Lightfall, p.43
Lightfall, page 43
“Everyone, around me!” Pippet ordered, and they crowded in, arms flung around necks and backs, all tilted forward and sideways to fit. Quill circled his sister’s waist with his brawny arms, and when Iri gave them the count of three, he swept her up, her squeals of laughter shattering like the light that bloomed from the box. Thorne’s eyes watered, but his face hurt harder from laughing. Maleck didn’t let him go right away, giving him a sharp shake before he released him; then the cabal was off, tugging one another into dances, the light waking them up from their drowsy contentment—all except Cistine. She stood rooted where they left her, one hand to her stomach, the other clinging to the back of Pippet’s empty seat. A flutter of pain crossed her face.
Skin prickling, Thorne stepped nearer to her. “Cistine?”
She sucked in a breath and pivoted toward him. “What? I’m sorry, did you say something?”
He rested a hand on her shoulder. “What is it? A memory? My father?”
“Not that.” She smoothed her hand uneasily over her middle. “I’m sure it’s nothing, just…the crowd. It makes me anxious after a while.”
“Do we need to leave?”
A determined frown sliced into her brow. “Not a chance. Dance with me, Thorne.”
There was something different in her grip when she dragged him into the middle of the room this time, her hand a cage around his, her face full of anger. Like she was taking, not a dance floor, but a battlefield.
Thorne danced with her long past the point of pleasure and into pain, when his fine boots bit into his toes and his calves ached in a way that for once had nothing to do with the course of his thoughts. Yet he danced on, following her steps, trusting her needs, letting her guide him from song to song until they were both sweat-soaked and panting.
Still, the peace didn’t return to her face.
“I’m going to get a drink,” she announced between one song and the next, and slipped off into the crowd without a backward glance, leaving him bemused in the sea of dancers. Dragging a hand through his damp hair, he gazed after her, at war with himself over whether he should follow.
But if she wanted him along, she would invite him. So he returned to the cabal’s table instead.
A few of them had drifted back for more food and conversation: Mira and Saychelle bent on the arms of their seats, chattering away, while Maleck sat next to Pippet and rubbed her back. Chin in her hands, she nodded off with every stroke of this knuckles down her spine.
Thorne braced one hand on each of their seatbacks, taking the weight off his throbbing legs. “I think this one needs her bed.”
“Not tired,” she slurred, eyes still shut.
“And I’m not a Chancellor.” Thorne drew out Pippet’s chair, jolting her when her elbows slid off the table. “Come on, Hatchling.”
She scooped up her lightbox with a yawn and bent to kiss Maleck’s cheek. “Goodnight, Darkwind.”
His smile as relaxed as the rest of him, Maleck leaned into her kiss. “Tracking lessons in the morning. Don’t forget.”
Beaming sleepily, she sagged into Thorne while he steered her along the edge of the dance toward the staircase. He caught Quill’s eye through the crowd, mouthed Bed, and gestured down to Pippet. Quill saluted and sucked his lip in, whistling; the sound barely cut above the music, but Faer swooped from the rafters, alighting on Pippet’s shoulder with a gentle pinch of talons. With a smirk, Quill went back to spinning Tatiana across the dance floor.
It was mercifully quieter in the halls; ten years in hiding had worn down Thorne’s already-scant interest in festivities. The tension eased from his muscles the moment they stepped into the deserted courtyard robed in shadows from the high walls and statues, not so much as a guard in sight.
“I’m going to miss parties like this.” Pippet’s tone was forlorn, her gaze wandering around the courtyard like it was the last time.
“Blaykrone is plenty capable of hosting a good dance,” Thorne assured her. “And if they’re lacking, you can teach them. Host parties of your own.”
Pippet blinked up at him, eyes shining. “Do you really think I should?”
He flicked her nose. “With your brother’s permission, yes.”
She stuck out her tongue, then hugged his waist and slumped against him again. “I’m going to miss you, Allet.”
“And I you.” Thorne tucked her tightly to him, careful not to disturb Faer from his roost. “But you’ll come back to visit…and you’ll have to return on your own eventually to begin training as a Tribune.”
