Page 31 of Artemysia

“Don’t you dare start screaming in the dark with me.” - Riev

A t the mouth of the cave system, Riev regains consciousness. I barely have time to help him to his feet when he shouts—

“Duck, Delphine.” His voice is rough as he shoves me aside protectively in time to dive between me and a single Syf charging out of the woods.

Throg and Ivy have already led their elk through the small crack in the large rock formation amongst the trees. They’re safe inside the cave.

Riev lunges at the lone Syf.

He carves his dagger across her abdomen, as effortlessly as slicing open a sack of grain, but she doesn’t slow even as she bleeds. They both whirl around with footwork faster than I can understand, but he somehow ends up behind her.

With a lethal, horizontal swing, her head is off. It lands near the stump of a fallen oak .

But Riev doesn’t stop there.

Whether out of rage or disgust or simply retaliation, he looms over her body, hacking her to pieces with his sword like a butcher chopping meat.

“That’s enough! Riev, stop it!”

As always, he ignores my order.

He didn’t listen to me before in the clearing and almost got himself killed, and he doesn’t listen now in his blind fury. He’s using both dagger and sword, one in each fist.

Slashing, hacking, stabbing.

The corpse becomes a pile of bloodied mush. Her skull is crushed, and an eyeball hangs loose.

His violence sickens me.

“I fucking hate you,” he hollers as he kicks the detached head with his boot.

My eyes fly open at my dawning realization, my heart wrenching as if torn out.

His anger comes from a place of self-loathing.

I fucking hate you .

He hates the possibility that he’s Syf.

“I fucking hate you,” he repeats, his face pink with a mix of blood and sweat, his eyes watering.

It devastates me that he’s speaking to himself. It’s never been more clear.

He sees himself in the Syf, and he hates it.

Suddenly, I don’t see him as a king’s assassin, but as a broken soul killing to survive, searching for where he belongs. Like a lone wolf traversing an icy lake, trying not to fall into the rapidly melting cracks.

Profoundly lost and alone.

I scramble to my feet and grasp his arm to pull him away from the mangled corpse.

He wrestles away and throws me off, but I seize him again and twist his arm behind him, hard enough to spin him against the nearest tree trunk. I use his momentum to press his back into the bark.

We knock over a bloom of turquoise fungi, and its blue spores release around us, smelling like powdery vanilla and decaying violets.

Riev coughs, choking on the stink, but I hold my breath.

His gray eyes flash, a murderous volcano of rage about to erupt.

His gaze is still locked on the corpse. He thrashes to shove me away, but I pin his throat with my forearm.

He gasps heavy breaths against the tree trunk.

“Stop it! You’re being…” I catch myself.

“I’m being what? Say it, Delphine! You’ve been thinking it this entire time. I’m a savage beast. A fucking murderer. You’ve seen what I can do.”

“No—”

“But what about you? You kill as much and as freely as I do.”

I know he is lashing out, and will regret the words slipping out of his mouth.

But they hurt anyway.

He doesn’t stop there. “How are you more human than me? Why aren’t you the villain? You’re a murderer, too.” He strains against my arm on his neck. He could break free, but for whatever reason, he doesn’t.

“I was going to say you’re being a self-loathing a-hole. You’re not like them. But maybe you’re right about me too. I am a killer! Do you think this is what I dreamt of doing? Do you think I like it?” I ask indignantly.

“Do you think I do?” Riev rages. Gone is his usual quiet seething, replaced by something uglier.

His loss of restraint makes me flinch. His control is shredded by his emotions, visibly unraveling even as I try to tamp down my own temper.

He spits out a hiss, and I’m uncertain what he’ll do next. He needs to calm down. I keep him pinned to the tree, for both our sakes.

Ivy and Throg reappear through the crack. I steal a glance at them, and Throg’s jaw tightens at the sight of me pinning Riev. Ivy stares at the uneven pieces of Syf at our feet even as she motions us to get our elk and arguing asses inside the cave.

This momentarily breaks the tension, and I remove my arm from Riev’s neck.

He kicks off the tree with a feral snarl, his nostrils flaring, a vein in his neck bulges dangerously.

“Get in the cave, all of you.” I stab a finger at them. “And block off the entrance,” I order, completely on edge.

The cavern is a lot wider and higher on the inside than the small opening outside would indicate. A volcanic formation of lava tunnels, perhaps—like the ones common in the southern mountains. The black cave wall around me glitters with silvery mineral flecks.

The four of us use Ivy’s elk to pull a slab of rock to close off the entrance.

