“Watch.”
The workers halted in their tracks and turned as one toward the condemned man. Terror brewed behind their glazed eyes, forced to stay open. Noceo’s mouth fell shut. Sweat trickled down his temples. He had reached his limit.
Drenevan unsheathed his knife before Clevsin could note the way his brother had sagged against a crate of product. It was always messier with knives, but a sword risked sending the man to Death too early. One of the first breaks in Drenevan’s back had been for doing just that.
Moonlight slid down metal. And Drenevan got to work.
Crimson dotted, then sprayed the warehouse floor. Rivulets ran down his knife like a smile through red teeth. First the digits, then the tongue. He belonged to this bitter dance, most at home within that frozen second between a blade and its meeting place. He notched into the stomach, then lower. The long strings of the man’s body and waste came from his gut in a slippery ribbon. His eyes rolled back in his head, going into traumatic shock. Death’s arrival was imminent.
Ah. Drenevan hid a flinch.Clevsin won’t be happy.
Pain burst across his back as he tried to make the kill pleasing. Shattering the man’s sternum, he kicked the gaping torso over to the workers, hoping it would suffice. The screams, swoons, and loud retching told him it had. The hand Noceo had seemingly casually placed against a crate quivered. Dalvia looked away, paler than the snow blanketing the Drust Mountains.
Monster, their eyes said.Monster.
He found Clevsin’s eyes and knew it still wasn’t enough. Menace bled from his father in waves that rivaled the Chaboras River at high tide beforehe stalked off, and Drenevan knew it would be him receiving punishment before Dalvia. He wiped his knife on his robes. Crimson bled into gray-green.
Noceo eyed him warily before approaching. “He isn’t pleased.”
“I slashed the gut too soon.”
His brother shivered. “You really don’t feel anything afterward?”
“He shouldn’t have had to die.” Drenevan watched Dalvia hesitantly approach the wreckage of the man’s body. Her retching rose above the sounds of the workers trying to go on with their day after another reminder of how disposable they were.
“Is that it?” his brother asked hesitantly. “You don’t feel revolted or angry at having to do it?”
Drenevan wondered what purpose that would serve. Blood had never disgusted him, and anger was best saved for the day he’d have the power to act on it. He still had none. “Someday, afterward,” he used the synonym that referred to their plan of escape, “I think I’ll feel anger. Maybe a lot of it.”
“Me too.” Silence stretched comfortably between them. “What do you want, afterward?”
Drenevan thought about that a moment. “A drink, maybe.” He had only recently traded the mild languor of blazeleaf for the deeper oblivion of alcohol.
Noceo let out a breath that could have been tinged with relief. He tilted his head to the exit. “Do you think Clevsin will let me out for an hour? I wouldn’t mind seeing Parvine again.”
His brother’s infatuation with the Poxtan girl evidently hadn’t dimmed. “He’ll be distracted with me,” Drenevan noted. His back tensed, knowing what it was about to face. “Ask him once he starts.”
Something that could have been a flash of sympathy lit his brother’s eyes before he left. Drenevan followed, their paths diverging at the house where his punishment waited.
What did he want? The question chafed at him through the shattering of a vertebra at Clevsin’s hands and its careless half mending by a healerdoing precisely as they were told. It pelted him through dinner where Dalvia spilled her soup all over herself, by trembling when their elbows touched. The answer wasn’t love. It could be power, but even that rung partially false.
Hours later, curled on the floor of his room, teeth ground in pain, he thought he might have it.
It might be nice to be understood.
With that settled, he took a deep draw of his blazeleaf roll and drank some more filched wine.
Sleep came easy after that.
Whose dream had that been? Whose life had she walked in for a few bitter hours?
Sarai opened her eyes to darkness and the echoes of a man being butchered on a warehouse floor. Names, faces, they eluded her now, yet the anguish behind her breastbone felt alive.
Rubbing her aching sternum, she sat up and stilled at the cool stone under her hands.Tile?Sconces flared one by one in a ring around the ballroom and sheknew. These walls, the hit of this tile against her cheekbones, all of it indelible. Yet, panic was an echo, and her mind too sluggish to scream.
A burst of wind forced the unlatched balcony door open, knocking it into an object atop a tablecloth on the floor. It twitched with an agonized moan, and she knew even before she approached the figure, knew the dark stains spreading from her even before she bent toward the badly wounded girl on the ballroom at the top of Sidran Tower.
Her past self stared back, pulling breath through bleeding lips. A laceration split her face horizontally above her mouth, continuing behind her ears.Tullus’s work.Her hair had been shorn by lightning, chunks stuck to her scalp. Brown eyes not gold. Too young to have known this.
