Текст книги "The Serpent and the Wings of Night"

Автор книги: Carissa Broadbent

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“Oraya.”

Vincent said my name in a single exhale of relief—not so much a greeting as much as a desperate thank you to the Mother that I was here.

I wasn’t expecting that.

Three syllables, and so much of my anger melted away, leaving a vulnerable affection that ached beneath a stab of guilt.

I had made him wait one more day. I couldn’t bring myself to see him after witnessing what happened to that little girl. And still, as I crested the hill today, I questioned whether it was a good idea.

I thought I was ready. Working in the human districts had stilled something within me. It didn’t make the image of that little girl’s crying face go away, but it did make her pain feel like it was worth something.

And yet, with every step I took towards Vincent’s meeting place, I felt smaller and smaller. All the parts of myself that I’d been so careful to hide from him were too close to the surface.

So I was relieved when he looked at me that way, and when it made all my anger deflate. He had been worried about me, and he loved me. That was all that mattered.

“Are you hurt?”

Vincent circled me, looking me up and down even though I wore leathers that covered my entire body, the scars of my injuries sealed away beneath armor.

“I’m fine.”

“You didn’t look fine. You looked…” His back straightened, paternal worry replaced with the rage of the King of the Nightborn. “What,” he hissed, “were you thinking? You nearly threw that match away. You nearly forfeited your life. For what?”

That stare was cold enough to freeze my heart again.

For what?

With those words, I was in the maze again, looking at that child, the horrifying realization falling over me. I had learned over the years to carefully regulate my emotions—anger is a series of physical responses—but this time it hit me hard, and fast.

“Why were there humans in that trial?” I asked.

I spoke calmly, but Vincent had taught me how to line words with steel. He recognized that now, blinking in surprise.

“The trials are not under my jurisdiction.”

“That isn’t true.”

Surprise turned to indignation. “Excuse me?”

“You do not execute them, but they are under your jurisdiction. And the humans are citizens of the House of Night. There are—there are protections. There should have been protections.”

I was eternally conscious of how I stumbled over my words. In my head, they sounded strong and convicted. Aloud, they sounded weak and childish.

His stare grew colder. “Protections? Their lives belong to Nyaxia. Just as mine does. Just as yours does. And if this is what she wants them for—”

“Children? She wants children for her entertainment? For—”

I cut myself off and turned so my face was shrouded in the shadows. Useless. It would hide nothing from a vampire.

Something in him softened. I could hear the change in his voice—he had morphed from father to king, and now he was my father again.

“Let me into that mind of yours, little serpent,” he murmured.

He didn’t know what he was asking for. He wouldn’t like what he saw there, if I did. The words that weighed heavy on my tongue tasted like treason—like they might betray me to him as someone who was too dissimilar to him. Not vampiric enough.

“A human life should not be worth so little,” I said. “There’s a reason why humans are protected within their districts.”

“All of our lives are cheap, Oraya. Human. Vampire. Even those of the gods.”

He said this somewhat pityingly, as if he was surprised to have to explain something so obvious.

It was true. Death was everywhere in the House of Night. Parents killed their children. Children killed their parents. Lovers took each other’s lives in the night, gone too far in the throes of passion. Even the stories of our gods were vicious, lesser deities frequently murdered for little more than sport. The Nightborn forged their people and their blades from steel, hard and cold and unforgiving.

This was life. Maybe it was a sign that something was wrong with me that I struggled to accept it. Struggled to hammer myself into that blade. Perhaps it was because I was neither human nor vampire, and because standing on that boundary made it so clear how steep the differences were.

“At least the vampires died for something,” I said.

“We all die for something. Vampire and human.”

I didn’t accept that answer. I didn’t accept it at all. If I died in the Kejari, at least I’d be doing so of my own volition. But those humans? What did they die for? Nothing. Entertainment for our bloodthirsty goddess and bloodthirsty populace. I chose this life, but that child didn’t.

Vincent was right that the House of Night didn’t respect any life, but it certainly still valued some more than others.

I tried so hard to stop there. But I couldn’t. The words came before I could stop myself.

“That could have been me. That girl. It could have been me. Do you ever think about that?”

Vincent’s expression darkened, like storm clouds blotting out the powerful stillness of the moon. “That never would have been you, Oraya.”

“I’m—”

Human. I so rarely spoke that word to him. Never said it aloud. Like it was some dirty term that neither of us wanted to acknowledge.

“You are not like them,” he cut in, forcefully. “It never would have been you.”

He was wrong. I knew this, just as I knew better than to say it.

He stepped closer, the shadows in his gaze growing deeper, fiercer.

