Текст книги "In the Veins of the Drowning"
Автор книги: Kalie Cassidy
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The way he looked at me was so close to the way he had last night. His gaze was heated, but a shadow swam through it now. He’d seen the dark thing within me, and it had changed him. Changed us. “Come here.”
I took a cautious step forward. Then another. When I was near enough, he leaned forward and took my hand. Hard fingers kneaded my hips as he placed me between his open legs. I tensed as his arm slipped around me, holding me still and close. “I still want you.” He looked up into my eyes. “I’ll admit I’m… shocked.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “But… Nemea doesn’t need to know.”
I set my hands to his wide shoulders and pushed. “This is a trick.”
“No,” he said, his hold on me unrelenting. “No trick.” I tried to hide my wince as he set the gentlest kiss to the middle of my chest. “I came to apologize. For hurting you.” He pulled back and swiped at the angry red puncture marks I’d left on his own neck.
“I don’t understand.” My blood screamed in my ears. “You can’t possibly still want me.”
He gave me a solemn nod.
“You kill my kind. You are ordered to do so. Why would you want to marry me now that you know what I am?”
“Besides the fact that I’ve come to… love you—”
I flinched. Love was not something I’d ever hoped for. It was not something I’d ever felt. I’d read great love stories; I’d spoken to maids with blood in their cheeks and stars in their eyes over a quiet stable hand or handsome soldier. And always, love struck me as something soft and incessant. It seemed lavish, sometimes foolish, dangerous even, but it was never threaded with terror, like what I felt now. Like Evander had felt last night when I’d drawn his blood.
He drew his thumb across my lower lip, dragging my attention back to him. “You grew up away from your kind,” he said. “You’re nothing like the rest of them. You’re docile. And there are benefits for me. Do you know of the Siren’s blood bond?”
I knew enough. A Siren was tied to the sea and the air. Their power and instinct to drown was made stronger by their proximity to it. The blood bond dulled this instinct. It kept the person the Siren was bonded to safe from the lure of other Sirens. The bonded pair would be compelled to protect one another at all costs. But up in the mountains, I was simply a woman. My instincts and power were all but dead.
“The bond is painful,” I said. “And there’s no need. What happened last night won’t happen again.” I’d keep away from wine. He’d scrub himself clean after being on the sea.
His hand rose to my jaw, fingers curling around it. He spoke slow and clear. “I do not want a wife that can kill me.”
My stomach plummeted. “The blood bond is treasonous.”
“I said Nemea didn’t need to know.” He released me and shook out the gown. Guiding me by the hips, he turned me, so my back faced him. He slipped my bloodstained chemise from my shoulders, letting it fall to a puddle around my feet. The cold air on my naked body raised bumps on my skin. He set his fingertips beside the open wounds at my shoulder blades. “Did you know…” His lips brushed my shoulder. “… that if you were down by the water this would have healed almost instantly?” His knuckle bumped over the bones of my spine. “I could take you down there with me, when we’re blood-bound.”
My mind flooded with thoughts of all the things Evander knew about my kind that I did not. I pictured his hands covered in their gore, his face sprayed with it. “King Nemea doesn’t allow me to leave the fort.” And I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
His lips touched my ear. “You wouldn’t belong to Nemea anymore, Imogen. You’d belong to me.”
I bent and pulled up my chemise, stained as it was, over my shoulders. I strode to the settee, where my stays had landed the night before, and forced my arms through the straps. “Help me.” A tremor shook my voice. “Nemea will never forgive us if we’re late for the ritual.”
Evander obliged, walking toward me slowly. “Who else knows?” he asked, as he clumsily started on my ties. Each tug was agony.
I stopped myself from looking toward my dressing room door. I’d slice off my own wing before sharing that Agatha had spent years and years with my secret tucked safely behind her lips. “No one.”
“Good.” Another torturous tug, and then my stays were squeezing, squeezing, puckering my ripped skin. “Like this?” he asked, pulling them even tighter.
“Yes.” I shuddered from the pain and stepped into my black gown. Evander fastened the glittering buttons up its back. At the looking glass, I ran my fingers through the knots in my hair and pinched some color into my wan cheeks. My gold-brown eyes looked glassy, empty. “There’s a problem.”
