Page 202 of Brimstone

A fourth set of hands tried to grab me, fingers digging into my throat again, and I let go.

My quicksilver rune wasn’t just useful for manipulating metals and making relics. It was also great at expellingverylarge amounts of power inveryshort blasts.

None of the guards had noticed the rune on the back of my right hand glowing brighter and brighter, lighting up the thick, oddly shaped tree trunks that surrounded us. Belikon apparently noticed, though, but far too late to save his men. “Back! Pull back! She’s going to—”

My shield blazed to life, and the interlocking Alchimeran runes projected in the air shone like a falling star. The quicksilver icon burned brightest, pulsing. When I flicked my wrist, the shield rotated, the icon growing larger . . .

Magic roared inside me, swelling, mounting, growing . . .

Belikon’s mouth fell open as he watched my shield detonate, and the force of the resulting pulse of energy launched the guards into the air and obliterated them. A fine mist of blood and pulverized meat rained down, speckling the snow red.

Six of them were dead now? Seven? I’d lost count. I got up again, ready for the next attack . . . but no one came.

Belikon De Barra stared in wonder at the shield still hovering in the air in a way that made panic chase along my nerves. “Spectacular,” he breathed. “Never before have I seen such layered power. It cannot be allowed to exist in this world, unless it is bound tome.”

“Well, I guess you should have thought about that before you killed all of the other Alchemists then, shouldn’t you?” I slammed my hands closed, and the shield snapped out of existence. I shouldn’t have let him see it. The madness in his eyes declared that he’d never stop until he’d found a way to chain me to him now, and that prospect was terrifying.

“Is that what they told you? ThatIkilled off your kind? You should do more research before—”

“I don’t want to hear it. Before you start spinning lies—”

“Insolent female! You are too fond of interrupting your betters! Hold your tongue. You won’t make it out this wood without my say-so,” he barked.

Chest heaving, I lowered Erromar and Selanir to my sides and spat on the ground, running him through with the most contemptuous look I could muster. “Won’tI?”

“No. You won’t. And you knowwhyyou won’t, too. You will stand right there, and you will behave yourself, because you want your mate to live. Orious, why don’t you show the little Alchemist where her precious dog has been spending his time the past few days?”

Orious.

That sniveling, greasy piece of shit.

He was here, too?

Yes. The rail-thin male stepped out from behind a tree, chin held high as he met my gaze. “I warned you, girl. You had your chance. This could have all been much easier. Much less . . .painfulfor you.”

“Fuckyou, Orious. Tell me where Fisher is.”

Off to Orious’s left, the Hazrax hovered in the dark, eerily luminescent in the moonlight,watching. . .

“Oh, but he’s right in front of you, girl,” Orious purred. “Don’t you see?”

Belikon’s seneschal casually stepped to one side, moving out of the way, and suddenly Ididsee. The woods pitched, the trees seesawing, and a brutal cry cut through the night air. At first, I thought the bloodcurdling scream had come from one of the Wicker Wood’s tortured shades, but then I tasted blood, and I realized it had come from me. I’d screamed so loud that I’d torn my fucking throat open.

A monstrous tree stood before me, fifty feet tall, its bark black as sin. A huge rent ran down the center of its trunk—a split in its wood so rotten and foul that it actually looked like awound. That’s where Fisher was, at the center of that wound. The lower part of the tree looked like it had healed around his body. All the way up to his shoulders, in fact, the wood had grown around my mate, caging his body inside it. It had almost swallowed him whole.

Fisher’s eyes were closed, his eyelashes a stark black ink against his cheeks. His hair was plastered to his head. He looked far worse than back in the dream—seconds away from death. At the base of the tree, Nimerelle rested on top of a flat piece of stone, spewing clouds of thick shadow from her blade. Fisher’s god sword was not happy in the slightest. “What are youdoingto him?” I whispered.

Belikon grinned a wolfish grin then turned his back on me, confident now that he had my attention. “You may recall, when we met first, Saeris, that I said this male, this . . .dog, was to face trial for his part in the death and destruction that took place in my beloved city of Gillethrye. He fled my palace without my knowledge and then sought harbor in an illegally warded refuge. Since he refused to stand before the court that he serves and give his account of what happened at Gillethrye—”

“You fucking monster. He didn’t have anything to do with those people’s deaths,” I spat.

“—the trial was conducted without him and judgment rendered in his absence.” Belikon’s grin widened to terrifying, unnatural degrees. “As you might have guessed, he was found guilty of mass genocide. Why he would have killed so many of his own people remains a mystery,” he said, a false airiness in his voice. “But as a just and fair king who cares about the welfare of his subjects, there was only one thing for me to do.” He fixed me in his gaze then, his expression going blank, and I saw thecold, evil thing inside him, peering out from behind his rheumy eyes. “I sentenced him to life imprisonment, of course. Here, in an oubliette.”

“What is it doing to him? Why is it trapping him like that?” Ihatedthe panic in my voice. Ihatedthe way it shook.

“Tell her, Orious,” Belikon said in a bored voice. “The Alchemist will learn eventually. And it’s better for us if she understands her predicament sooner rather than later.”

Orious, bootlicker that he was, bowed until he was bent double at the waist. “Certainly, Your Majesty.” He rose and set about explaining. “You might assume that you are surrounded by trees right now, but you would be wrong. These are no ordinary trees. They were once a clan of dryads. Self-righteous and arrogant as they were, they took it upon themselves to stand up to one of the northern witch clans. No one really remembers why. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that they lost their feud and suffered the consequences forthwith. The witches cursed the dryads and turned them into these prisons. They were damned to find no solace or comfort in the daylight that they worshipped and instead were doomed to feed only on the suffering and misery of others. The witches transformed the dryads into everything they abhorred . . . and here they still stand today, fueled by the fear and the never-ending pain of those they house inside of them. They keep their prisoners alive, you know. Their relationship becomes symbiotic. It’s fascinating really. I have—”