Page 46 of Deadly Maiden (Dragons and Darkthings #1)

Wyntre

Pain dominates my head, and my mouth is so dry my tongue sticks to my gums.

I shiver and swim upward, surfacing, remembering…what happened.

I cannot see.

A hood covers my head and breathing makes it suck against my mouth.

Calm. I need to be calm. I can breathe.

An ice mage hit me with something non-lethal. I move my head, groan as my head thumps, my temples throb as if an alien thing is about to scrape out the top of my head.

My hands are locked behind me, and I’m on my side. Whatever I am lying on shifts. I’m being carried somewhere. When I try to stretch my arms, it pulls at the hooks that have been lodged in both sides.

I hiss at the burn. I won’t weep, but blood trickles from where the metal slices in.

And…I’m dead inside.

There is a silence I’ve never felt before. Even when I was a child my necromancy must have colored the world, made it different.

Now that is gone.

I ring with a hollow emptiness.

Doors are opened, and boots stomp and shuffle on stone. I think I know where I am.

“Put her there.”

They lower me to the hard floor and position me on my knees. Though I sway, I manage not to topple. I need to gather my strength. I never thought my powers would be gone. That puts a spanner in the mechanism.

A man hisses words an inch from my ear. “Bitch. Fucking necromancers. You killed m?—”

They go away. Someone has pulled them off me.

People file into the room. Clarity arrives and sharpens my senses. My mind seems to have recovered to a level close to normal. I’m sure I know where I am, and I’m going to kill everyone in here who gets in my way.

I shift my arms. My wrists feel the bite of the iron manacles, my flesh the bite of the hooks. My jaw clenches due to the pain but I think this through. Even through the hood, this place smells stale and old. The air is frigid. The sister told me Jennae was preserved by cold.

I can feel Rorsyd’s presence, no doubt with his shifting and his powers neutralized by iron.

If this is Jennae’s tomb, the others in here are predictable.

Seven of us? Including Jennae. Assuming the sister is here?

They whip the hood from my head. From beneath my brow I watch as the last soldier jogs up the stone stairs to the entrance and exits. The heavy doors are closed with a resounding boom .

I can see them all now.

My counting is almost correct. There is one extra—Kroll.

The sister is at the rear, yards above everyone else, standing beside the door. Paloma, I assume. Purple robes, purple sheen from a pair of spectacles barely visible under the hood, an inscrutable expression on her delicately tattooed face. I pray she is on our side.

Directly before me, from left to right…

Queen Ruelle has a fancy smirk on her red lips. Her ebony hair is styled magnificently, raised, stiffened, and decorated with gems. It might kill something if it falls off her head.

King Madlin with his heavy coat and neat, side-shaven white hair, with gold-embossed sword hilt and gold bits and pieces on his black Aos Sin uniform—he is ready to kill me with pomposity.

Kroll, looking horribly ill, the burn scars barely fading, red, ugly, and distorting half his face. One arm is slumped low, so I figure his wound goes all the way down his side. Good.

Then there is Rorsyd, and here is where my heart whines and claws inside me and wants me to sob. I won’t. Not yet. Not until this is over, and by then it won’t be necessary…

Still, this is nigh on unbearable. I hate seeing him like this.

Like a noose, a large chain runs from an attachment on the ceiling to his neck then runs to his hands and ties them at his front. Iron chains, certainly. And a new spear has been run through his middle. It’s not as scarily thick as the original, but the spear point protrudes obscenely from his stomach, smeared with his blood.

I can see the old wound just below. I frown at that. How is it already so healed? My heartbeat does a small dance, fluttering faster. That. Seems…hopeful?

Yet Kroll stands with Rorsyd, and he has a large, rusty iron axe propped upright between his boots. An executioner’s axe. I’ve seen one before, in my childhood at a village when Father and I wandered by, blissfully unaware of the upcoming punishment.

Is death a punishment? When you’re dead, you’re dead. Only the living remain punished.

Kroll wants to cut off Rorsyd’s head. He eyes his neck then swings his focus back on me, then back to Rorsyd’s neck. Then he slowly swivels the axe, back and forth, between his feet.

It’s an obvious message.

Obey, or else. And I’m expected to believe he won’t do it after I obey.

I am not that stupid.

