Текст книги "A vow of blood and tears"

Автор книги: Cate Corvin

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Текущая страница: 30 (всего у книги 41 страниц)

“But you were the clincher, Lady Silence.” He laughed, carefree and joyful. “Seriously? ‘Wargs and fiends are the same’? You couldn’t have made my life any easier if you tried.”

I remembered looking at that paragraph, debating whether to scribble it out, debating throwing it in the fire, and failing to do either of those things.

I had ruined myself.

“I left a little note from you, and it’s going to stab him right in the heart.” He shook his head, still chuckling. “I almost wish I could’ve stayed to see the look on his face. All those years of treating me like dirt, talking down to me like I’d never measure up to my saint of a fucking mother, and finally, I get mine.”

Why? I finally wrote, trying to keep my breathing even. What do you get out of this?

“Well, the why is pretty simple.” His hands twitched on the reins. “It’s not just that I have a Forian father. As you can probably guess, she was raped during the war. I’m the son of a warg. Did I ask for that? No. And yet they still treated me like an outsider. You should probably understand more than most what it feels like to always be on the outside of things. Just one little fault in your makeup, one you never asked for, and people will always look at you sideways for it.”

I hated to do it, but I nodded. In a way, I did understand, completely and totally—until I met Bane, I had always been the outsider.

“As for what I get, Hakkon promised me citizenship of Foria. I belong to my father’s people. So long as I bring them something of value, I’m one of his people, under his protection. That would be you.”

Because I’m the Lady of the Rift? I asked, a sour taste in my mouth. I had been warned there was a target on my back, and it had finally hit home. But you forged a letter for Bane. If he doesn’t come for me, I’m of no value to them at all.

“What? No. Because you’re a lai Darran.” Miro tilted his head, studying my profile. “I directed Hakkon’s agents to your estate weeks ago. Your parents were one of the wealthiest old-blood families in Veladar. The estate itself is practically brimming with gold to be made.”

By the Light, I was going to be sick. I had never wanted to think of them again, but they had, in a way, put me on the path to true happiness. I didn’t wish any ill on them.

Were? I wrote, my hand trembling.

“Were.” Miro brushed a lock of hair off my cheek, tucking it behind my ear. “Unfortunately, you won’t be able to say goodbye, as Hakkon’s men got there first. But look on the bright side, my quiet little mouse. You’re the last living member of that bloodline, which means you’ve inherited all that land and gold, and that makes you valuable beyond your wildest dreams.”

My sisters? I had only vague memories of them, of curly red hair, giggling under the covers, eating honeycomb in a pasture together, but… ancestors, to think that any relation to me would’ve torn their lives apart…

“Dead,” he said roughly. “They’re all dead, Cirri. Your parents, your sisters, your cousins, the servants… anyone living there has been dead for days now. Since Bloodrain, in fact. Aptly-named holiday, that.”

I couldn’t breathe. I stared out at the looming mountains, unable to think of a single thing to say.

Because of me, because of that tiny twist of fate when they’d chosen to give up a child, they were all gone. I could picture the wargs in horrible clarity, juxtaposed against my fuzzy memory of the estate, and see those creatures tearing through the only blood relatives I had.

I wondered if the wargs were there now. If they’d torn them to pieces and spread them all over the fields.

Miro cleared his throat. “Sorry, I know it’s shocking to hear. But that’s also what I get out of this: you. Your estate. Your family name. Most of your gold goes to Hakkon, of course, and the wargs will be living there, but that’s a small price to pay to become high nobility.”

He had done all this for a lai in his name. It seemed incredible, almost unfathomable, that he could speak of destroying my entire family for a single syllable.

I shook my head, pushing that aside for now. I could mourn for them later, when my own situation was no longer a sword poised over my neck.

How did you take me from Ravenscry? What is corpseflower root powder? Are you sure it’ll wear off?