“Do you want to change this world, little serpent? Then climb your cage until you are so high no one can catch you. Break its bars and make them your weapons. Nothing is sharper. I know because I did it.”

I was accustomed to seeing Vincent the king, Vincent the father, but it was rare that I saw this version of him: Vincent the revolutionary. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that he’d reshaped this kingdom. He knew what it was like to crave change.

“You cannot accomplish anything in this world without power,” he said. “And power requires sacrifice, focus, and ruthlessness.”

His gaze drifted off into the shadows behind me, and I wondered if he was thinking about his own rise to power and everything it had taken from him. I knew he had sacrificed, too. But in exchange, he had become the most powerful king the House of Night had ever seen. He’d been able to shape this kingdom into everything he wanted it to be.

You cannot accomplish anything in this world without power.

The truth. In good ways and bad. Perhaps the only useful thing my anger could do for me was motivate me. I needed to stay focused.

I swallowed and lowered my chin. “I know.”

Power. The word reminded me of all the questions I still didn’t have answers to. I rubbed my fingertips together as they tingled with the memory of my confusing, brief burst of magic.

“Something strange happened,” I said. “Before the Trial. I… did something I don’t understand.”

I told him what had happened with my magic—selectively, of course, leaving out the specifics of my argument with Raihn. I didn’t need any more of Vincent’s disapproval than I already had on that front.

He listened in silence, face stoic. When I was done, I watched for some sign of surprise, of concern, and found none.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “I have never been able to do anything like that. Not even when you were training me.”

He was silent for a few seconds before answering, like he had to think about what to say next. “We always knew you had talents.”

The faintest tug at the corner of his mouth. Just a hint of pride.

We? Maybe he did—maybe, I was a bit skeptical—but I never thought I could do anything like that.

“But I never had before.”

“Magic is an unpredictable force, and your life has changed dramatically these last few weeks.”

I stared flatly at him, unconvinced.

“I’m not a vampire. I’m not one of Nyaxia’s children. How could I have wielded that kind of power from her arts?”

“You offered your blood to Nyaxia. You offered her your life. That offering does not go unrecognized. And many have been able to wield powers that traditional wisdom said they couldn’t.”

I thought of Mische and her flames—a vampire wielding the power of Atroxus.

“Perhaps some part of you knows that you need this power now more than ever. So learn it. Use it.” He leaned closer, eyes cold with fervor. “Nothing matters but this, Oraya. Nothing. Step over temporary barriers. Once you win, the world is yours. That is the time for dreaming. But this? This is the time for conquering.”

I, once again, barely returned to the Moon Palace in time for dawn. By the time I made it back to our apartment, the sun was already peeking over the horizon. I came in just as Mische was heading back into her room, but Raihn once again stood at the window, forearm braced against it, curtains parted.

He peered over his shoulder, giving me a little smirk. “Welcome back.”

“You aren’t going to ask me where I was?”

“I’ve learned it’s more fun to be surprised by you. Besides, I think I know. You ready to start tomorrow?”

I thought about the last time we’d played out this moment and just how poorly it went. Briefly, I wondered whether I was insane.

But there was a Halfmoon trial to win.

Now is the time for conquering, Vincent whispered in my ear.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be ready.”

I started to go to my room, and then succumbed to my curiosity and turned back.

“Why do you do that?” I asked.

“Hm?”

“It must hurt.”

“Not too bad yet.”

“But… why? Why do you do it?”

He was silent for a long moment, then smiled at me.

“Get some rest,” he said. “We have a lot of work to do.”

It struck me as completely unfair that he got to see my secret but refused to explain his own stupid self-destructive habits. I decided that refraining from pointing out this hypocrisy was my first step to being a decent ally.

“Well, don’t burn yourself so badly that you’re going to be useless tomorrow,” I said as I turned away. “Won’t do much to convince me this is a good idea.”

“You say that like you aren’t desperate.”

I shook my head, rolled my eyes, and went back to my room.

I did not miss Mische peering around the corner of her door, not even bothering to hide her eavesdropping nor her grin.

INTERLUDE

The little girl was no longer a little girl. Now she was a young woman. At sixteen years old, she now thought she understood her place in her unique world. But something strange happened in those hazy years between childhood and adulthood. The things she desired changed. The things she noticed changed.

Vampires are beautiful people.

This is almost universally true. Their flesh is smooth and soft, their features bright and striking, their voices sweet and melodic. They are often the kind of beautiful that leaves a mark on one’s soul—the kind that visits you again as you lie awake in bed at night, thinking about the shape of those lips.

The young woman had learned to numb herself to this. She had been taught relentlessly to view the beings that surrounded her as deadly monsters. It was only as she grew older that she began to view them as dangerous not for all the ways they were monstrous, but for all the ways they were not.

