Do I deserve this?Part of me wonders if I might.
At least Jude said it kills quick.
There’s a sly grin on Dorian’s face that I don’t like at all as he leans close. But when he tilts his head at me, I pause, find myself struggling to recall if it was his left ear that was missing. Itwashis left ear. Not his right. Wasn’t it?
“Don’t look so scared,” he whispers, voice dropping so low, I think only I can hear it. “What did I teach you about your nerves? Three deep breaths.”
My breathing stops altogether.
“You aren’t Dorian,” I say.
“Dorian? No.” He smiles. Gold curls under one of his irises. “Not I.”
Intermission: Scene VI
The room stills when Jude rises to his feet, face conniving as a jackal and gold spilling across his eyes.
Eleni shrieks an order to halt when one of their hunters reaches for a weapon.
Dorian—or, rather, Jude disguised as Dorian—watches in amusement as Eleni treads carefully forward, hands raised in surrender. “Where is Dorian? This doesn’t have to end in blood.”
Jude raises an eyebrow, looking pointedly down at me bound in my chair and then back at Eleni. “It doesn’t?” He lifts a hand, runs it absent-mindedly over his missing ear.“This,”he announces, twirling a finger at the room, “isreallyrude. I’ll have an apology. Who’s first? You?”
His eyes fall on the muscular woman behind Eleni, whose hand curls around her dagger. “I’d sooner cut out my tongue.”
“Do it, then.”
My eyes flip up to Jude as my mouth falls open to tell him to stop, but I’m not fast enough. Not before the woman’s tongue falls to the floor. She starts moaning incoherently, sending Dorian’s people scattering toward the walls where weapons hang or to their belts for Eleutheraen gold daggers.
“I saidhold,” Eleni shouts through her teeth, then turns back to Jude. “Whereis Dorian?”
All at once, his disguise melds and shifts, face morphing until he’s Jude again.
Blood is splattered from his sleeves to his forehead.
“Well, don’t look so sad.” Jude pouts, rubbing his chin. There’s blood crusted under his fingernails. “You’ll see his face again.” A wry grin slides over his mouth. “I left it hanging just outside.”
The air drains from the room. Eleni’s expression clears, blank as paper. But something more vibrant than gold washes over her eyes. I want to say it’s the hardness of anger or the guttural pangs of disbelief, but when she opens her mouth and utters a sentence in an old language I don’t understand, it’s with a darkness that sounds more like heartbreak.
Jude replies in the same tongue—old Syrenian, I would guess—then lets out a mean laugh. It’s a rich and selfish sound, the sort when you laugh for yourself and don’t bother to check if anyone else found it funny. The sound is beautiful when you’re in on the joke and cutting as steel when you’re not.
His words, whatever they were, sink into the room, into the minds of men and women with no marks to defend against his Compulsion. Weapons drop, clattering loudly to the ground.
Eleni hisses something back, and he doesn’t react, a cold glint in his eyes, probably enjoying the attention as Craft pulses bright in his veins.
He raises his chin, utters another word.
A curious blankness paints the faces around me. I watch as each set of hands, unburdened by weapons, slowly pulls a torch from the wall instead.
Eleni is gripping her hands into fists so tightly, I see blood. Fighting Jude’s Compulsion?How?She looks to the Player and whispers a word in that old tongue again. The pleading way she speaks it makes me think it’s“please.”
Jude balances a glare down at me, then back at Eleni, making a littlehmmsound in the back of his throat. And then: “Kneel.”
The room goes deathly still, the air gone. The woman glowers at Jude, just barely letting her gaze slide to her hunters clutching torches—and those horribly blank expressions.
With eyes like chips of ice, she bares her teeth, lowers herself onto a knee—
“Notto me,” Jude snaps, that twisted smile faltering. “Come now, I’m getting bored.”