Selfishly, I was more concerned about the lingering malaise and the nauseating pounding in my skull, than I was about the deaths of blood-kin.

His smile returned. “Just a little something to keep you compliant. Too much isn’t great for your health—there’s a reason it’s called corpseflower—but the muscle spasms and weakness should be gone by tomorrow. Agripin, my Forian contact, arranged for one of the wargs to leave a cache in Tristone.”

So that’s why you were so determined to go. You’re allergic to work otherwise.

“Obviously. I picked it up while searching for bodies. The rest of it was on me to get you out, but no one thought twice about their Forian slave labor running a supply route, and it was good luck for me that you showed up in the stables, with a gloriously incriminating statement, to boot. A little corpseflower root, and I just threw you in the back of the wagon.” He chuckled, pleased with himself. “Sometimes everything comes together. Or maybe that was Wargyr, giving me his blessing to ruin your loathsome husband.”

A muscle twitched in my jaw; annoyance, or the spasms he’d mentioned? Either way, the anger was eating me alive. You’ll be just as useless in Foria as you were here. No amount of plotting can save you from being a selfish waste of a human being.

“Better than being a dumb broodmare.”

I slowly closed my journal and gripped my pen, debating turning around and jamming it through his eye.

But even as I considered the limp weakness of my arm, Miro narrowed his gaze, and plucked the pen from my hand with ease. He tucked it deep in his waistcoat, shaking his head.

“You’ve really got to stop announcing your intentions with your face,” he said. “But, on second thought, it makes my life infinitely easier.”

I tucked my journal away, wanting nothing but silence, and to wait for my moment.

The trail led up through the mountains, but Miro guided the horse towards a gentle slope through the trees. The trail under its hooves was nearly invisible, the faintest indentation in the dirt, and he led us towards a steep slope of dark shale.

As the horse picked its way under the pine canopy, I saw a mine shaft looming ahead. At first, I simply blinked: thousands of cold iron charms had been nailed into the support timbers, old bits of braided primrose and holly dangling from the charms. But there was nothing silly about that enormous, dark mouth of a cavern waiting to swallow us up.

In a panic, I turned to look at Miro. Even he seemed paler than usual, his smirk gone.

“We cut through under the mountain,” he said softly. “Hakkon told me the way.”

I shook my head, not wanting to enter that darkness. For the first time, staring into that throat, breathing the musty, mineral tang of the air gusting out, I understood the fear the Rift-kin held of the Fae and the land below the earth. Like the eye of the dead warg, it was a terrible, primal terror, icing the marrow in my bones.

But Miro straightened his back, nudging the unhappy horse into a walk. As we drew closer to the entrance, he sighed in relief: standing out as an oddity among the charms was an old metal lantern hanging from a peg, filled with fresh oil.

“Thank Wargyr, he came through on this, too. Like I said, you’re valuable. Simply having you in his possession will be a blow against Bane.” Miro fumbled in his pockets, pulling out a pack of matches. The first two he dropped as soon as they lit, his fingers shaking ever so slightly, and on the third failure he looked at me. I smirked.

“Cirri,” he said, his gaze serious and calm. “If something comes for us in the dark, I’m leaving you while I run.”

My smile faded as I imagined what things might be in those shadows, and Miro got the fourth match lit. He held it to the wick, and when the light was burning steady and clear, he plucked it from the peg.

He tightened the arm around my waist, speaking low against my ear. “Good thing you’re mute. We need to be silent all the way through. Quick and quiet wins the race under here.”

The horse shook its head too, sending its mane flying, dancing from side to side as Miro guided it under the timbers dripping with charms. I reached out, plucking a piece of cold iron from a loose nail as we passed.

True to its name, it was icy against my palm. The metal itself was no more than a long blob, twisted and warped, but it was a comfort as the daylight faded.

The horse’s hooves clopped on the smooth floor, echoing in the silence, and I felt Miro flinch behind me. The mine shaft extended forward with the tiniest hint of a downwards slope, into darker places.

