Death's Mistress

Page 8

His legs were pulled apart and secured to the bottom sections of the rack. The rough wood had not been planed properly, and splinters ate into his flesh. Gnats buzzed around his face, crawled over his skin, and he was powerless to knock them away. And on the boards before the rack, placed so that he could see it, the whip lay coiled like a leather snake, waiting to strike.
He ignored it and looked outward, slitting his eyes against the glare, searching the crowd. She wasn’t hard to find. The pale skin of his exposed flesh was burning, but at least he wasn’t sweating like the mongrel in the family box, perched next to that half-breed of a husband. The canopy over her head was not enough to keep her from staining her pale green gown. She shifted, looking anywhere but at him, her fingers curled tightly into her lap.
It was a testament to the High King’s lust for power that he had brought such a thing into his court, polluting his line, sapping its strength. And now a full-blooded Light Fey prince was about to be whipped in front of a half-human, half–Dark Fey abomination. It was obscene.
Soldiers guarded the platform, barring any possibility of escape, watching. The armor on their shoulders and arms, the swords at their sides, the peaks of their helmets all glittered in the glaring sunlight. Pennants and flags of blue and gold hung limp in the breathless air, waiting like everyone else.
Drummers began a slow, measured beat that echoed around the silent grounds. From across the small hill separating the course from the castle, a parade appeared. The nobles of the court, lords and ladies clad in their glittering best, walked in lines behind the tall figure with the silver-blond hair and the golden circlet of office.
The king paused in front of the stands, speaking to the crowd. A pointless exercise. They all knew why they were here. But the voice droned on and on, like the sound of the insects buzzing around his ears. He ignored it in favor of staring up at the rotting pieces of flesh that adorned the corners of the stands, all that remained of the few this court boasted with the strength and will to act.
Vítus had been captured along with him, but he was not a prince. No war hung on the outcome of his fate, and there was no one to speak for him. His family had gone running like the rats they were, bowing and scraping and pleading with the king to save their own skins, to protect their lands and titles. They had left Vítus to the king’s mercy.
He had been there to witness that mercy, while his own fate still hung in the balance. Had been forced to watch as the king unsheathed a plain battle sword, its water-marked blade gleaming mirror-sharp. It had caught the light, sending a spike of painful radiance into his eyes. But he’d refused to close them, refused to look away even for an instant, lest it be taken for weakness.
And so he’d seen the sword descend, the neck sever in two, a pulsing arc of pure fey blood shimmering in midair like a spill of rubies. It had all been limned in a flare of red, a slash across his vision, burning the image into his memory. It reminded him of the gleam thrown off by the setting sun just before it slips below the horizon. The difference between day and night, between what was, and what will be.
The crowd gasped at the first execution some of them had ever witnessed. But they quieted again as the king stepped past Vítus’s body and stopped before Ölvir. He had been manacled kneeling, as the damage to his legs from the battle was too severe to allow him to stand. His hands were bound before him in cold black iron attached to heavy chains. The metal leeched his strength, and if left in place long enough, it would burn the skin.
It wouldn’t have time to mar his.
He’d straightened as the king’s shadow fell over him, first his back, then his neck, looking up proudly, tangled black hair falling over his shoulders and sticking to his cheeks. The damage to his face was ugly, and still only half-healed. Only one eye opened enough to see out of but he had stared up at the king without flinching.
He had not begged for his life or for mercy.
He had been offered neither.
The High King finally finished his platitudes and the nobles took their places, in a ring of special seats set close around the stands. They’d been there when the executions took place, too, ensuring that they went home with their finery splattered with the blood of traitors. It had been a clear message, as if any of the puling cowards had needed it.
The king stripped off his outer shirt, folded it and set it neatly on the thick gold grass next to the platform. His circlet of office went on top, and he smoothed his hair back over his skull, knotting the tail in a neat, quick movement that kept it off his face. Finally, he walked up the steps to the platform, stopping in front of the rack.
He bent and picked up the whip by the handle, leaving it to uncoil as he straightened, the braided leather slithering over the wood with a dry, scaly sound. He said nothing further as he paced to the required distance, as he drew back, as the whip snapped through the air with a crack. It would be the first of many.
