“You seemed rather pleased with yourself in the last battle,” Thaane says, “when you tore out her fellow combatant’s throat with your teeth. Or when you put an end to your father, your mother, not so long ago. Remember that, Adria? The thrill of unleashed potential?”
Zalel reaches to catch my arm, to hold me back. Too late. I’m already between Thaane and his charge, who’s become a quivering mass of spikes and skin behind me. My wingspan is broad enough to swallow her up; it casts her into total shadow.
“Why yes, Thaane,” I say, his name falling like a curse from my tongue. “I am a monster.” I plunge one clawed hand into his chest. His mouth hangs open with surprise, blood and foam bubbling on his lips. “I revel in my strength,” I say, twisting my claws for good measure as he gasps, writhes. “I exult in the power bestowed upon us.”
The light flickers, threatening to leave Thaane’s eyes entirely. I lean close. I ensure he is looking at me.
“But I—am not—an animal.” I yank my hand back, coated with blood. Thaane collapses to the ground, both hands clawing at his ruined chest, the whites of his eyes wide as moons. “Zalel.” I nod in the healer’s direction. “Attend to him, please. He will stand trial for war crimes, as the law dictates.”
“War crimes?” Thaane spits on Zalel as the latter kneels, one healing hand extended. Where I am built to break, Zalel is built to mend. “This chamber you authorized is rife with implements of pain.”
Thaane isn’t wrong. I quickly scan the wall of blades and manacles, some showing signs of dried blood. “Bodies are always broken in war. A soldier’s spirit is sacred, even in captivity. This thing you’ve done—” Idon’t understand why phantom tears, unshed, threaten to swallow my voice. “You think she doesn’t know that she’s exactly what she fears, what she’s fighting? You think it doesn’t haunt her every day?”
Of all the things I’ve broken in my quarters, overcome by rage since my unspeakable parricide, so many of them have been mirrors.
Behind me, barely audible, the prisoner sobs.
“Blood dries. Scars fade. Flesh knits itself back together. What you’ve done to this prisoner will follow her as far as she could ever run.” I turn to the shuddering girl, lift her by the shoulders so that we’re both on our feet. “You threatened my fortress. You fired upon your queen. There are punishments for that sort of insubordination, but this—this is not one of them.”
She blinks at me, rapidly, eyes open and shut, open and shut. Her quivering mouth cuts off her words.
I ask, “What is your name?”
At that, her rapid blinking slows into a wide, haunted stare that holds my own. Her eyes are watery, red-rimmed, the pupils broad black discs in her pallid face. “Eridian,” she says.
“Zalel,” I say without turning around. My voice is nearly a growl. “Release her back into the Shadowlands.”
Zalel, bless him, doesn’t choose this moment to question my authority. He simply nods and takes the prisoner by the hand, wincing when one of her rogue spines digs into his shoulder. She glances rapidly between Zalel and the door, tense as a bowstring, before turning to meet my gaze one final time.
“Now heed my words, Eridian. This is no small mercy after your defiance of the crown. Follow my servant. Keep your eyes fixed ahead. If you look back even once, my soldiers will strike you down for good where you stand.”
She nods stiffly, her mouth forming words but no sounds coming out, and Zalel leads her into the maze. Out of the fortress.
Thaane’s wound is healed. Yet he clutches at it, grimacing from phantom pain. He spits on the ground. “Your father would be ashamed of you.”
“Then it’s a blessing he isn’t here. Now get on your feet, you bastard.” I seize a pair of handcuffs from the wall, originally intended for Eridian. “We owe the Shadow Court an explanation for this—and if we stay here much longer, Thaane, I’m afraid I’ll be delivering you in pieces.”
CHAPTER
7
KORI
My sleep is brief, not troubled but vivid. In my dream,Charon’s wingspan barely fits between the sheer verticality of the obsidian mountains, their jagged edges visible only by faintly twinkling starlight. I bringCharondown slowly, carefully, to rest beneath a vast outcropping of stone. It casts my entire cockpit into chilling darkness. I close my eyes, just for an instant, to gather my thoughts—
And open them, awake in the cockpit, back in the settlement, where everything began. My hand remains on the Morpheus sphere in my pocket, where I stored a new memory. Not a stranger’s from the market, this time, but one of my own. Presented with the possibility of a forbidden nightfolk memory, I had no time to find a suitable trade from one of my clients, so I resorted to pilfering my own mind’s cluttered storage.
I can feel an outline of where the memory once resided, like the imprint of a hand in sand, but it’s already distant, slipping. A strong enough wind could blow it away entirely, tossing the sand back into chaos.
It’s of the first time I stepped aboveground again after a long, icky flu as a child. The sun flooded my gaze, even through my necessarily masked face. The heat was cleansing, renewing, boiling the clinging remnants of sickness away. Beautifully blue sky swept like a paintbrush in every direction, shimmering from the intensity of the Daylands’ heat, blue and blue and blue into infinity, puffs of cloud adorning its breadth. There, aboveground, everything was sunlight. Anything felt possible again.
Aspect nudges my hip with a metallic foot. “Kori makes—loud unpleasant—exhalations—when recharging—sometimes.”
I blink, clearing the lingering sheen of sleep from my eyes. “Are you saying I snore?”
“Aspect is programmed—to mimic—human behavior. Aspect can—provide example—if Kori wants.”
“That won’t be necessary, Aspect, though I appreciate the—”
