Page 38 of Her Cruel Redemption (The Dark Reflection #3)

Chapter Thirty-Eight

M y eyes opened reluctantly. My eyelids felt like they were made of lead and coated in sand, but I forced them open all the same, rocked with a heaving, whirling nausea as I did. It sent me rolling to my side to vomit bile all over the ground. When I stopped heaving I groaned, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand. Everything ached. Like I had been beaten or trampled or pushed from a cliff.

‘Easy,’ Daethie’s voice crooned as I pushed myself up to sitting, wincing against a pounding headache. ‘Your body isn’t ready to be awake yet.’

‘What happened?’ I mumbled, pressing a palm to my forehead and squinting at my surroundings. I was in my tent. I had no idea how I’d wound up there. A violent wind was rattling the walls, shaking the poles and testing the restraints holding the entire structure to the ground.

‘You pushed yourself too far,’ Daethie said, and I swivelled my gaze to her, focusing on her face with some difficulty. ‘I warned you to be careful.’

‘I was in the middle of a battle. Anyone would have pushed themselves too far.’

‘Then anyone would have collapsed just like you did,’ she replied mildly. ‘All that magic whooshing around in your body. And above it.’ Her gaze swayed to the roof of the tent, as though she was looking through it. ‘It must have been painful.’

Well, yes, it had been painful. But I thought back to that euphoric haze that had consumed me, thought about how detached I’d felt from the pain. I’d known I was pushing too far. I would have had to be an idiot not to realise that I was doing myself damage. But at the time, the thought of stopping, ending the pain, protecting my body, hadn’t even occurred to me. I’d just kept reaching for more.

‘You’re lucky Maelyn found you when she did,’ Daethie continued, and I refocused on her.

‘Mae found me?’

‘A retreat was called. She was retrieving what wounded she could.’

‘We lost,’ I said bluntly as I swam back through my memories, trying to grasp what had happened. I’d been stalking across the battlefield with lightning pouring out of me, the taste of ozone on the air. And there’d been Draven. Telling me we were losing.

‘If victories were counted in lives, I would say there were no winners.’

‘How many dead?’

Now, something grim shadowed the healer’s face. ‘A lot.’

I dug down to the important part of the memory, the part where Draven had said that he’d known to watch the tunnels beneath the city. That he’d used them to get into Port Howl in the first place.

I know this city better than its king.

I tried to swing my legs out of the bed only to be choked by another wave of nausea. I groaned, doubled over, pinching my brow as my stomach tried to fight its way out of my mouth.

‘I told you not to move,’ Daethie sighed. ‘I suppose you always do as you will, though.’

Taking a few steadying breaths, I slowly settled back into the bed, suddenly uneasy as I remembered the sight of Draven’s fear. Fear that hadn’t been at all tied to the lightning I’d been wielding and seemed to have a lot more to do with the moment the magic had turned on me, its corrosion overwhelming my body. You’re making yourself sick. You could make yourself so sick you’ll never be the same again.

‘Have I done any lasting damage?’ I asked warily, taking stock of my trembling limbs, the slight slur to my speech, my cloudy, slow thoughts. ‘Is that possible?’

‘It’s more than possible. You could kill yourself with magic poisoning,’ Daethie said, her tone light and airy, as though I’d asked for her opinion on a new hairstyle. ‘Your organs haven’t fared too well. I’ve been trying to help them fight off the toxicity, but it’s been slow going. And not only that, but this time it got into your head.’ She tapped a finger lightly against my brow. ‘There’s so much heat up here. You can’t sustain regular damage of that kind. If you keep pushing yourself, permanent damage will be a given.’ She began digging around in a bag beside her, producing a water canister and offering it to me. I sipped at it slowly, still nursing my nausea but relieved to wet my cotton-dry mouth, and for the first time since Baba Yaga had gifted me the magic, I felt wary of what it might do to me. It was one thing to hear warnings that I could be driven mad. Another thing entirely to feel what I’d felt on that battlefield. That longing, that burn for more, that voice in my head whispering that I could show them all, take it all. I could still feel it now, even wracked with after-effects as I was: this vague hum of yearning to be more.

‘You’re awake.’ Mae’s voice interrupted my brooding. She was standing at the flap of the tent, looking surprisingly clean for someone who’d apparently pulled me from a battlefield only… well, I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Rubbish.’

‘I’m not surprised. I don’t think magic was supposed to be the plan.’

‘I couldn’t just let Draven turn the minds of our entire frontline unchallenged.’

‘I don’t think assaulting the land for a hundred kilometres in every direction with wild storms and lightning strikes was a good solution to that.’

