“She’s an abomination. I am your husband. You were given to me, Alise. Place your trust in me. I know what I am doing.”
A hush fell. Tense and strained. It leaned forward, waiting and watching for what was next.
I twisted my neck, trying to look behind me. “Go! Just go, Alise,” I called, my voice breaking but no less determined.
“No, Tamsyn, I can’t let—”
Stig’s deep voice overrode hers, harsher than I had ever heard him speak to her. “Enough of this, Alise. I am your lord husband. You will obey! You will go back to the tent, and do not come out until morning.”
Silence descended, dropped like a blanket over the evening. I listened to the air, cold and thin, hearing the things that throbbed beneath its shallow surface—the quick, ragged breaths and even quicker heartbeats. Alise’s heartbeat. I picked it out, detected it among the rest of them, for hers was the fastest, as wild as the wings of a hummingbird, panicked and terrified. Afraid for me.
Stig addressed the maid then, instructing that Alise be kept in the tent, restrained if necessary. Footsteps crunched over the ground again, mingling with her soft tears, and I knew she was leaving.
Moments passed, and I imagined Stig was waiting, making certain she was well out of range.
Then he spoke, repeating, demanding: “Flog?”
I was faced with the knowledge that I was about to be beaten as I never had been before. What would happen then? My fear went beyond fear for myself. Would my dragon surface involuntarily like the day when Arkin tried to kill me? I couldn’t let that happen.
But what if you cannot stop yourself?
I twisted and strained my neck at an uncomfortable angle,glimpsing a solider handing off a whip to Stig. I narrowed my eyes on it. Something about it was …different, and I had seen all manner of whips in my day. The shape of this one, the color … It was unlike anything that had been used upon me in the palace, and that told me that it was worse. More damage-inflicting. This night was about making me suffer, after all. It was about pain.
It was about dying.
A sob scalded the back of my throat.
Stig tested its weight, examining it in his hand.
The tightly woven leather grip sprouted into a half dozen strips. He slapped them against his palm experimentally. “Have you ever seen a whip like this?”
I shook my head even as I pulled against my bindings. It was useless. My arms were tied to a tree with rope. Impossible-to-break rope. That same rope dug into my wrists until my fingers ached and went numb, incapable of movement.
“It’s called a piske. I found it in the palace dungeon.” Of course. Among all the other relics used to defeat and destroy dragons back in the Threshing. My dread sank lower, twisting deeper inside me. That meant this was a whip especially designed to hurt dragons. There would be no quick healing. No speedy recovery. “They do quite a bit of damage to your kind.” For once, his flat brown eyes gleamed with life.
I swallowed. He was enjoying this.
“Who even are you?” I whispered, wondering how I could have been so wrong—about everything.
He looked down at me, and beneath the dark fury in his expression, beneath the storm that had been rolling in his eyes from the moment we had reunited, he rasped back at me, “Who even areyou?”
That was when I understood. When I realized he felt the same way I did. Wronged. Betrayed. And there was nothing I could do to change that … to get him to stop looking at me with hate, to calm the storm in his eyes.
There were minds and hearts that could never be changed in this life no matter what was done or said.
His attention returned to the whip in his hand. He let the multiple strips of lustrous dragon hide slide slowly against his palm, stopping when he reached the ends, seizing them. It was then I noticed something glinted there.
“See these?” He gripped one of the arrow-shaped discs and held it up to me. “These are made from dragon scales.”
I exhaled a jagged breath.
“It’s going to shred you to ribbons,” he proclaimed with immense satisfaction.
I wouldn’t easily recover. Perhaps I never would … but then, that was his intent.
I sucked in a sizzling breath. One thing was for certain … I would bleed. My dragon blood would be on full display, for I had not perfected the art of bytte.
I scanned the night air, gauging its darkness, its ability to conceal. Would the deep purple be discernible in the night?