His lips pursed. “What’s that?” Possessiveness thinned his gaze as he traced the lines of my body.
“The blood bond can only be performed if my wings are out. I’d never shifted before last night.” Last night had been an unfamiliar swirl of wine and salt and heated skin. “I don’t know that I could do it again.”
I watched him in the looking glass as he adjusted his coat and said with frigid indifference, “We’ll do what we do for executions.”
I spun, gaze locking with his. “For executions?”
“I’ll bring up seawater and use the siphon to force it into your lungs. It makes you shift.” He came to stand before me, so close that I had to tilt my head back to meet his eyes. He bent to place a kiss on my neck. Then another. His lips might as well have been a clamp around my throat.
Crushing.
Silencing.
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No amount of velvet coverings or gleaming wood could hide the fact that King Nemea’s ritual room was subterranean, carved into the mountain itself. Its dank smell and webbed corners wouldn’t be done away with. Candles glowed in their iron holders, giving off a secret kind of light.
My arm was linked with Evander’s, and he slowed us just as we reached the heart of the vast, low-ceilinged space. “I’m to escort King Nemea from his quarters,” he said. “Do not leave this room.”
He left and my tight shoulders eased.
We’d arrived early to a few courtiers greeting each other, their voices pinging off the stone as they regaled one another with stories of last night’s feast. Their laughter boomed and closed in around me. I walked the room’s perimeter slowly, feeling caged. In the far corners, the statues of the Great Gods and Goddesses that had once stood in the courtyard gathered dust. Their faces had been chiseled off when I had been a girl, but I knew them from the items they held.
Milton of Della cupped silkworms in his crumbling palm and a hare was tucked beneath his arm to signify his power over beasts. Panos of Varya stood tall and strong, with a flowering vine snaking up his leg, over his shoulder, and around his open marble hand. I noted the tall, graceful lines of his body. He reminded me of his grandson, King Theodore. Panos had possessed the power of life—with just a thought he could make dying plants spring up green, mend ripped flesh. Diantan of Hera—the Great Goddess of craft—cradled a hammer and joiners. The plumb line that had hung from her other hand had long since snapped off and was likely now the grit I felt beneath my shoes. A prolific builder, she could machine what she saw in her mind’s eye. Jesop of Gos lay on his side, his bearded head a foot away from the rest of him. He possessed the power of memory, which, combined with a God’s divine, near-immortal life span, provided Leucosia with its first books of history, genealogy, and folklore.
And in the most dismal corner of the room stood the Great Goddess Ligea. I gazed up at her. Her delicate marble wings lay in pieces around her base. Her head was missing altogether, but her body was strong, swathed in a length of fabric that fluttered behind her in an unending breeze. A cresting wave kissed her bare feet. The other Gods said that she possessed the power of death—but they were wrong.
She controlled the wind and sea.
With a melodic whisper, she could kill a tempest or stir one to life. She used her power to fill nets with fish, to aid ships in battles. And when she was wronged, she would lure the guilty to a brutal, drowning end.
I stared and stared at what was left of her.
“Lady Imogen,” came a low voice beside me.
I whirled. King Theodore stood taut with anger, a ferocious look on his face. I curtsied. “Good morning, Your Majesty.”
“What is this place?” he asked, fiery gaze bouncing from one defiled God to the next. His eyes stuck to the effigy of his ancestor. “I was instructed to arrive here but was not told why.”
My mouth gaped. The Great Gods—the Gods of Leucosia, made from its land and water—did not require offerings. They were not worshipped within the stygian belly of the earth.
“It’s King Nemea’s ritual room, Your Majesty.” Shame weakened my voice. “It is where his court offers their blood to his deity.”
His gaze shot to mine. “You do this?” A horrific look of disgust marred his face. “You give your blood to—to what? To whom?”
The water deity that I was moments away from offering my blood to was no Great Goddess, nor was she their descendant. If King Nemea was to be believed, she had been born with no power at all. Just like him. She’d made her own power with twisted, illicit magic.
“I do, Your Majesty.” I couldn’t meet his eye. “The offering is made to Eusia. Refusal means death.”