I stared at her blankly, my jaw slackening. ‘I what? ’

‘Did some funny things with the weather,’ Daethie chimed in, taking back the water canister in exchange for a roll of blessedly soft bread that made me suddenly ravenous. ‘It seems as though whatever you were doing out there interrupted nature’s systems. I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it.’

‘It’s terrifying,’ Mae said, the words blunt. ‘No one should be able to do what you did.’ She shot Daethie a scathing look, but Daethie was either oblivious or pretending to be. ‘You shouldn’t be alive.’

A shiver of awe ran through me, but I had to quickly pack that away before either of them could see or feel it. I didn’t need them knowing about the thrill of wielding that kind of magic, the way it had consumed me out there. ‘I hear the fact that I am is owed somewhat to you,’ I said, wanting to steer the subject away from the plea to give up the magic I was sure was coming. ‘Thanks for finding me and bringing me here.’

For some reason, this comment made her look a little shifty. She moved her violet eyes to examining a spot on the tent canvas, expression carefully blank. ‘You’re welcome.’

I’d been unconscious for several hours, as it turned out. It was late in the evening, and beyond the tent fires burned as soldiers drank away the day’s sorrows and losses. Mae answered what questions she could about the outcome of the battle, confirming all who had travelled from the Living Valley with us were alive, that Gwinellyn was unharmed, as was King Esario, and both were locked in a strategy meeting plotting their next move. She left after that, muttering something about going to get me something else to eat. Daethie made me swear I wouldn’t eat whatever she brought me until I’d been able to keep the bread down for half an hour, then went off to tend to some of the other wounded.

I was relieved when they left me alone because I needed time with my thoughts. I lay in bed with my head spinning, processing all that had happened. Mae was right; my abilities were terrifying. Astonishing and impossible and wonderful and terrifying. If I could wield magic like that in every battle, if I could control it, I could turn the tide of the entire war. The diplomats and powerful men of Oceatold and Brimordia would crawl over each other to have me as their ally. There’d be no more admonishments to keep from using magic; I’d become an integral piece of battle strategy. Their greatest weapon.

The thought made me feel sick again. I hadn’t fought so all those scheming old men would respect me. I didn’t want to be a weapon wielded by kings. Aether help the idiot who tried it. I turned my mind instead to those moments on the battlefield right before the magic had overcome me, when I’d come face-to-face with Draven. When I’d challenged him to take my mind and he’d refused. When he’d warned me that I was pushing myself too far.

And then he’d left me lying in the mud for Mae to find.

Why wouldn’t he just fight me? I was sure he wanted to. I could almost taste the suppressed fury radiating from him on that battlefield, all that barely restrained violence he seemed perfectly happy to unleash on everyone else. He had no problem manipulating the emotions of an entire front line to send half an army so mad with fear they turned and fled, but I stood before him literally demanding that he strike out at me and what did I get? Him offering to get down and beg for mercy before I’d even started to earn his pleas. Was he just so uncommonly clever at reading me that he knew exactly which reaction would throw me into the most confusion and went straight for that? And what about his pride? Was he really so willing to sacrifice it just to remain unpredictable?

I wanted to hurt him.

I wanted to hurt him until he would fight me the way I needed him to. Until he would let me hate him the way I needed to. Until he would give up tormenting me with hints of what I might have had if he had been anything less than a total fucking monster who’d sacrificed me to meet his own selfish ends.

I wanted him to finally admit that the feelings that consumed me when he was near were the direct result of him manipulating me with magic. How much would I have to hurt him to achieve that? How much would we have to ruin one another before I would finally be vindicated of my part in this destructive game between us?

Someone brought me food. Not Mae, though. Some prepubescent boy who couldn’t look me in the eye and scampered back out of the tent so fast that he almost tripped over his own feet. I supposed I’d earned a new mantle of scary after my display on the battlefield. It was a little satisfying to be feared and I wolfed down the food with a grim smile haunting my mouth. When I was done eating, my stomach felt far better, but my whole body was still gripped with a jittery, fluttery feeling. It was like being a little feverish, a little ill, maybe a little hungover. I tried to push away thoughts of magic’s toxicity and the warnings of what its continued use would do to me as I dragged myself out of my bed. I had to steady myself against one of the tent poles until I got my balance, but then I strapped on my belt and sheafed a set of throwing knives like it was any other day. After that I was striding out the entrance and into the night beyond.

I felt strangely restless, and I needed distraction from the nest of thoughts turning over and over each other, so I found one of the fires where several men were perched on logs and passing bottles back and forth. They shrank low as I approached. I sat at the end of one of their logs, staring into the flames for a few moments as they all gaped at me.