Pippet grinned, nestling her head under his arm.
They entered Kanslar’s wing in silence, and Thorne savored that pause, the world holding its breath, only the faintest hint of the faraway dance whispering in the walls.
Then they stepped into the bedchamber corridor and spied a figure, hooded and cloaked, picking the lock on Pippet’s door.
Thorne slammed to a halt, limbs going taut, but Pippet spoke before he could silence her. “Excuse me, what are you doing? Those are my rooms!”
The man froze, gnarled hands going still, and Thorne knew—even before he pivoted and straightened, turning back his hood, revealing his scarred, bald head and perpetual leer.
Devitrius.
Faer croaked a warning, and Thorne swept out an arm, pushing Pippet behind him. “How did you get in here?”
“If I told you, you’d wet yourself.” His father’s man stalked toward them, hand drifting to the whip belted at his waist. “Did you really think by sealing your own creeping holes to and from this city, you were ever safe?”
Thorne gave ground one step at a time, shifting Pippet closer to the hall where they’d entered. “It sounds like you had it all plotted out. But unfortunately for you, my father is not in that room.”
Devitrius scoffed. “I’m not here for him.”
There it was—the faint tell in the flicker of his accent. He wasn’t alone. “Then why are you here?”
Devitrius flicked his gaze past Thorne to Pippet.
Icy dread and hot fury braided together in Thorne’s chest. He settled his stance, bracing his feet; he wouldn’t give one more step before his father’s most powerful ally. “Then you came to die.”
“We’ll see.”
Before Devitrius’s blades left their scabbards, Thorne dropped to one knee and spun, kicking his ankles out from under him. Two fingers in his mouth, he whistled a command to Faer; the raven lifted off, shooting down the corridor, and Devitrius rocked to the side and aimed his knife. Screaming, Pippet cast her lightbox aside and dove at him, slamming into his knife arm—but too late. The blade sang out, ripping across Faer’s back. The raven floundered, collided with the wall, and flopped across the rug, blood streaking his wake.
Pippet ran to him, and Thorne leaped on Devitrius, scooping up the thrown blade as he went. His father’s man met him knife-for-knife, a wicked dance of metal spitting sparks as they spun down the ghostlit hall. Cold air bit into Thorne’s face when Pippet flung open the window at the end of the corridor and sent Faer out, repeating the whistle to dispatch him for aid—sounding the alarm.
In the brief heartbeat Thorne was distracted by them, Devitrius winnowed in. Their blades locked at the grip at chest-height, and his elbow, thick as stone, slammed into Thorne’s chin, snapping his head back so hard blackness blotted his vision. He crashed against the wall, hand springing open around the knife, all the air gushing from his lungs at once. Devitrius lunged for the discarded weapon.
But Pippet was already there, fearless like Ashe and Aden and as mad as her brother, kicking the knife down the corridor and spinning in a dancer’s pirouette with the same movement, cracking her knee into Devitrius’s jaw. He stumbled, swearing, and she was after him like a wildcat, kicking and hitting and clawing at his face. Thorne choked down air and pushed up from the wall, gasping her name, but it was too late; by the time he reached the knife, Devitrius had overpowered her. In two blows, he set Pippet’s nose bleeding; then he caught her by the mouth and spun her around, pulling her against his chest and pressing his own serrated blade to the leaping pulse at the side of her neck.
Thorne froze, panic sparking in every nerve, chest heaving, the knife an unbearable weight in his hand.
“Drop it,” Devitrius ordered, “or I’ll spill her throat.”
Thorne measured the distance and how quickly Pippet could break that hold with her nose broken and tears swimming in her eyes; how long it would take his blade to soar and lodge in Devitrius’s forehead and whether the drag as he fell would end Pippet’s life.
Then, cursing, he hurled the knife down, embedding it in the floor.
Pippet’s eyes blew wide, a muffled shriek bursting from her chest. She thrashed and bit down on the hand covering her mouth, twisted her head free and screamed his name—not in terror, but a warning.
Thorne pivoted.
A Svarkyst blade pierced down above his clavicle, into his chest. Crunching bone. Tearing sinew. Setting loose a torrent of blood down his front, inside him, so swiftly and deeply he didn’t even feel pain.