The withering look he gave me was clear—the threat of death did not absolve me.
A hard hand met the small of my back. “All right, darling?” Evander said, glaring at King Theodore, who stared back with his own obliterating sneer.
The room had filled further. Nemea now sat in a wooden throne on the far side of the room, wearing the same scarlet coat he’d worn at the feast.
“Just fine,” I said, and followed where Evander led me. In the center of the room, a throw of black velvet had been laid upon the dusty floor. Two bowls made of carved bone sat atop it. Beside them lay a pair of short, wickedly sharp obsidian blades. A small pile of white bandages sat in the very middle. The ritual for the betrothed.
Absent-mindedly, my thumb bumped over the mound of scars etched into my left palm. I’d sliced my hand with that blade so many times, I’d lost count.
“Imogen.” Evander jostled me. “Did you hear me?”
I shook my head.
“What did the prick want?”
“He wanted to know about this room—and the ritual.”
Evander made a gruff sound of annoyance and adjusted his coat. “Have you decided what you will ask of Eusia?”
“Oh.” Evander had never performed the ritual before, as only King Nemea’s court was required to do so. He seemed eager, gaze intent on the implements at his feet. “I have nothing to ask of her,” I said. “I only ever speak the ritual prayer.” A prayer that made my stomach twist, for Nemea’s beloved water deity was offered the blood of his court so that she might grant him his greatest desire: to rid the sea of Sirens.
“And what will you ask of her?” I asked, somber and soft.
Evander answered without pausing to think. “For power.”
Power.
I shook my head, confounded. “Don’t you have enough already?”
“You mean my title and my sword?” He gave a mirthless huff and his gaze cut to King Nemea. “I live my life in service of someone else.” He shook his head, met my eye. “I want something that’s mine. Something I can’t be stripped of.”
Perhaps Evander and I were not so different. After last night, after feeling my veins fill with such potency, I yearned for power too. I yearned for the freedom and choice and protection it could offer. If I were near the water, I’d command the sea and shape the wind just as the Great Goddess Ligea had once done. I’d sing those who would hurt me to a black, depthless grave. If I were near the sea, I’d have sway over the man beside me.
No—I’d have outright control.
A hush fell over the room as King Nemea cleared his throat. “We wish for goodwill between our kingdoms.” He spoke to the other rulers—the Queen of Della and Gos, the King of Hera, and to King Theodore too—in a rough voice. “For years, the Isle of Seraf has sought acceptance and respect. We have a right to worship who we choose. And we have a right to ask for blessings from a deity who actually answers.”
The challenge in his voice sent a chill through the air.
Nemea went on. “Today, the betrothed shall ask Eusia for a blessing. May she give them what they request. Captain Ianto, Lady Imogen. Kneel.”
The courtiers had pressed back against the rough walls of the room, their faces smudged by the dark. My breaths were shallow, hands damp, as Evander and I faced one another and went to our knees before our respective bowls. Evander’s back was to King Nemea, which left me with a clear view of him sitting on the edge of his throne, a mad gleam in his eye.
But it was King Theodore who drew my gaze.
He stood beside Nemea’s seat, seething. Deep lines were carved between his brows, and his jaw looked close to snapping with how tightly he held it. Even in the weak candlelight, I could make out the green of his eyes, wild and furious, locked on me.
Power radiated from the man. It poured from him, wove through his well-formed muscles. On the heels of the disgrace he’d made me feel came a burst of anger. He had never known what it felt like to be bent by someone else’s will. He’d never been required to give something of himself that he did not wish to give. I met his blazing glower with my own, suddenly enraged that he would make me feel like my desire to survive was unforgivable.
“Begin, ” came Nemea’s dark voice.
Evander lifted his blade, and I watched him, frozen. He swiped it quickly over his hand, splitting it open. His blood spilled like dark wine between his fingers and over his wide palm, tapping into the bowl below. He whispered his prayer, then snapped his gaze to mine. A lock of sandy hair fell over his furrowed forehead.
“Imogen,” he warned through clamped teeth.
There was not even time for me to lift my knife. His shocking grip found my wrist, and with a sharp twist, he forced my palm up. The black blade bit deep into my skin and with a flick, my hand burst open. My entire body jerked at the ripping pain.