‘Can I have some of that?’ I finally asked, directing the question to the one with the bottle. He had a neatly cropped beard streaked with rusty colour and a face creased with middle age and weather. He looked to his companions for guidance, and when none was forthcoming he nodded and passed the bottle over. I took a long swig, filling my mouth and throat with enough burn to cut the threads on my more terrible thoughts. When I pulled the bottle away from my mouth, I couldn’t help coughing. The stuff was noxious.

‘Not the like you’d be used to drinking in a palace, eh?’ the man said as I handed him back the bottle.

‘A palace, no. But not the worst I’ve ever tasted either.’

‘Oh, ey? I bet you’ve drunk in some interesting places.’ I didn’t miss the knowing glance exchanged with the man next to him.

‘I’d wager I’ve spent more hours in a tavern than you,’ I said bluntly, staring him dead in the face. The surprise in his expression was satisfying. Well, unless he’d been stuffing his ears with tallow and living in a hole in the ground, there was no way he wouldn’t have heard stories about me. Perhaps the surprise was merely at hearing me admit to them. Wordlessly, he handed the bottle back.

The soldiers relaxed as the bottle emptied, and when the liquor was gone they produced another. It was easy company to fall into. Familiar company. I told them some of the lewd jokes patrons of the Winking Nymph had enjoyed and they were generous with their laughter and in passing their bottles to me. In this way, I earned my mouthfuls. It was a pleasant enough way to pass an hour, numbing some of the tumult that would hit me as soon as I returned to my tent.

But after a particularly raucous story told by one of the men about a cow, a saddle and too much drink, one of others was fool enough to say, ‘I’d like to have seen you riding that thing into battle this morning,’ and after a few chuckles, we fell into a silence too full of room for thoughts to return to the bloody scenes of hours before.

One of the men across the fire stood, stretching. ‘Well, gents, I’m off to renew my faith in life before it’s tested again tomorrow.’

I raised my eyebrows as he withdrew from the fire, and the bearded man who’d first passed me the bottle chuckled.

‘He means he’s off to visit a whore,’ he said. He took a deep swig, his throat moving as he swallowed, wiping his mouth on his sleeve when he was done. ‘There’ll be a lot of busy ladies tonight. Men always want a warm body to cling to after a day like today.’

Two of our other companions stood, mumbling their goodbyes, perhaps reminded that there were other pleasures to be found beyond this campfire and off to seek them.

‘So,’ the bearded man continued, turning to me. ‘Quite the light show you put on earlier.’

The comment drained all the joviality from me, reminding me of the huge divide between me and my companions. The divide between me and everyone, really. With the buzz of the drink softening my sharper edges, the ache of loneliness was harder to mask. Seemed a good sign to leave. I stood. ‘Thank you for the drink,’ I said. My words were a little fuzzy around the edges. I should have known better than to drink soldier’s swill. It was clearly very strong.

I left the fire and headed for the trees to find somewhere to empty my bladder before I returned to the tent. When I was done, I dawdled along, the sounds of the camp fading behind me as I drew further away, hoping the cool night air would clear my head. The trees broke to form a clearing and I stared up at the sky. It was a clear night for once, without Oceatold’s near constant cloud cover, and the stars were icy pinpricks against the black above. The storm seemed to have left behind a chilly calm. A sense crawled over me, something that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. The sense that I wasn’t alone, though I’d heard nothing to suggest it. I touched the scabbard of one of my throwing knives but didn’t draw it. Had one of the soldiers followed me out?

A hand clamped over my mouth.

Fear and rage roared to life inside me, burning through my veins. Magic rose to meet it, hot and potent, rushing to my hands in readiness for release. How dare someone grab me. Didn’t they know who I was? What I could do?

‘You hesitated,’ a voice murmured in my ear. Dark. Whiskey and treacle. Familiar . A body at my back, an arm around my waist. The shock of recognition trembled through me, waking every nerve. ‘Hesitation is a good way to wind up dead. Especially now that you’ve painted yourself as such a bright, crackling target.’

I grabbed onto the hand over my mouth, took a mouthful of flesh and bit down. Draven hissed, flinching away just enough for me to turn on him, plant my hands on his chest and push. He was caught off guard, lost his balance, staggered a few steps back. The alcohol buzzing in my head made me slow. Imprecise. I had to catch my own balance, flinging my hand against a tree, steadying myself as my heart pounded hard enough to shake the earth.

He shook out his hand. ‘I don’t think you needed to bite me.’