And over the hilt of that dagger, his father’s eyes, cold, merciless, boring into his. Behind him, Rakel, her stare as void as Salvotor’s was ruthless, unchanged while her husband twisted his black blade deeper into their only son.
Thorne’s mind ordered him to strike—this close, he could wrap his hands around Salvotor’s throat—but talons of pain held his limbs in a vise. He couldn’t move, couldn’t draw a full breath even to give voice to the agony bellowing in heaves through his body.
Salvotor jerked him close by the back of his neck. “Actually, boy, I win.”
He cast him to the floor. The impact jolted fresh pain through Thorne’s body that numbed too quickly, telling him everything he needed to know about this injury, about that blade and what was happening to him. But he grabbed at the carpet anyway, soaked with his blood, and tried to get his feet beneath him when Devitrius roared and cursed again. Then there were hands on Thorne, scrabbling at his back, trying to drag him up to his elbows. Pippet sobbed at him to get up, get up, get up.
He tried, but he broke down again and again, choking on blood, on her name, while her hands tore against his shoulders and then peeled away.
Her sobs turned to furious screams. His name. Over and over.
Salvotor had her, his arm around her waist, hauling her away. Pippet kicked and flailed, drilling elbow jabs and kicks into his body precisely how they’d trained her; but against his reinforced flesh, it did nothing at all. Devitrius, bleeding from Pippet’s punch to his mouth, and Rakel, tall and wicked as a sheathed blade, flanked them up the hall.
They were escaping. Taking Pippet with them.
Panic sliced through the pain-addled fog, and Thorne made one last valiant effort to crawl after them, gasping Pippet’s name. She gave up fighting and reached for him, tears streaming down her cheeks.
He reached back with everything he had left. He was still reaching for her when the darkness claimed him.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
THE FEELING OF darkness returned with the flash of Pippet’s augmented lightbox; after nothing but tendril traces since Nygaten, its vicious reappearance shook Cistine to her core. She tried to ignore it by dancing and eating and drinking, but nothing helped. It festered deep in her throbbing middle even when she curled up in her chair at the table, trying in vain to focus on the story Ashe was telling about Maleck dressed up as a vendor, giving a rose to the Queen.
She should’ve been in stitches about it, but something was wrong and growing worse. Even pressing on the compass pendant, visualizing Darlaska, and turning her betrothal band around her finger did absolutely nothing to distract her. A piece of her was separating from the rest, drifting off into some dark void—stealing her attention with it.
She flinched when Quill and Tatiana flopped down at the table, her on his lap, his arm slung around her waist. “Did we miss anything?”
“Maleck in a hat,” Aden chuckled, sipping his mead.
Quill slapped the table. “I demand to hear this tale from the beginning.”
Ashe groaned. “God’s bones. I forgot how much I didn’t miss you.”
Tatiana toasted with a mug of water. “The feeling was mutual.”
Ariadne bent away from her conversation with Mira and Saychelle, a frown sketching her brow. “Cistine?”
She blinked rapidly, trying to come back to them, reaching for her voice buried deep under her straining ribcage.
Up by the steps, someone shouted in surprise, disgusted gasps following a shrieking knot of black feathers that shot down from the door; the whole cabal leaped to its feet as Faer plowed into the table, knocking dishes everywhere. Quill bellowed the raven’s name, panic rending his voice, and scooped him up. A gouge on his back dripped blood on Quill’s bare hands, and Tatiana’s when she helped support him.
“What happened to him?” Cistine shouted.
“I don’t know, something must’ve attacked him! A hawk, maybe?” Quill bundled up a discarded cloth napkin and pressed it to Faer’s bleeding back. “I sent him out with Pippet and Thorne, he was supposed to stay with her! Someone get us a healing augment!”
Cistine stared motionless at Quill, his words dropping through her one by one like stones loosed from a great height.
Faer had gone, but he’d been sent back to them—a warning.
“Cistine?” Ashe growled.
The drumming in her chest, the fraying sensation in her spirit—
Salvotor. She didn’t know how she knew. But she did.
