He grabbed my wrists and squeezed. “So you’re going to try to kill me, too?” He searched my eyes. “What’s wrong with you? What happened in there? Ruby!”
His firm but gentle grasp, or perhaps the shock of his temperature being so similar to my own, somehow brought me back to awareness. Something frayed and snapped. The darkness faded, tendrils of shadow lifting into the air, leaving me bereft and grieving and alone. I sagged toward the floor.
Arms caught me in a tight hold, hauling me back up. I shook my head, trying to clear it.
Kai. That was his name. His face was flushed, his arms hot around me, his expression horrified.
“I—I didn’t mean to…” I turned to look behind me. The bar was empty except for the barmaid and a woman wailing over the still figure of the man.
The man I’d killed.
“Sud, no. No!” I invoked the goddess of the south wind to help me. This couldn’t be happening.
But then the man on the floor moaned and coughed. The woman bent over him sobbed in relief. “Thank Fors you’re alive,” she said brokenly.
Relief overwhelmed me. But, oh Sud, what had happened? Had the man tried to kill me? Or was that all in my head?
“Call the constable!” the woman screamed. “That filthy Fireblood tried to kill my husband!”
Kai yanked me out the door into the confusion of the wharf. His hand was clamped on the back of my neck.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked, pulling against his hold.
He dragged me into an alley and pushed me up against the side of a building. “Why did you try to kill that man? Tell me!”
I shook my head violently. “He had a knife!”
“He was just sitting there! Did you recognize him? Did he hurt you before?”
“No.” I was trembling all over. So cold. “It must have followed me somehow. I don’t know.”
“What? What followed you?”
“The curse. Please, please, just take me away before it comes back.” And to my horror, I found I was sobbing.
There was a long silence. And then I was being pulled along the wharf to one of the creaking docks. A short, wide-shouldered man wearing a cap helped me into a rowboat and Kai climbed in after me. They spoke in lilting Sudesian, and the burly man began to row with steady strokes.
We moved into choppy water, around the headland, and into a cove. A ship nestled there, its front covered by the figurehead of a wide-eyed young woman with flowing carved hair that streamed onto the sides of the ship. She looked as startled and as lost as I felt.
A couple of sailors threw out lines and secured the rowboat, then tossed out a rope ladder. When I reached the top, I dropped to the floor—or rather, the deck. I’d read about ships enough to know that much. I listened to Kai shouting orders, then the creak of chain as they hauled up the anchor.
The wind caught the sails and spray arced over the ship’s side, shockingly cold on my fear-heated skin. I pushed to my feet and scrambled to the railing. As we curved around the jut of land that bordered the harbor, the docks and wharf grew smaller and smaller and slipped out of sight. Eventually even the land was nothing more than a series of inky smears on parchment left by the fingers of a child.
I stood there for a long time and watched Tempesia fade from a violet-gray blur into the flat, blue horizon—leaving everything I’d ever known behind.
SEVEN
WHEN I WAS DONE HEAVING OVER the railing and my legs felt like wet straw, Kai led me to a small cabin where I promptly crawled into bed and fell asleep.
Sometime later, he came back wearing fresh clothes: fawn breeches, black boots up to the knee, and a loose-fitting white shirt. The lamplight made highlights and shadows out of his angular features and tinted his hair a deeper orange. He held a metal tray with a cup and a wooden bowl that steamed.
“Eat,” he said, plunking the tray on a small table next to a chair, both of them bolted to the floor. “I think your sickness has passed.”
The cabin was so small I could make it from one end to the other in a single leap. Not that I felt like leaping. Or moving at all. I considered pulling the covers over my head and going back to sleep. Instead, I forced myself to sit up.
“Thank you,” I said quietly.
“It’s just pottage with turnips. You won’t thank me once you’ve tasted it.”
“No, I mean thank you for bringing me aboard after…”
He leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. “If that man had attacked you, I would have fought alongside you. But he did nothing. You didn’t answer me when I told you to stop. You were like a wild thing. An animal.”
I shuddered. “I know.”
His eyes were hooded. “You claim there is a curse.”
I’d forgotten I’d said that. I flapped a hand in the air to cover my anxiety. “It won’t make sense to you. You won’t believe me.”
He hesitated. “Your eyes are the color of honey in the sun, but when you looked at me in the tavern, the color was gone. Your terror was genuine. Tell me what scared you, and I will try to believe you.”
To buy some time while I considered what to say, I took a bite of pottage and grimaced. If Kai thought Tempesian food was bland, I didn’t know how he could stomach this. I put the bowl back on the tray. “It’s a long story.”
He folded himself into the chair next to the bed, crossing his outstretched legs at the ankle and folding his arms. “The journey is long. There is time.”
Brother Thistle had cautioned me not to tell the queen my reasons for coming to Sudesia. It stood to reason I shouldn’t go around blabbing my plans to anyone else. Kai might seem like an ally, but I barely knew him. So I gave him an altered version of events.
“I had to fight for my life in the arena,” I said, searching for partial truths that he would accept. “I had to kill people.”
“Yes, I know this.”
“Even though it was necessary to my survival, I sometimes feel the burden of what I’ve done. Sometimes I even feel like a… a dark presence has taken hold of me.”
“What kind of presence?” he asked, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.
“I have memories of those fights that are so real, it’s as if I’m reliving them. For a few moments… sometimes… I can’t tell what’s real.”
I watched his face, gauging his reaction. I had to be careful not to tell him things that would make him distrust me, but at the same time, a part of me wanted to unburden myself. Part of me still wanted absolution for what I’d done, even though I’d had no choice. The death of Clay—the boy from my village whose rebellion against King Rasmus had landed him in the arena—wasn’t my fault, but it still haunted me. And the eyes of Captain Drake’s wife and daughter as I stood over his bloodied corpse flashed into my mind at odd moments. I told Kai, and he listened quietly with a neutral expression.
“So you had a flashback in the tavern?” he asked.
“I… The man must have reminded me of someone I’d fought in the arena.”
It hadn’t been a flashback, though. The Minax had made me see things that weren’t there. No wonder there had been so many murders. It must trick people into thinking they are under attack, filling their minds with hallucinations.
“But you said something had come for you. A curse. You begged me to take you away before it came back.”
I grasped at the first explanation that came to mind. “There are times I believe I’ve been cursed for what I’ve done. And I want to escape that curse and start over.”
There was truth in that. I wanted to be free of the Minax. I wanted to discover what my life would be like without the creature’s consciousness affecting my thoughts and dreams, ruining my sleep and my peace of mind with guilt and disturbing memories.
His expression was serious, lips firm, eyes a little wary as he said, “And what happens if you encounter someone else who reminds you of an old opponent? Will you attack that person, too?”