In my periphery, King Theodore moved closer, but I didn’t look up. I could only focus on the sting and the growing pool of red in my palm. It oozed toward my sleeve cuff, seeping into the black lace. Evander twisted it over the bowl. “Say the prayer, love.”
I tried to speak through the bitter taste of self-loathing, through the fiery anger. All my life I’d thought being docile and obedient would give me a sort of strength, safety. But I’d made myself fragile instead. I’d turned myself into something easily snapped between the finger and thumb of a person like Evander. My voice wobbled when the words finally came. “I give to the sand. I give to the water.” The last bit of the prayer stuck, just as it did during every offering. “Hear me, heed me. Cleanse the sea.”
When my blood stopped flowing, Evander stroked my wrist, a gentle back-and-forth, then took a bandage from the pile and wrapped it around my palm. How effortless it was for him to cut me, then mend me. To mix his barbarous duty with his endearment. I slid my gaze away from him, as if compelled, straight to King Theodore.
He’d stepped so close that his polished boots toed the black velvet we knelt upon, spear-tip eyes on me and me alone. Anger flushed his cheeks, and when he spoke, like a deep roll of thunder, the pressure in the room seemed to shift. “How much blood have you taken from her, Nemea?”
Not a single courtier pulled in a breath as they waited for King Nemea to answer. Even Evander had frozen, his hand hovering over the hilt of his sword.
“I have taken blood from my entire court and gifted it to Eusia for over two decades, boy.” A smile colored his voice.
King Theodore finally unlocked our gazes to glare at Nemea. “I asked about hers.”
Why?
Something dangerous hung between the two men, something unspoken that I could not decipher, but I felt myself—my blood—sitting at the rotting heart of it.
Nemea laughed, the sound rattling and bleak. “Look at the cogs of your mind trying so hard to spin. I have taken her blood since her infancy.” Nemea sat back in his seat. “Since the day she became mine.”
There was no time for me to parse Nemea’s words before King Theodore reared back his long leg and swung it into the offering bowls that sat between Evander and me. They flipped and spun, spraying the blood within across my face. It spattered over his own cream-colored coat. I fell back, swiping the sticky, hot liquid from my cheeks, my eyes, when the room surged into motion. Guards’ swords rang as they were pulled from their scabbards. Women gasped; men shouted. I tried to untangle my legs from my gown, scrambled to stand, but all the while I could not look away from the fearlessness that King Theodore possessed amid all the swords and muscle and sound.
Nemea’s guards encircled him, and Evander pushed me back, clearing me from the center of the room. King Theodore was quickly enfolded by his own guards too, but there came no clash of metal. Nemea bellowed over the huddle of grunting men, “You cannot undo what has been done, you fool. But I hope you die trying.”
“Imogen, get to your chamber,” Evander yelled from where he stood between the two kings. “Now.”
The courtiers cawed and clutched one another at the sight of the two rulers coming to blows, and I shouldered through them, toward the steep, uneven stairwell. The stone wall was cold beneath my bandaged hand, but I used it as my guide, forcing myself up and out of the belly of the mountain and into the slicing light of Fort Linum’s entry hall. The front doors sat wide open to the courtyard, just as they did every day when the weather was fair. I started toward my chamber and stopped.
The sky outside was shrouded in clouds that rippled like gray waves. The mountains below sat in a bluish-white haze. How vast, how endless it all seemed, and I did not want to be locked behind a door. Trapped and amenable. I wanted out. A pitiful thrill of excitement raced through me as I disobeyed my order and crossed the fort’s threshold.
The courtyard was a wide, barren circle, ringed in towering white pillars. At the very center sat an oblong stone, soaked with layer after layer of old blood. I strode past the stain, black gown dragging behind me, toward the cliff’s edge. Beyond the peaks, through the haze, I could just see the fluttering stretch of sea. I pulled in a long, slow breath and imagined I could smell it. Imagined I was filled with it once more, like I had been last night. I had been fearsome. I had made Evander’s eyes stretch wide. I had made him beg. Made him bleed.
“Imogen.”