To hell with it. If Bane thought I’d left him, if he wasn’t going to come for me… then I’d rather be dead by ghosts or Fae than let Miro use me.

The lantern’s soft light made the shadows dance. I could feel Miro holding his breath, his palm clammy with anxiety against my belly.

I rubbed the cold iron charm in my sweaty palm, and dropped it. Probably to be forgotten in the dust for a thousand years, or taken and squirreled away by some fell creature of the night, but there was always a chance.

A thin, dim sliver of a chance that I hung all my hopes on.

Find me, Bane.

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Chapter 40 Bane

In the inner keep, I stared up at Cirri’s tower, at her empty window. Devoid of light, devoid of fire.

Wyn and Visca surrounded me, their mouths moving. Their voices traveled right through my head, leaving no mark.

I was not there, not really. My body remained, but my mind… that was elsewhere entirely.

Over and over, my final moments with her replayed—the rage that had boiled over, the hot glove of blood I’d worn, the horror that she was finally seeing me as I really was… and even as I envisioned it all going a different way, there was no changing the past.

I had destroyed everything with my own two hands.

Sometime in the midst of my imaginings—Cirri, staring wide-eyed at Ellena, Cirri flinching away as I roared at her to turn her eyes from the creature I was—something touched my arm.

Not softly. Not the one touch I wanted.

Wyn had smacked me with the back of her hand. “Well?” she asked waspishly.

I blinked at her, brought back to the screaming void of the current time and place. The place where my heart was nothing but a raw, gaping hole in my chest. “Well what?”

How could she have left? How could she have not left, after discovering the truth?

Had I given her any real choice?

Or perhaps I should have given her my blood the moment she asked. Then she could run… but she could never hide. Not from me.

A bright streak of fire cut through the numbness of my core. She was human, slow, reliant on horses and carriages.

She could not outrun a fiend.

She was mine.

“What are you going to do?” Wyn asked. “Lurk around in a grim mood, or go find the girl?”

Visca stood at her side, lips still downturned, face grim. She stood braced for an answer she didn’t want to hear, her arms crossed over her chest.

Reality asserted itself along with the newly-kindled fire. Visca wanted to go south with the legions; Wyn was positive I would find Cirri on the road, heading back towards Argent—if the Rift guards came across her, they would neither leave her unguarded nor allow her to cross the border into the Moor.

I had remained aloof from the plans, my mind stuck in the tower, living those final moments over and over.

But they didn’t have to be final. Not if I refused the letter.

She was my bride, she had made her vows to me, and I would be damned if I let her walk away without a fight.

“I’m going south,” I said abruptly, and Visca’s brow unfurrowed. “South with the legions. I’ll find her on the road.”

“Good.” My commander’s shoulders loosened, her entire posture one of relief.

“Good?” Wyn shook her head in disgust. “She’s having a tantrum. I had high hopes for her, honestly, but this is entirely too much. This isn’t some—some chosen courtship where she can flounce off in a huff. She is the Lady of the Rift, with the expectations of conduct—”

“Darling.” Visca rubbed the bloodwitch’s shoulders, squeezing hard for a moment. “Does Cirri strike you as a flouncer?”

Wyn glared out the window, deprived of her censure. “Not really in particular, no. Afford me a moment of irritation, things were going so smoothly, the last thing I thought we’d have to deal with was another debacle like Voryan’s girl…”

Visca gave me a long-suffering look, still massaging Wyn’s shoulders. “Not a flouncer, then, eh? Which means this is serious. So let’s find her on the road and bring her home, clear up any misunderstandings.”

I was in agreement, and when I found Cirri, I would bring her home and ask what I could do to make reparations. I would pay for Ellena’s death, if I must, but Cirri would stay.

Wyn exhaled, turned her head to kiss Visca’s fingers, and strode to the keep’s doors. “You’re right as always. I’ll get the blood sigils ready.”