Let us be clear: she was a smart girl. She knew how to survive.

But all living creatures desire. Is that weakness?

One night, the young woman met a young vampire man. She did not often interact with members of her father’s court. But this boy, too, seemed like an outsider. He was young, only a few years older than her. He was the most stunning creature she had ever seen—his face the flawless combination of hard angles and gentle curves, rendered in shades of warmth that hinted at what he had once been.

Yes, he had been Turned.

He was a lonely young man. She was a lonely young woman. Is it anything but inevitable that something should form between them?

Perhaps he himself did not understand the weapon of the skin he wore.

Perhaps he was attracted to her because she reminded him of what he once was.

Perhaps he even thought he loved her.

The young woman had never thought much of love. She had not been fed tales of storybook princesses; she did not dream of true love’s kiss saving her from her treacherous life. But the memory of this boy’s mouth still visited her at night. If it was love to want someone, perhaps this was it.

She was so, so young. Hard in some ways. Softly naive in others. She did not truly understand, yet, that vampires shone as the silver teeth of traps shone. Their beauty was a beckoning hand, promising sweet caresses.

The little serpent was so very lonely. She slithered right into those lovely, elegant fingers. She did not even see the claws.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I thought that perhaps if we were very, very lucky, Raihn and I could manage not to kill each other, but I hadn’t expected that we would work well together.

Those first few nights in the districts were far from perfect. Having a mutual goal that we actually cared about helped, but we still found ourselves tripping over each other. Raihn’s wall of a body managed to get in my way whenever I needed to move fast. His strikes always took our target out of my line of attack at just the wrong moment. In one memorably painful instance, his wing hit me so hard that it flung me into a wall like a swatted fly.

But there was no shortage of targets. The vampires of the inner city had happily turned the district into their hunting ground in my absence. So we continued, breaking down the barrier between us bit by bit.

Five nights in, and I realized we’d gone an entire trip without either of us accidentally—or intentionally—hitting the other.

Six nights, and I realized we hadn’t even stepped on each other’s feet all day.

Seven nights, and we actually managed to complement each other, dismantling one of our targets with seamless efficiency. We’d stopped and stared at each other afterwards, wide-eyed, like we had both witnessed a miracle and didn’t quite want to jeopardize it by acknowledging it aloud. Of course, after that, we’d gotten in each other’s way for the rest of the night, but I’d take what I could get.

On the eighth night, I fell back and simply watched him work. By then, I’d started to gain an innate understanding of how he moved, and observing him with that in mind crystalized all of my observations into conclusions.

When I first met Raihn, I’d thought that he relied on his size and strength. I had been very, very wrong. All of that was a distraction. He used magic constantly, hidden in each movement and blow, obscured by showy savagery. If someone wasn’t watching closely, they would think he just went at his opponent with a giant Nightsteel sword and won by sheer brute force alone—and they would be underestimating him.

It was much more than that. Those strikes were devastating because he was using his size, his speed, and his magic with each one. There was nothing crude about it—it was strategic. He knew when to hit, where, and how hard. Calculated.

This dawned on me as I watched him yank his sword from the chest of a limp vampire corpse. He glanced over his shoulder at me, brow quirked.

“What? Like what you see?”

“Do you do that on purpose?”

“This?” He gestured to the body, straightened, and wiped his blade. The glowing shadows along its length shuddered as the cloth ran over it. “Yes, I’d say so.”

“The performance. Your fighting style is a performance. You’re making it look simpler than it is.”

He paused for a moment—maybe in surprise—before turning around.

“You have been watching closely. I’m flattered.”

“Why do you hide your use of magic?”

He sheathed his sword and declined to answer. “What’s next? The southern end?”

“Do you want people to think you’re a brute?”

He stopped mid-step, eyebrow twitching in an expression that I now had come to know meant, Oraya said something amusing, probably unintentionally. “A brute?”

I didn’t know what was funny about my word choice. “Yes. Even when you used it in the feast hall that time, it was all power, no finesse.”

“You think I have finesse? That’s flattering. So, southern end?”

“I think you deliberately try to seem like you don’t.”

“Southern end it is.” He started walking. “Perhaps I hide my magic for the same reason you hide yours.”

I had to take three steps to keep up with two of his. “You weren’t entitled to know about my magic. And you aren’t entitled to know why I hid it.”

“Oh, I know why you hid it.”

I had to fight to keep the surprise from my face.

A slow smile spread over his lips. “You hid it because you didn’t know you could do it. You threw me out of a window completely by accident.”

This time—Mother damn my face—the blink of shock happened before I could stop it.

