amaya.
Or Captain. And it is an honor to meet you, Warlock Arion Stone.
We wouldn’t have known about mercury if not for your attack.
” She turns to Gavriall. “It was years ago now, but he conjured a mercurial gas, and it melted the flesh right off Tempest’s vanguard. Can you believe that?”
Gavriall stares a hole into the side of my head. “You know? I really can.”
Amaya continues as if he hasn’t spoken, her gaze flicking back to my face. “We started experimenting after that. Managed to excavate the stuff from deep, deep within the earth. Gruesome, truly. You really are as ruthless as they say.”
I step closer, and my wings cast a haunting shadow across the room. Rain pelts us all, cold and dreadful, but I don’t shiver. “Your mother tried to take Mortia’s coast.”