Visca waited until she was gone before casting a clear, cool eye on me. “The furthest she could have gone is Thornvale. They’ll stop her. They’re still acting under their initial orders—in the event that she attempts to flee, she’s to be detained.”

“But no word has been sent yet?”

Visca hesitated, and shook her head. “No, but none of the horses are missing, which means it's likely she’s gone on foot. Not the choice I would imagine her making, but… it’s not that hard to follow the road south, and there’s a scad of legions between her and any rogue wargs. She’d be safe enough walking all the way to the bottom of the Rift right now.”

But wargs were not the only threats, and my Cirri was only human still—so fragile. Ravines, rockslides, natural predators, icy rivers, poisonous plants, the cold of the night… my gods, what couldn’t kill her?

And now, with the worst realized, I found that I could entirely believe in the Rift-kins’ outdated fears. Who was to say for sure that all the Fae were dead? Perhaps she’d wandered into a circle of mushrooms, or slept on a tree with a knothole in it, and summoned their spirits out of the earth…

“Buck up.” Visca slammed her fist onto my shoulder. “The boys are ready to go. We’ll join the southern legions and send out scouts along the main road, and we’ll find her, Bane. Whatever set her off, we’ll find a solution. Something isn’t right about that. She’s been so level-headed about everything so far, and that’s what sends her running? I don’t buy it.”

Nothing was right about anything, as far as I was concerned, but that was neither here nor there.

For now, I had a direction, a purpose, a shining light guiding my way.

Go south. Find Cirri.

And then what? The beast inside me whispered. Lock her in the tower? Keep her chained to a monster she hates?

I considered that for a moment, and finally settled on an answer that was neither noble or kind, but true.

Yes.

She was mine. And she would spend the rest of her life with me, one way or another.

The legions were far ahead, and I was far behind. Crawling on all fours, my sensitive nostrils filtering out the scents of the legions’ caravans: the warm stableyard scent of horses, the tang of oiled iron weapons, soft leather.

They followed the road; I followed the forest.

Creeping over game trails and worn foot-paths, driven with a single purpose, I made my way to the south of the Rift.

She was likely in the custody of Thornvale’s guards already. Would her eyes fill with relief to see me again? Or would she curl her lip and turn away?

I hated this, not knowing what to expect. Perhaps I had come to take her desire to see me for granted. Were there signs I had misread?

No, no, do not think about that now. Only hunt. Find her.

I shook my head, snorting through my nose and sending leaves flying. All I smelled was natural decay, the rhythms of rot and birth of the forest, the occasional animal stink of horses or wandering goats.

No scent of Cirri, neither roses nor musk.

It was late in the evening when I caught up to Visca and her legion, in a small, unnamed village. The boys were already unloading supplies from the caravan, setting up tents.

The resolute flame in me had guttered, losing to the cold tide of uncertainty.

Cirri might have taken a horse from a village; if she hadn’t touched the ground, I wouldn’t scent her at all. I even had to face the possibility that she had managed to slip the guards in Thornvale, or cut through one of the mountain footpaths to the west, bypassing the forest tracks entirely.

I crouched at the edge of the village, obscured by the trees, my claws cutting through the earth as I envisioned her hitching a ride on a wagon, guaranteeing her scent would be hidden under everyday smells I would ignore… effectively making her passage invisible to me.

Wroth had told me… that she would turn on me. She had gone out of her way to ensure I would never find her.

She hated me. My brother had been right.

I exhaled, releasing the forest from my lungs, closing my eyes.

There were so many things in my life that I’d accepted, choices offered, chances taken.

But this thing… even knowing that her hatred must burn in her like an all-consuming flame to do this, I didn’t want to accept it. I wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

So she was not in the south. I would backtrack, take the road to Thornvale. Send their guardians out along the road.