“Is she awake enough?” the king asks his queen.

She only shakes her head.

Rorsyd is mostly naked, bare-chested, presumably so he cannot do anything tricky.

I’ve studied all of this with my head hanging low, drool spilling from the corner of my mouth. Best to look cowed, though the drool is unplanned.

I am somewhat in trouble. Just a bit.

Then again, what about Andacc? Why are the king and queen here if the rebellion is happening? That seems to bode poorly for the attack on Tensorga.

One problem at a time. Figure out how not to die, first, then panic.

I’m feeling too cheerful, really, but the opposite, being depressed, does not appeal.

I raise my head and center on King Madlin, do a little more swaying, for effect. “Are we having a party?”

Rorsyd grimaces then changes to a grin. He winks at me. His throat shifts as he swallows. The chain must be pressing on him. I smile back, mostly using my eyes.

“Good. You’re awake.” The king stays where he is. I suppose he aims to keep his distance from me, as if he fears what I might do.

Yet I am manacled, half-drugged from what the mage did to me, weary, weaponless—almost. And my allies are not in the best condition either.

My one advantage? I do have a plan.

“What do you want?” As if I don’t know, but I need time to recover.

“Let me spell it out. I want you to raise my daughter Jennae from her death sleep. She has been kept perfectly preserved since the day she died, a day after the Battle of Orish.”

“Twenty years ago?” I put on my skeptical face.

“Yes, but she has not changed since that day.”

I shrug.

“We know…” He indicates the queen. “That it is within the scope of necromancy powers. Do this, and we will free you and your soulmate, Rorsyd. Yes, we know of your relationship.”

Kroll rocks his head, smiling, but with dread menace in those darkened eyes. He won’t let us be free, or not unless we are dead. And neither will Madlin.

Dead and free is not that attractive.

“I am not a fool. If I do this, what guarantee do I have that we will be allowed to leave Tensorga and the Kingdom of Zardrake alive?”

“My word as king.” He straightens, impales me with a piercing glare, thinking that will convince me. His history speaks otherwise.

“I cannot do anything with iron on my wrists and in my flesh.”

“Easily corrected.” He slowly paces forward. “The queen is a bloodwielder. Attack me, and you will both suffer.”

Queen Ruelle makes a fancy show with her hands and conjures strands of blood that spin and spin.

They knit together to become a swirling ball of blood magik. As they churn, the red glutinous strands reflect their light off the tomb’s walls and the skin and clothing of every occupant. If pure evil exists, I sense it in her. Kroll, her, and the king make for a frightening trio.

The king unlocks my manacles and lets them drop, which makes them jerk on the hooks. My tunic was caught up above the strings on the hooks and he lifts it higher, baring me there. I curse and grit my teeth as he carefully, methodically, removes each hook.

“Blood is such a pretty thing,” he murmurs, drawing a finger up my side and over the punctures as he stands. “Don’t make me need to paint you with more of yours.”

He returns to his position, leaving me to acclimatize to the rush of my magik blossoming. The pain shrinks to nothing. Mind spinning, I am consumed by the power rushing into each and every cell of my body. My pulse intensifies— lub-dub, lub-dub.

Ruelle’s eyes flash to me, as if she, too, hears the pulsing of my blood.

Once more, I am a necromancer.

I roll my shoulders, rub each wrist, then smile and rise to my feet. “Thank you. There is a problem or two, of course.”

They wait for me to continue while Ruelle’s ball of blood magic throbs and spins.

Half-turning, I gesture at the top of the sarcophagus. It lies propped at an angle against the other side of Jennae’s casket, so that it will not slide away and smash. It’s been levered off the casket holding her body.

Under this central monument to the king’s daughter, I sense her flesh, paused in its moment of death, not decaying, not moving onward. Her ghost is in here, hovering, unaware of the consequences of this ridiculous show.

Icy air curls about the dislodged sarcophagus. Chains lie in a tangle over her effigy. Those would have been used to winch the stone lid off the casket.

“You used ice magik to preserve her flesh?”

“Yes. Just do what you need to do.” The king regards me sternly, rests his hand on his sword hilt. “Before Kroll loses his mind and uses the axe.”

As if to emphasize his threat, the iron axe rotates one way, rotates back. Kroll shrugs, as if the axe movement is nothing to do with him.