“That’s not—”

“Look, you are many things, princess. But a good actress is not one of them. Now let’s go. We’re losing moonlight.”

Goddess fucking damn him, there were so many things I wanted to say—chief of which, You fucking knew and you still gave me that much shit?—but I shut my mouth, drew my blades, and went after him.

I didn’t know how I felt about that—the fact that he had been observing me just as closely as I observed him.

I didn’t like being observed—and even less liked being understood—but even I had to admit that it had undeniable benefits. Soon, Raihn and I worked together as if we had known each other for years.

We had learned each other’s fighting styles and learned where to leave openings to accommodate each other. It took nonstop work, from the moment the sun set to the moment the horizon bled pink with impending sunrise. It took many bruises, snapped insults, and aching muscles. And we still had a long, long way to go.

But Raihn, I begrudgingly had to admit, had been right the night he had first approached me to ally: we made a good team.

After we returned from the districts, I would spend time with Mische each day, too, practicing magic use. That went… less well. At least Raihn and I made measurable progress every day, even on our worst outings. My magic, though, was a volatile, unpredictable beast. Sometimes, with Mische’s tutelage, I managed to coax little wisps of shadow or Nightfire to my fingertips. Other nights, even asking for sparks was too much. And not once did I come even close to summoning the kind of power I’d used to throw Raihn out the window.

I was grateful that we did this work in my bedchamber, where Raihn couldn’t see. I never would have gotten over the humiliation.

“You’re already defeated before you even start,” Mische said, after one long night in which I failed to summon my magic at all, even weakly. “It knows when you have a bad attitude.”

“I don’t have a bad attitude,” I grumbled.

“You’re scared of it and it’s scared of you,” she chirped. “You just have to, you know… seize it! Let your heart open!” She flung out her arms wide, beaming, as if this was a triumphant and completely reasonable instruction.

I gave her a deadpan stare, sighed, and then proceeded to fail fifteen more times until I gave up in exhausted rage.

The truth was, despite my grumbling, I admired Mische. It wasn’t her fault that my magic was too temperamental to be useful. She was a patient and dedicated teacher, and her grasp of magic was incredible. She manipulated flame and light as if they were an extension of her body, with carefree effortlessness. It was mind-boggling.

I’d thought I might be able to learn from Mische because she, too, drew from magic that traditionally fell beyond her domain. But all I learned was that she was apparently some kind of anomaly of nature, because she didn’t seem to have to try at all.

One time, when my curiosity got the better of me, I asked her, “How did you even start doing this? The fire?”

“It’s just… in me.”

“Right. But… how? How did you know that? How did you find it?”

She looked blankly at me, brow furrowed, as if I’d just asked her to describe how she began breathing. “It’s just there. And yours is, too.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, it is!” she insisted.

It was not.

Vincent wasn’t much help, either. His advice was the opposite of Mische’s—doled out in scant instruction about muscle control and form and, above all, focus focus focus. I saw him only a handful of times over those weeks, and less as time went on. Sometimes, I was too busy to go to our meeting spot. Other times, I would wait for him for an hour and he would never appear. With each visit, he was more distracted and distant, and the knot in my stomach grew tighter.

I wasn’t stupid. I knew something was happening, something bad that he didn’t want to reveal to me. Whenever I gently inquired, he told me I needed to focus on the Kejari in a tone that left no room for negotiation and that I knew better than to challenge.

So I did as he said. I focused, and I trained.

In the second week of preparation, Raihn and I forwent our nightly trip to the districts to train with Mische in the apartment instead. Developing a rhythm with Raihn had been the hard part. But once we forged the foundation of our partnership, it was easy to fit Mische in. She was fast and flexible, responding intuitively to wordless cues. After only a handful of clumsy starts, the three of us fell into a balanced team.

That night, halfway through the session, Mische stopped short. She backed against the wall and crouched down with her hands pressed together, eyes round.

I faltered mid-movement. “What’s wrong?” I asked, alarmed. “Did I hurt you?”

“No, no.” She shook her head, a grin spreading across her mouth. “It’s just… gods, look at you two! It’s amazing!”

“There’s no bonding like bonding over murder,” Raihn said dryly.

“I’m just so proud,” she sighed—and I was still trying to figure out whether she was joking or not as he rolled his eyes and beckoned to her. “You’re just trying to get an extra break. Let’s go, Mische.”

Together, we refined the teamwork we had discovered, night after night after night. Every morning, I collapsed into bed exhausted. Every night, I woke up sore and ready to do it all over again.

On the sixteenth night, in the brief seconds before sleep took me, I thought, This might actually work.

It might actually work.

And maybe—maybe—I even liked it.