And if she had slipped past them, I would go to Argent, and rip the Cathedral’s doors off. I would make the Silver Sisters’ sanctuary my bloody den until they handed her over.

There was nowhere in Veladar she could run, nowhere she could hide, that I would not find her.

My lips curled back over my teeth as I braced myself for another run. To the northwest, to Thornvale, and beyond if I must…

“Bane. We’ve got a problem.”

Visca stood in front of me, her brow creased. I opened my eyes a crack, muscles still tense, for once uncaring of what the legions were doing, what any of their absurd little problems were. “What.”

My commander pushed a hand through her crow-black hair, shifting from one foot to the other. “Ancestors, I’m ashamed to admit this,” she breathed. “Miro Kyril was supposed to be here last night with the supply run.”

My eyes opened a little wider, a rill of ice running down my spine.

“As you can see, he’s not here.” She gestured towards the camp, a sharp, frustrated motion. “My boys on the wall gave a report that he headed out of the Ravenscry gates yesterday afternoon, but he never arrived, according to the captain here, and we saw no sign of an accident or ambush on the road down.”

I pondered that for a long moment.

Miro Kyril. Once a puling, sickly boy, but Edda had begged us to give him a chance. Her only son, a child born of a Forian warrior, and yet Edda had loved him.

And because I was fond of Edda, I had granted her request. The sickly boy became a dandy of a man, but he had reason to be proud of his work. If not for that inherited talent, I would have seriously reconsidered my final promise to her.

I thought of the portrait of Cirri, and of Miro’s fine taste, and the luxuries in his room that could only be afforded with handfuls of gold.

The luxuries that were most easily acquired in Port Coran. I thought of who might have passed information to Ellena, a lady’s maid who probably knew next to nothing of fortifications and legion movements.

And where would a petulant, sniveling, half-Forian boy go, if he decided gold was worth more than the lives of the Veladari?

Ah, but I had been so in love, I had been blind to all else under my nose.

“I’m saying I think he’s with her, Bane,” Visca said bluntly. “Either he convinced her to run off with him or he took her by force, but he sure as hell didn’t come south.”

“I know,” I said, reasonable and level. “He took her. He likely took her into Foria.”

“I’ve made an utter cock-up of my command.” She rubbed her temples. “We’ve lost an entire day going in the wrong direction.”

I smiled. “Believe me, I will rectify that.”

“You’re making me nervous.”

“Indeed.” I stood, stretched, my back muscles flexing and loosening, anticipating what was to come. There would be pain, oh yes.

Not only for Miro, whose skin I would peel away and hang on my wall, but for myself. I required blood, a vast ocean of life’s elixir. I needed every last drop of energy, the better to hunt with.

Visca let out an ear-splitting whistle, and one of the vampires in her latest legion, a young human man, hurried to her, guiding her horse.

“I’ll be right behind you,” she said grimly. “Do nothing foolish, lad. Track them, and if that track brings you to the Forian border, then you must wait for me and Wyn. We’ll get her back, but ancestors forbid we start a new fucking war from putting one toe over the wrong rock at the wrong time.”

“Let them start a war. I’ll be waiting for it.”

She gripped my arm hard, digging her nails into stony flesh as she stared up at me. “They won’t hurt her. Remember that. As long as she’s alive, she’s of great value.”

I was icy, numb. I had no idea what Visca saw in my face that caused her to release me, backing up a step.

“Not even Hakkon is that rash,” she said quietly, mounting up. “Hold onto that thought. She’s alive and well, and we’ll get her back.”

I nodded, and tore into the forest without another word, aiming north like an arrow.

With every footfall, every racing heartbeat, every minute that slipped past like sand in an hourglass, I told myself that Visca was right.

Cirri was in Miro’s hands, but alive. Possibly a prisoner, but well.

I would hunt him by land, by sea, by sky. He thought he could escape me, flee Veladar with my Cirri?

No. There was nowhere in the whole circle of the world that he could hide.

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