“Even if I knew how to raise a corpse, and she is that—dead. Even if…I could not restore her to normal life. She would be undead. She would lack the mind of your daughter.” This does sadden me. If I could restore anyone, it would be Asher.

As if prompted by my thought, which he may indeed have felt, a hand appears at the lip of the casket, lifting it open an inch. Cold fog pours from the crack, sending licks of creamy mist spilling across the floor.

Too soon!

The queen gasps.

Asher shoves aside the light casket lid and emerges from his hiding place—somewhere impossible for any fae to survive. The perfect bedroom for an undead. He raises his darkthing-edged sword and jumps out, faster than I’ve seen him move before.

“Asher!” I yell with my arm thrust at him, using his real name to distract the others, to make them pause. I expect him to throw the sword to me so I can kill Kroll. It is why he was hidden there—to bring the sword.

Asher’s name has its expected effect. They all gasp and focus on this remnant of a dead man, the brother to the king of Orencia.

I must be swift.

Except Asher does not throw the blade to me.

He leaps at Kroll. And mayhem breaks loose.

Unsummoned, Anathema materializes from the shadows and skitters across the wall to attack the largest threat he can see—the queen and her red ball of magik.

Ruelle tosses strands at Anathema, as if as an afterthought, caging him to the wall with bars of glistening blood. She morphs the remaining ball into two slim blood-scimitars—and is now doubly armed.

Kroll flips the axe upward, catches it by the haft, and swings at Asher, slicing him almost in half at the waist.

Fuck. That shatters me as if my own blood has been spilled.

Though dealt a lethal wound—for a normal fae—and already toppling, Asher, my undead hero, carves a terrible path through Kroll. The sword slices from shoulder to groin and Kroll screams and collapses. The pieces of Asher barely stay together as he strikes at the iron chains held between Rorsyd’s straining arms.

Iron chain meet hardened steel sword.

The chains part with a clanging, grating crack , then slide and unravel until they swing freely from the ceiling.

I flick my attention to Ruelle—the threat I need to counter now that Rorsyd is almost released and Kroll is twitching and taking his last breaths. Cautiously, she steps toward my soulmate, circling one way while Madlin deftly unsheathes his sword and slowly circles him.

With a fearsome roar, Rorsyd tears the spear from his guts and kicks Kroll’s body into the king, sending him staggering backward then falling. He flings the spear at Ruelle, who dodges it.

Four or five or ten seconds have spun past, and I need a weapon. The spear? Wary, I step closer to the fight.

Ruelle raises her hands, surely about to use those terrible scimitars on my soulmate. He’s healing the spear wound but is tottering, his face contorted. Then Madlin sweeps his blade at his feet. I gasp. And Rorsyd deftly dodges it.

“Open the door, Sister Paloma! The door!” The king is panicking. I like this.

Me, I’m still weaponless. My sword is elsewhere, in the middle of the fight. Plan meet dumbass undead hero. Asher. Tears fill my eyes, but I have no time for those.

So, I try to do the impossible by concentrating on the mind of a woman who died long ago.

The book stressed that they must recently dead to do what I intend to do.

I reach, tentatively, and crawl my thoughts into the stilled mind of King Madlin’s daughter. I feel…something in there, a stirring, a tiny mouse-feet creeping, a whisp of a presence. I flinch and pull away. If that is real, the freezing must have helped. I reach again, and this time, I also reach for her ghost, and I draw gheist inside her frozen skull space while I strain and dedicate every ounce of my power to this task…

Jennae. Jennae! There is a prickling in my mind, an echoing whisper that leaks into my head without my ears detecting anything.

Yessss. Jennae’s corpse sighs.

I have her. I have her. My teeth feel the chill that is trapped inside her. My fingers crack as her long-unused joints move, and she grasps the edge of the casket.

And I raise her from death and watch as her corpse bends at the waist, and slowly climbs from that casket.

Learn as you go. Yet, I cannot, will not, use her to kill her own parents. The distaste I feel even considering doing that—just no.

It’s taken me seconds… Wisps of black mist snake from my raised hand and disperse.

Ruelle cries out and spins, her scimitars drooping as her mouth drops open. “Jennae? Is it you?”