Blood was soon dripping down the prisoner’s back and legs, oozing from his tightly bound wrists, adding a new pattern to the reddish brown stains beneath him. The Domi had lobbied hard, or so he’d heard, for the maximum sentence: five hundred lashes, likely deadly even for a fey. But the king had bargained it down to two, still trying to prevent a war.
Fool. It was obvious to everyone but him. They were already in one.
Chapter Five
Someone slapped me. I flinched, and the brightly lit scene shattered and fell away, leaving me staring blankly at a cobweb on the underside of the porch’s ceiling. I was sprawled on the couch with Claire standing over me, a hand gripped around my wrist, her face pale and frightened. Her other hand was raised, but I caught it in time. My cheek already stung enough.
“I’m all right.”
“All right?” she demanded shrilly. “Your face went slack. You wouldn’t talk. You were barely breathing! For over a minute, Dory!”
“I saw something—”
“I’m sure you did! You’re lucky it wasn’t the last thing!” She held up her uncle’s little bottle. “How much of this did you have?”
“Not that much.” I sat up, feeling too warm and vaguely nauseous. I could still smell the blood, hot on the air, hear the eerie silence of the crowd, feel the sharp bite of stripes I’d never taken. But that wasn’t what had me struggling to my feet.
“Sit down!” she snapped, trying to press me back. “I’m going to get you some water, and you’re going to drink all of it!”
“I saw subrand being punished,” I told her, pushing past to the railing.
“That stuff will make you see anything, if you drink enough of—”
“You were wearing green. An apple green dress. It was hot and you were sweating. You looked like you wanted to be anywhere else.”
She stared at me, her flame red hair glowing in the light from the hall. “How did you—”
“I see memories, Claire.”
“But you weren’t there! Dory, are you telling me you can see other people’s memories? That you can see mine?”
“It wasn’t yours I saw,” I told her, scanning the yard. I concentrated on the distant rain, the metallic smell of it, its elusive, seductive whisper—and at the presence hovering just behind it.
Claire frowned. “Whose, then? Because Aiden wasn’t—”
“subrand?” It leapt out of me on a breath, curled at the end into a question.
Claire clutched my arm. “Dory! He’s in prison in Faerie! He isn’t here!”
“I didn’t see the beating from your perspective,” I told her harshly. “I saw it from his. And I only do that when someone is close.”
“How close?”
“Very.”
It was hard to tell what might be out in the garden, or in the darkness just beyond. The storm was almost here, and the breeze was increasing. I watched it run a circuit of the yard, high in the trees, slipping under the green leaves and turning them over so that their lighter undersides caught the moonlight. More leaves turned as the wind raced along the fence, until the yard became a silver flag unfurling with a rustle against the dark green storm clouds.
But if there was a person in all that, I couldn’t see him.
Claire was shaking her head. “Nobody will be here for a couple of days at the earliest, I promise you. Even if he’d somehow escaped, he couldn’t be here.”
“The fey timeline differs so much from ours that there’s no way to know how much time has passed there since you left. They could have had weeks to look for you.”
“No, they couldn’t.”
“Claire! I saw you a month ago and you weren’t even showing! And now you have a one-year-old—”
“Nine months.”
“Whatever. The point is—”
“That time is running faster here right now, giving me a head start.”
I turned from staring at the garden to look at her. “Come again?”
“The fey have the timeline variations charted out. It’s one of their major advantages over us. They always know exactly when they’re going to arrive in our world, and we never do in theirs.”
“How the hell can you chart something like time?”
She pushed up her glasses, the old signal for nervousness. Or maybe it was just the heat. The air was thick with rain, muggy and hot like an encompassing blanket. Smothering. Like the day subrand took two hundred lashes, and learned nothing but how to hate.
Like he’d needed the lesson.
“Caedmon has this room in the palace where they keep up with it,” she told me, sitting back down. “There’s this big thing on the wall. It looks sort of like a map with two rivers. One is our world’s timeline; the other is theirs. And they each have their own riverbed, you know? Sometimes they go pretty parallel, while in others, one will bow out in a big loop, taking a lot more time to get back anywhere near the other.”
“So sometimes time runs faster here, and sometimes it runs faster there?”
“Yes. I checked yesterday, and it will be a while before anyone can come after me.”