Not only that. Thorne was in danger. Thorne was dying.
Louder than the call of the Doors, louder than anything she’d ever heard, his name roared through her—love’s last defiant scream in the face of death.
Cistine hiked up her skirt and ripped the wind augment from the pouch belted around her thigh, then hesitated.
It might be a trap. Salvotor might take her again.
She didn’t care.
She shattered the flagon between her palms. At the force of its unleashing, the torrents of power howling loose to her summons, every window in the room exploded outward, a deadly constellation touched by the power of the gods. And Cistine let that power carry her away.
She had just enough control to know when those gods-sent winds bore her out of the courthouse, into the courtyard, and through the arched doorway into Kanslar’s halls. Dispatching the augment with a snap of her wrists like slowing a downhill descent, she skidded and slid on her heels, slamming to a halt at the mouth of the cabal’s bedchamber corridor—all closed, all untouched, every ghostlamp dimmed.
But still she saw him.
Thorne was sprawled on his chest halfway down the hall, a discarded knife just out of reach stained in blood, his arms akimbo as if he’d dragged himself after his attackers. Pippet was nowhere to be seen, but her lightbox lay broken in half on the floor.
Cistine registered all of this before she reached Thorne, before she tumbled down, fingernails stroking from his shoulders down to the small of his back, searching for wounds. A thin trickle of blood seeped through the back of his shirt, but that was all.
When she maneuvered him onto his side, she found the puddle below him. The shredded strip of his shirt showed blood plumping from his collar, close to his heart. Too close.
She screamed for help, even knowing if there had been anyone nearby, this couldn’t have happened. There was no one, just her and Thorne, his eyes shut and breath rasping slowly from his lips. She ripped his fine shirt apart, baring the injury to what little light remained. Balling up the hem of her dress, she pressed against the wound.
“Thorne.” Her voice shook, yet her hands held steady. They had to. No one else was here to help. “Thorne, I know you can hear me. Look at me, Starchaser!”
At his Name, a tinge of consciousness crept in. His breaths hitched, and he moaned, a shattered sound of pain that tried and failed to become her name.
“There you are.” She peeled back the wad of bloodsoaked fabric and fresh panic screamed through her. There was something wrong with this wound; the blood wasn’t coagulating, and the edges pulsed a sickly, purulent yellow-white. But it couldn’t be infected, not in mere minutes.
She rubbed her bloodstained fingertips together and found grit to the substance.
Poison.
Silence clanged through Cistine’s head and stilled her hands. She stared at her selvenar’s face, his flickering eyelids as he fought to stay conscious. Another scream built in her throat, but she swallowed it back. She wouldn’t sit here and cry for help while he bled to death. She’d sworn she would never be helpless again when a friend was poisoned.
She could mend this. She knew what it was, the texture, the color: bloodroam, Niklause had called it the night of the Tribune’s dance—a Tyve poison often forged into blades to create unclotting wounds not even a healing augment could close. The counteragent was a poultice of sweetsap…a northern delicacy to drink, a fragrance used in potpourri. Thorne had planted it in her bedroom garden.
She ducked under his arm and yanked him forward, sitting him up on his knees. His head lolled, his body arching in a pained spasm as she pressed her hand uselessly to the bloodied slit on his chest. “Thorne, I need you to help. I need you to get up!”
She heaved with the last word, and his weight barreled into her, knocking them both against the wall. Muscles throbbing, she dragged him the six agonizing paces to her door and crashed inside, hauling him onto the bed. Then she fell to her knees beside her garden, uncovering the sweetsap and tearing it at the root. She crushed it in her mortar and pestle, gaze flying between her work and Thorne splayed on the bed, his chest rising and falling weakly.
Chanting prayers under her breath, she drizzled in the sap from the leaf and lunged back to the bed. When she grabbed Thorne’s shoulder, his hand crawled up to meet hers and squeezed three times.
“No!” Her shout jerked his eyes wide open and yanked his breath in so deeply, it sounded like a death rattle. “I forbid you to say that if it means goodbye! I’m not letting you go, Starchaser. You made me a promise—you still have to marry me!”