Madlin has recovered and has stood, and he turns and sees her. He freezes and pales. One hand rises toward his undead daughter. “Jennae?”

I shouldn’t do this. No. I fucking should not. But Asher is expiring, his last moments as a real almost, living person, going, going… My face twists in unreasonable grief.

Though he swipes his face with his arm and has his eyes closed, Rorsyd has recovered the sword Asher was wielding. It will not be enough against those blood-wielder scimitars.

Yet, I cannot make a daughter do this. Asher was aware of who he was, and so might Jennae know her parents. That would be a grievous act of evil.

The alternative—to fail and die here?

Jennae growls, a sound no one can mistake for that of the living.

“Gods! That is not her!” Madlin scrambles backward. “Sister! Open the door!” He’s afraid of his daughter. Rightly so.

“No. But. No. It has to be her! Back away, you!” Ruelle faces Rorsyd and spits at him—an unhinged mother defending her daughter.

Sister Paloma remains still, silent, and hooded beside the door, her arms folded. Her expression obscured.

Muscles bulging, spear wound healing over, Rorsyd crackles with fire blazing in his eyes. He heaves out a breath, a cloud where embers swirl and heat blurs the air.

Seeing her last chance of victory fading, Ruelle strikes at him while Madlin slashes from the other side. Though he deflects Madlin’s strike then Ruelle’s, Rorsyd’s sword crumbles as blood magic consumes the steel.

Damn this.

They’re ignoring me, the weak, useless necromancer with no weapon in her pockets. Tucked deep in a pocket I do have a tiny ball of darkthing matter, but it is not a weapon. Ironic that I could not dispose of it.

Rorsyd backs from them, aiming for where the spear lies.

Ignore me at your peril. I make Jennae take a step. She blurts out Mother in a deep, ghastly voice that would not convince me, but her parents look, with equal parts horror and pride on their faces.

The barest gout of flame appears at Rorsyd’s mouth. Scales sketch upon his cheeks and neck, upon his thick arms, on his muscle-ripped stomach. The wounds have gone. The scales, the flame, they flicker and die.

We need more time.

I let Jennae tumble to the floor. One partly frozen arm cracks off her body at the shoulder to roll across the floor. Eek. Nasty.

There is a way, a path. I see it now.

Jennae died the day after the battle, from a mortal, festering wound.

I have seen within her thawing body, seen the darkness, the deadness the ice has kept in limbo. I plunge within and tear loose the frozen darkthing matter that festered long ago. It comes to me in black, wormlike threads. With no time to craft them, I throw them at Ruelle and wrap her into a head-to-toe cocoon.

Screeching, flailing, she staggers backward, sprawling against the stairs. The threads tighten and begin to cut.

Callously, I pull on the ends of each thread, wrap her in knots, and pull and pull. Her skin splits. Her muscles are diced to an inch deep, then deeper. Her bones grate against the darkthing threads. Her screams echo off the stone walls, and Madlin recoils. Then I yank on them and cut her into a million pieces that skitter wetly across the floor in splotches, gobbets, and blood.

Her scimitar evaporates, as does Anathema’s cage.

King Madlin bellows as Rorsyd rips his sword from his quivering grasp and backhands him halfway across the room. He lands on his back, winded, and is soon whimpering and pleading for mercy, his arms up to shield his face.

I stalk to him, bare my teeth, and realize how angry I am. Asher will be no more, soon, and this, today, is a piece of chaos unnecessary for any sane reason, for any sane person.

“I kept this for you.” I poise the last piece of darkthing above him, sharp, deadly. It will easily pierce his throat.

He grins up at me. “Do that and then you will be trapped inside this tomb and surrounded by my army. You cannot defeat them all. Spare me, and I promise you will go free.” He nods at his daughter’s corpse. “I can see you told the truth. She is no longer Jennae.”

I cannot trust him. I move the shard back a tad, thinking.

“Wyntre?” Rorsyd holds my shoulder. “He is right. Though perhaps I can fly us out.”

The sister speaks. “I will not stop you, though I would rather he die. Truthfully, there will be mages out there. Flying out will be perilous.”

“And so we kill him and martyr ourselves?” My hand is shaking. She does not answer me. Perhaps being a martyr appeals to her.

I have an idea. Another idea, really. Do I normally have this many?