Ivy has already started a fire, and based on how the smoke is sucked away from us deeper into the cavern, the tunnels must be vast and complex. Our voices echo down into the shafts.

As usual, Throg sniffs the air like a predator.

“Does anyone else smell the rocks in here? They remind me of something…” he murmurs to himself, because no one else seems to know what he’s talking about.

Normally, I’d laugh at him, but I’m in a foul mood.

I fumble in my pack for a first-aid kit and approach Riev to clean his head wound, but he pushes the bandages away, retreating to slump against the concave rocky wall, arms folded. I follow, refusing to let him bleed.

“Stay away from me,” he snarls. The high, jagged ceiling of the cave rumbles an echo.

“No,” I say stubbornly.

“Okay, then answer my question. Do you think I like killing?!” Riev shouts.

Perhaps sensing the dangerous tone in both our voices, Ivy and Throg slip out of sight, moving deeper into the cave, downward into the earth.

I call after them with a command. “You two. Find a cavern and set up our tents for the night.” It comes out more sharply than I’d intended.

“Yes, Captain.” Throg’s deep baritone resounds from the darkness beyond the illumination of our fire, though he’s vanished from sight. From what I recall, Riev’s crude rendering included countless zigs and zags and circles representing separate caverns and tunnels.

I answer honestly. “The brutality, the killing. It doesn’t affect you the same way. You don’t hate it.”

He clenches his fist as he whirls on his heels, aiming to slam his hand into the cave wall.

I lunge forward with just as much speed to capture his arm. “Don’t break your hand like an idiot.”

He shakes me off with an angry huff. A heavy beat of silence later, he heaves a sigh and his palms unclench.

“Maybe I don’t hate it. It keeps me alive. It’s how I survive…but…” He drifts off, his breathing shallow.

The flames of the fire between us flash long shadows on the walls and illuminate the hollows of his cheeks, the sharpness of his nose.

“ It affects me ,” he says quietly.

“Tell me.”

“In my earliest assignments, King Galke ordered me to patrol the river and to kill any Syf on sight. Syf families were spotted swimming in the river in the summer.”

My hand goes to my mouth. “And you did?”

“I killed the adults. Let the young ones escape. But they witnessed their parents being slaughtered. The little ones aren’t the ones attacking us, but the higher-ups said they’d grow up to kill humans, and the less there were in the future, the better.”

“Oh.” The look on his face crushes my heart. He’s never expressed remorse about killing. But I know not showing something doesn’t equate to not feeling it deeply.

“It affects me,” he repeats. He drops into silence for a bit, but I watch his throat bob as he swallows.

“I didn’t know.” Since he won’t look me in the eye, I toe a rock with silver specks, rolling it across the ground.

“You don’t either. Just like you don’t show when you’re scared.”

“I’m not scared—” I lie, protesting the truth because it’s too hard to admit.

“You should be scared!” His temper flares again, and his voice rumbles against the hollows of the cave. Something farther in the cave flutters, and we turn our heads. Bats?

He continues, his tone strained. “Don’t you ever give up? I asked you to leave and ride to safety with the others. Instead, you risked your life for me. What if you’d been thrown off my elk, too? Do you ever just stop? Any survival instincts screaming, ‘Hey, let’s watch out for ourselves?’ ”

He stops to catch his breath. “Don’t involve yourself with someone like me. What if I’m just one of them? You could have died back there, and for what? Would it have made any difference?!”

A wounded gasp comes out of me. This hits deep into my greatest fear—that I’m not making a difference.

That we all sacrifice so much but that it changes nothing.

When I speak, I trip over my words. “I was thrown off! I landed on my damn feet, but I got back on. I try to do what’s right. ” I hate the way my voice wavers.

“Dammit, Delphine! You always do what’s right. All the fucking time. You don’t put your own needs first.”

“That’s what a good leader does.” I jut out my chin, reining in my emotions. I’m a damn captain; I don’t lose my temper. I’m sensible. Levelheaded.

But it seems to piss him off more.

His tone rises dangerously. “You just keep going, like a cheerful maniac, strong and stupid brave. What scares you? What upsets you to the core?”

The hollowness expands in my gut, triggering my deepest fears. What scares me? I fight down the answers surfacing from a dark abyss in my soul. Never-ending death and loss. A meaningless fight for survival.

Losing everyone I love. Violet, blue, green, gold, crimson. Crimson washes over me, drowning me in the idea that all I do is in vain, drowning me in my failures—past, present and future . Crimson.

I don’t even realize I’m mouthing the colors to calm down until he says, “What’re you mumbling?”

His temper erupts when I can’t answer.