King Nemea’s voice was harsh and scraping as he strode through the fort’s doors. Behind him, his guards were an implacable wall of armor and blades. Evander stood at the center of them. He’d removed his dress coat in the tussle and his shirt was now rumpled and undone at the neck. In one hand he cupped his ritual bowl, in the other his sword. The disappointment in his gaze staked me to the spot.
Nemea’s cheeks were mottled red and beaded with sweat. Those colorless eyes of his locked with mine.
“Your Majesty.” I gave a stiff curtsy. “Is everything all right?”
His grunt sounded like scuffing stones. “That fucking boy-king can rot on the seafloor.” He lifted a ritual bowl, still coated with thick, wet blood, from his side. He grabbed my hand like an eel striking prey and ripped the bandage from it. “He fancies himself a benevolent king.” He took his thumb and dug it into the angry flesh around my cut. His touch was heavy, painful, forcing my stanched wound back to bleeding. “But it is not benevolence that makes a ruler mighty, is it, Imogen?” His eyes had grown bright with malice. Spittle collected on his lip like sharp white teeth as he forced each word out. I gasped as he squeezed and pressed, grinding the bones in my hand against each other.
My mind slipped outside my body from the pain. It floated above me. Heard my whimpering and saw my tears. “Stop. Please.”
Finally, he stopped, but he kept my hand in his. “It does not matter how powerful the ruler’s blood is. It does not matter that a ruler is good, or just, or fair. What matters is that they can keep hold of what is theirs, by whatever means necessary.” He turned my hand and placed a kiss on the back of it. “It is easy to be good when you’re blessed by the bloody fucking Gods. It’s when you are lowly, when you are nothing—like I was—that you learn to make your own power. And with it, you take what you’ve been denied.”
He stared at me for a long moment, holding the bowl of my blood, before he turned and made for the stairs that led down to the mountain road. His guards followed him, and I knew precisely where he would go.
To the sea. To offer my blood to his deity. To make his own power.
Evander slowed before descending. “I ordered you to go to your chamber.”
“I needed air—”
His eyes flashed as he shoved his sword into its sheath. “I don’t care. I’ll not risk you getting hurt.”
I skipped over the irony that was my aching hand, carved open by him. “There was no danger—”
He was before me in a breath, fingers biting into my jaw. “That’s enough.” He lowered his lips to mine, but it felt nothing like a kiss. It felt like a cracking whip, slashing through my flesh. “Get”—another kiss that felt like a leash, notching tightly around my throat—“to your chamber.”
He walked away like he knew I would listen, never once looking back. A blood bond between us would compel his true protection, but his protection was locked doors, and smothered needs, and obedience of my body and mind. A bond would bolster him and wear me down to nothing—I would become the headwater and he the river that I fed until I ran dry.
I needed to leave. I needed to get down this mountain, off this island, or every vital part of me would perish.
Inside, the courtiers were abuzz. I stopped at the top of the entry stairs, my wounded hand cradled against my chest, and watched them over the banister. They rose up from the ritual room stairwell, pooling in the center of the hall. They recounted the kings’ fight with glassy eyes and cheeks full of ruddy color, like they’d just gorged themselves on a fatty meal. It was easy for them to be entertained by these men—they weren’t at risk of being crushed between them.
The blood on my cheeks had dried and felt tight. I needed to wash quickly, bandage my hand, and then find Agatha. I’d tell her everything. Admit she was right about my engagement from the start, beg her to help me find a way out.
There came gasps and murmurs. The clank of armored men. I looked out over the banister once more. The king of Varya had ascended from the ritual room. He stood in the stairwell door, my blood flecked over his pale coat, looking severe as a graven image. The whole hall fell reverently, dreadfully still.
Envy ripped through me.
He could silence a room by simply entering it, could command awe, fear, without making a sound. He did not buckle under Nemea’s barbarity the way I did. How clear it was that he was something different, something greater than Nemea and Evander, who grasped and gnashed for dregs. No, the king of Varya’s greatness welled up from within, fed from a source that was entirely his own.
Clarity struck me, bright as a bolt. It pulled my spine straight and tilted my chin high.
It was not Agatha whose help I needed to get out of Fort Linum.
It was the king of Varya’s.
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