Thander’s semi-prophecy predicted something important might happen to me if I kept Rorsyd. I wonder if that covered today. In the small print, maybe?

Asher still twitches—he is partly still unalive and undead. I’m not sure there is a word to describe what he is. I haven’t said goodbye to him. Instead, I’m hesitating over killing this asshole.

Then Kroll shows he’s alive and opens a hand to fumble at his axe. Rorsyd looks at him then me. “Want me to fix that?”

“Yes.”

He ambles over, lifts one foot. Without again examining what his foot is doing, he slowly crushes Kroll’s throat until he ceases to flail about.

“See that?” I tell Madlin. “We aren’t squeamish about removing the assholes from the world.”

“Do that to me, and you won’t survive.” The king’s grin widens. He sees our weakness.

I thrust the shard into the very top layer of his brain, and I do what no one has ever tried to do. His pupils blow out to all all-encompassing blackness as I cajole the invasion of the most miniscule strands of the matter. The sliver-thick filaments are thinner than an eyebrow, barely more than nothing, and slowly I track down his thoughts. I find his memories, the worn paths of his actions. I draw them out, fishing for everything that made Madlin into Madlin. Then I ruthlessly obliterate each one I find.

Simple.

It’s only brain surgery I tell myself.

When I judge I am done, I pull my mind from his and I take that small TOD darkthing ball from my pocket. I let it roll across my palm.

Madlin is still. He breathes but stares sightlessly past my shoulder. He is no longer a person. He is, I hope, a vessel.

“What is that?” Rorsyd asks. “Are you okay? You’ve been silent for ages. We need to choose what to do.”

“This is Asher, inside this ball, recorded when he died. Done by my parents. It is the essence of him,” I say it reverentially. “I am making this evil piece of a fae shit into Asher, the once upon a time, almost-king of Orencia. His brother, I have seen him, and he has been rendered witless.”

“You can do this?” He sighs. “Why am I not shocked? And yes, I thought this too. Twenty years of torture would do that.”

“Then pray this works. Else we may soon be fish food.” I bend to finish my work then, instead I hesitate and rise, and go to where Asher dies a slow death. Is he still in there? Perhaps.

I reach inside him. If there is anything here, maybe…maybe, I can grab it. A melding of old Asher and new Kyvin would, simply, make me happy. I never knew Asher, but I know Kyvin and admire what he achieved despite his defects.

When I gain my feet, I have something of him, I think, incorporated into the ball.

“The proof is in the doing,” I whisper as I press the filaments of Asher’s personality into the king’s mind and let them settle in.

I need to do this better than before. If he dies an instant afterward, all of this has been for nothing. I need today to be for something. I especially need Kyvin-Asher to come back to me. And so, I take my time gluing everything into place, in the very best order, with the most delicate of touches.

I hear the words, as a song, in my head.

I’m making him good.

Knitting him thrice.

Putting things in place.

No matter the price.

A worthier king is coming to town.

I can make him a new king, a greater king. Or I can make another dead man. Or perhaps I can make him alive but insane.

Which will it be?

The clock in my head ticks slowly. Time passes. The room, when I rise onto my cold feet on shaky legs, it’s a dizzying mess and spins and spins.

My head pounds and swells. Exhaustion takes its toll.

“Rorsyd?” I clear my throat. I have to tell him something important. “Andacc is out there fighting?—”

My knees fail me, drop me to the hard floor.

The voice of my soulmate sounds but grows quiet. Then he pulls me up and into his chest, murmuring as he warms me. “Stay with me, I need you. I cannot live without you.”

I smile at that and feel my head coming out of the clouds. “I love you too.” I shudder. “Gods, the things I had to do to find you again.” Weakly, I clutch at him, lift my head, and meet his sweet, sweet dragonshifter eyes. “I might need to put you on a leash.”

He only rolls those eyes, and the flames in them curl and flare.

Sister Paloma arrives, having padded down the stairs, hooded, composed, and somewhat unreadable with those spectacles on.

I pull away from Rorsyd, still holding his large, comforting hand, and let my focus ramble over the room. From body to body, to the undead, to the puddles and explosions of blood and flesh, until I return to King Madlin, kneeling with his head down.

“What have you done to him?” the sister asks in a calmer voice than I expected. This woman is made of steel.