This filled him with no small amount of horror.
Someone had delivered him to this place as if he were a newborn babe,swaddled in a skin of darkness. What had happened to him? He was not supposed to have been so immobilized; he should’ve had strength enough in the end to have returned to his rooms. He’d planned for it. Even now he felt the thrum of latent magic inside him, stores of which lived in his veins almost constantly.
He’d had a plan.
He’d meant to cast himself back to the privacy of his quarters, where he’d intended to suffer the torment of this first night in the company of his own unraveling mind. When preparing for Alizeh’s arrival – long before he knew who she was – he’d asked his mother to choose a room for this bride of the devil as far away from him as possible. It had seemed a wise enough choice at the time, but just yesterday it struck him as a terrible mistake. The impressive size of the palace made it so that their rooms were dangerously far apart, and Cyrus had worried that, in the aftermath of the blood oath, he’d have to endure a torturous degree of separation from Alizeh – for there was no magicking away the pain of such a vow. He’d expected to pass these hellish hours wide awake and retching into a basin. Never did he think he’d fall asleep. Neither did he think the agony would be so manageable. He hurt, yes – everywhere – but it was not so intolerable that he was unable to function.
He wanted to celebrate this fact, except that he was ill at ease in this foreign space. He felt certain he was in the castle, for there were aspects of the room that seemed familiar to him, but he needed to know where, precisely, he was – and whether he was alone.
He had a strange feeling he was not.
With great effort he levered himself upright, shifting onto his elbows to look around. The sheets fell to his waist, exposing his upper body to the cool air, a welcome balm for his overheated skin. Half the room was cast in deep shadow, the rest touched with just enough light that he could make out general impressions of furniture. All the suites in the palace were well-appointed, but this one appeared, by all accounts, nonspecific. There were no personal effects to be seen, no discarded items on the bedside table, no shoes, no glasses of water or articles of clothing lying around.
No one, it seemed, lived here.
With a dawning relief, Cyrus realized he’d been delivered to one of the many guest quarters in the palace. Presumably they’d not wanted to invite the curiosity of a snoda, for a servant would’ve had to unlock his bedroom door. He nearly smiled at this discovery as he stretched his neck, closing his eyes as he drew a deep, cleansing breath.
Finally, he might simply exhale.
Horrified as he was to have been carried to this strange room like a child, he was cheered beyond measure to find that the resulting discomfort was reasonable. Hazan’s protests had been so theatrical that Cyrus had almost believed the pressures of the oath would kill him. Yet he’d awoken just now much like an ordinary person from an ordinary sleep – somehow arising without unspeakable pain.
This was reason for gratitude.
Slowly, he untangled his legs from the terrible shroud, then stood with great care, grasping the bed post as he straightened.His body was still trembling slightly, and it was a moment before he blinked away a sudden head rush, but he soon felt at least well enough to put weight on his legs. Even in private he felt uncomfortable being so exposed in a strange space, and he reached for the cashmere throw draped at the foot of the bed, wrapping the soft length of it around his hips before taking an exploratory step forward.
His first thought was to magic himself back to his own room, but he was struck by an alarming thought: that his earlier theory might’ve been wrong, that perhaps he’d been brought to this guest suite as a mercy, not a convenience. He wasn’t certain where he was positioned just then in the palace, but there was a chance his pain was only tolerable because of his proximity to Alizeh’s rooms; if so, he didn’t wish to upset this balance.
He thought instead to search the space a bit more, hoping to find a pile of his discarded clothes, or at least a dressing gown. He’d made it to the hall when something snapped inside him, the lash so electric it spasmed violently in his chest. He gasped, biting back a cry as the pain blinded him, radiating in his eyes, his tongue, his spine. He staggered forward, catching himself too late against an opposite wall as the whip of what felt like lightning cracked once more inside him, this time so severe he made an anguished sound as he fell to his knees.
He was gasping for air, his body shaking so violently he could hardly gather the strength to return to bed; the pain was strange and breathtaking, a torture unique from the other experiences he’d known, for once started, it did not cease,not even for a second. Over and over he was struck by the explosive force of an unseen strap, as if someone were attempting to leash his soul, to drag him back to his possessor.
Cyrus realized he must be locked in the wrong place – too far from the safety of where he’d started. He managed, in his agony, to heave himself a few inches closer to the bed before he was clipped by a gut-wrenching shot that caused him to cry out desperately. He collapsed, catching himself on his hands and knees, panting and nearly blind.
He had a sudden vision of his nightmares: the dark bands of smoke around his body, the fall from a great height, the endless torture, crawling in the dark like an animal in search of escape. At least in these terrors there was the promise of relief, the vision of an angel that arrived, always –
Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed movement, straining to lift his head only to witness the first burn of dawn, golden rays of light lifting against the windows, glazing the room in an ethereal glow. He knew he’d gone mad when he saw her then, when she moved toward him in a vision of radiance, just as she always did in his dreams.
It had finally happened.
He’d finally lost his fucking mind.
“Cyrus,” she whispered, drawing closer. “Where are you?”
Disbelief paralyzed him utterly. His mind was ravaged by the impossibility of this vision, the disorienting déjà vu.
Cyrus. Where are you?
The words she spoke, the way she moved, the blaze of light.Was he, in fact, dreaming? From his vantage point on the floor he noticed then, for the first time, a side table upon which sat a potted orchid, a bowl, and a gold-rimmed dish – within which sat a heap of blood-stained towels.
Had she washed the blood from his body?
Were he capable of movement, he might’ve inspected himself – might’ve drawn a hand down his limbs to confirm the theory. Instead he grit his teeth so as not to scream as pain continued to thrash him. His instincts insisted something was amiss, even as the violence of his torture abated at her approach. This was literal delusion, he knew it was – knew ithadto be, even as he felt very much awake, his heart beating in his chest with concrete force. She spotted him on the ground and moved toward him like an angel, the silhouette of her graceful body backlit by the rise of a brilliant sun.
This was impossible.
“No –no–”
“Cyrus,” she said again, crouching now to look him in the eye, worry creasing her brow. “I only want to help you.”