I just stood there trying to overcome my shock at seeing him. Here. In the dark near a camp of soldiers who wanted him dead. Putting his hands on me , who wanted him dead more than all the rest of them combined. I wanted to strike him with lightning, one good volt to end him once and for all, but I couldn’t grasp the threads of the static, couldn’t release it with the alcohol making me fuzzy and stupid. Sparks crackled uselessly between my fingers, but they wouldn’t gather, wouldn’t bend. I stumbled another step back. My head swooped. His gaze followed the sparks, and a savage smile pulled at his mouth.

‘Oh and you’ve been drinking. No magic for you, then. I suppose no one told you that, either. Unless you’re walking around with a death wish these days.’ Too fast, he crossed the space between us. I stumbled backwards until my back hit a tree and I was caught with nowhere else to go. ‘Or were you hoping to be captured?’

‘Is that why you’ve come?’ I spat, trying to appear unphased by his proximity. ‘To take me prisoner?’

‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you? I’ll admit the idea is tempting.’ That vicious smile widened, darkening his eyes as he traced a finger lightly along my jaw, the contact so sudden and intimate that it caught me completely off guard and all I could manage was a sharp inhale. ‘To have you tied up and completely at my mercy. The things I would do to you.’ He slipped his hand down my neck, caressing my throat, letting that dark, decadent threat hang between us for a moment. And I just stood there, pulse racing, immobilised by the contact, by the shock, by the maddening sense of disappointment that followed when he drew his hand away. ‘But I’m not interested in giving you anymore excuses to deny responsibility or in feeding your delusion of me as your villain. If you were to ask me to tie you up and take you back to my bed, though, that would be another story.’

‘Then why are you here?’ I garbled the question in my speed to get it out of my mouth, to take us from the subject of being tied to beds while I scrambled to try and erect my shaky mental shields, envisioning walls and steel and fire and ice and anything to keep him from being able to fan the flames of the heat he’d wakened with his touch. I wished I hadn’t had so much to drink. It was making me blunt where I needed to be sharp. He’d risked coming to find me for a reason, and if that reason wasn’t to capture me, then what? ‘If you’re caught, I doubt they’d even wait to try you. The soldiers would string you up before anyone could stop them.’

He took a lock of my hair, wound it through his fingers. ‘So, all you’d have to do is scream and you could finish me. What are you waiting for?’

‘I want to know what you want first.’

He laughed. ‘I’m glad I still have your curiosity at least.’ He seemed to sober, releasing my hair, that wicked gleam leaving his eyes. ‘I’ve come to warn you.’

In a flash, I’d drawn the throwing knife I’d been subtly trying to loosen. Managed to brandish it before me. ‘You aren’t in the position to be making threats.’

‘I said warn, not threaten,’ he continued, as though the knife wasn’t even there. ‘You’re treading dangerous ground. You’re using magic without any concern for what it’s doing to you.’

‘You’re just getting scared because my power means we’re going to win,’ I snarled, the effect ruined slightly by the slur in the words.

‘You didn’t win today.’

‘That’s because you played dirty.’

‘Because lightning is straight-up honourable.’ A flash of anger glinted in his eyes. ‘And how are you feeling after your little stint playing with magic? Well enough to drink the better part of a brewery, I suppose. What a good idea, to treat yourself to another kind of poison right on the back of a brush with death.’

I just stared at him blankly for a few moments, before I huffed a laugh of disbelief. ‘What is this? You’ve come to scold me for not taking better care of myself? Are you fucking joking?’ I leaned closer, baring my teeth at him. ‘Have you forgotten why I’m here in the first place?’

He regarded me more soberly now, gaze tracking across my face in that way that was so familiar it made me want to scream. I could feel the aching pressure of it building in my chest, looking up at him, feeling that clamouring desire to hurt him again.

Because I was hurting, and I wanted him to hurt with me.

‘Don’t you remember what it did to me when I pushed myself too far?’ His voice was quieter now. The memory of that tense night after Dovegni had attacked us materialized around me in an instant: mopping at his brow as he shuddered his way through a fever dream, wrapped in terror at the thought he might die. ‘That was just the baseline,’ he continued as I tried to push the memory and the feelings attached to it away. ‘The magic will get into your head if you’re not careful. Without training in mastering it, you’ll be drawn into using more than you can take. It took me a long time to find that line between wielding magic and being wielded by it, and I had help from Baba Yaga, who knew the limits better than anyone. If you push yourself again like you did today, it’ll become even more difficult to control. It’ll kill you.’

‘I don’t need or want your advice,’ I said, though some of the venom had leaked out of my tone. ‘I still hate you for all you’ve done to me. And if wielding magic is how I make you pay for it, then that’s what I’m going to do.’

He let the words hang between us just long enough for them to begin to disintegrate, to grow tattered and fragile. Because it was hard, to hold these two sides of him in my head at once. The side that was here, risking himself trying to warn me. The side that couldn’t be trusted, that could turn my own emotions against me, that had tried to kill Gwinellyn, that had torn a country apart. That had promised he wouldn’t let anyone hurt me.

‘So you take revenge on me, I suffer, you get some kind of gratification out of it. But how does this end for you?’ he said. ‘A victory for them won’t be a victory for you. They fear you, my dear. You’ll never be anything other than a weapon to them, and they’ll have no use for a weapon in times of peace. As soon as they’re done using you, they’ll be working to end you. You will be their new villain.’

I hated how he always seemed to be able to speak the truths I was too afraid to acknowledge. Hated that he’d come here to lay such ideas at my feet. Perhaps that was his game, though. Perhaps he was here to try and turn me against my allies and what I needed to do was get away from him before he could cloud my head. I still held my throwing knife limply in my hand, all but forgotten. I’d stabbed him once before. I could do it again.

Instead, I spoke. ‘I could say the same of you. All those allies of yours. Surely they don’t all support your methods. You can’t tell me the Yoxvese with you have completely abandoned all their beliefs about violence and the sanctity of life.’

‘They don’t complain when I get results.’

‘And when they no longer need the sort of results you can get them?’

He smiled coldly. ‘Well, then I suppose we’ll see who strikes fastest.’

‘Good luck with that.’ Finally, I forced myself to move. To slip out from between Draven and the tree at my back. To where it was colder and clearer and I could think a little straighter and could stop fixating on this magnetic tension between us that seemed to keep me perpetually locked in his orbit. I should have already walked away, should have raised the alarm.

His arm shot out with the speed of an arrow, snatching at my hand. Inhaling sharply, I paused, and we stared at each other, the weight of the night pressing down on us, the contact between our hands somehow more intimate and vulnerable than when he’d had me by the throat only moments ago.

‘I didn’t expect to see you out there today,’ he said. His voice was rough. Almost a growl. ‘I never thought they’d let you fight. Not in the middle of it all.’

‘I can wield lightning, Draven. The fact that I’m a woman hardly matters in the face of that. What else did you think they’d do with me?’ He didn’t need to know that no one had actually wanted me out there today.

‘So no one will teach you to use magic but you’re happy to kill yourself with it to further their cause.’

‘I was wielding it just fine today.’

His grip on my hand tightened. ‘You’re not a soldier. You shouldn’t be on a battlefield.’

‘I wasn’t royalty either. That didn’t stop me from becoming a queen.’ I needed to cut the contact. His hands were too familiar to me, those calluses on his palms, the pressure of his fingers. My pulse was rising with the memory of what it felt like to be touched by him. Held by him. So unlike the death and terror and numbness of the day. We held tight to one another for a long, long pause, and the memories just kept turning over, becoming more vivid with every breath. I wanted to sink into them, into a time when this moment could have ended in his lips on mine.

‘Your rage is with me,’ he said softly. ‘This war isn’t your fight. Don’t get yourself hurt for it.’

His hand in mine moved as he brushed his thumb against my skin, and that tiny gesture, the tenderness in it, was almost too much to bear. I wanted him closer, wanted to dissolve and destroy and consume him. Wanted it all gone and undone and unsaid and unbroken. Wanted to go back to a time that had never existed, to a fancied moment where he hadn’t used me or betrayed me and I could have allowed myself to love him.

But finally, I withdrew my hand. ‘If you leave now, I won’t turn you in,’ I said, voice breathy and unsteady. ‘We can settle our differences on the battlefield.’ I needed to put an end to this. Before he realised how badly I wanted him. If he didn’t already know it.

He didn’t respond. Just stood there, face lit with only starlight, eyes locked on me in a way I recognised intimately. It was the way he had looked at me when I held a pin to his throat and he’d pulled me tight against him. The way he always looked when he was ready to brush aside all my attempts to arm myself against him. Like he would lean into the threat just to press his lips to mine.

I thought—alright, maybe I hoped —that he wouldn’t let it end there. That he’d pursue me. When I turned my back on him, I thought there’d be an arm around my waist a moment later, a voice in my ear telling me I wasn’t going anywhere. That I belonged to him, the way he’d told me once before. That he would always catch me if I ran. But my footsteps were uninterrupted as I headed back towards the camp, and by the time I risked a glance behind me, I couldn’t see him anymore. What a stupid little idiot I was. I wanted him dead, not between my legs. No matter how bleak the day had been, or how much I sometimes, in the secret quiet of my mind, wished things could have been different. That could never be. Draven was who he was, he’d done what he’d done, and there was no undoing any of it.