But a name’s just a name. Brand’s lips curled back and he took a step forwards, the growling in his throat hot as dragon’s fire, kicking a corpse out of his way.
The duke whipped the sword from Vialine’s neck and pointed it wobbling towards Brand. “I’m warning you, stay—”
The empress grabbed his hand and bit it, twisting free as he screamed. He raised his sword but Brand was on him, making that sound again, that shrieking, keening, gurgling sound, not thinking of doing good, or of standing in the light, or anything but breaking this man apart with his hands.
The sword grazed his head and bounced off his shoulder. Maybe it cut him and maybe it didn’t and Brand didn’t care. His arms closed tight about the duke like a lock snapping shut. He was a big man, but Brand once held the weight of a ship across his shoulders. He hoisted Duke Mikedas into the air as if he was made of straw.
Four charging steps he took, thudding across the dark lawn, lifting the duke higher and higher.
“You can’t—” he screeched, then Brand flung him into space. Over the stone rail he tumbled. He seemed to hang there for a moment against the dusky sky, astonished, sword still in his hand. His screech turned to a coughing gurgle and he plummeted flailing out of sight.
“God,” croaked Vialine.
There was a crunch far below as her uncle hit the ground. Then a long clatter.
Then silence.
DEBTS AND PROMISES
Thorn’s eyes opened and it was dark.
The darkness beyond the Last Door?
She tried to move, and gasped at the pain.
Surely the one good thing about death was that the pain stopped?
She felt bandages across her face, remembered the jolt as Duke Mikedas’s knife punched through her mouth, gave a rusty groan, her throat dry as old bones.
She squinted toward a slit of brightness, fumbled back blankets and slowly, ever so slowly, swung her legs down, everything bruised and battered and stabbed through with cramps. She moaned as she tried to put weight on her left leg, pain catching fire in her thigh, creeping up into her back, down through her knee.
She hopped and she shuffled, clutching at the wall. Gods, the pain in her leg, but when she winced at that, gods, the pain in her face, and when she whimpered at that, gods, the pain in her chest, up her throat, in her eyes as the tears flowed, and she made it to that strip of light, the light under a door, and pawed it open.
She shuffled forward with one hand up to shield her sore eyes, like staring into the blinding sun even though it was only a single candle. A thick candle with long, jewelled pins stuck into the wax. She saw crumbling plaster, fallen clothes casting long shadows across the boards, the dark folds on a rumpled bed—
She froze. A dark-skinned back, a bare back, lean muscles shifting. She heard a slow grunting, a woman’s voice and a man’s, together, and Thorn saw a pale arm slip up that back, a long, wasted arm and on the end was a shrivelled hand with just one stump of a finger.
“Uh,” she croaked, eyes wide, and the woman’s head jerked around. Black hair across her face, and a scar through her top lip, and a notch of white tooth showing. Sumael, and with Father Yarvi underneath her.
“Uh.” Thorn couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back, and she stared at the floor, burning with pain and embarrassment, trying to swallow but feeling as if she’d never have spit again in the aching hole of her mouth.
“You’re awake.” Father Yarvi scrambled from the bed and into his trousers.
“Am I?” she wanted to ask, but it came out, “Uh.”
“Back to bed before you set that leg bleeding.” And the minister slipped his arm around her and started helping her to hop and shuffle back toward the dark doorway.
Thorn couldn’t help glancing over her shoulder as they passed the threshold, saw Sumael stretched out naked as though nothing could be more ordinary, looking sideways at her through narrowed eyes.
“In pain?” asked Father Yarvi as he lowered her onto the bed.
“Uh,” she grunted.
Water sloshed into a cup, a spoon rattled as he mixed something in. “Drink this.”
It tasted beyond foul and her ripped mouth and her swollen tongue and her dry throat burned from it, but she fought it down, and at least she could make words afterward.
“I thought,” she croaked, as he swung her legs back into the bed and checked the bandages around her thigh, “you swore … an oath.”
“I swore too many. I must break some to keep another.”
“Who decides which ones you keep?”
“I’ll keep my first one.” And he closed the fingers of his good hand and made a fist of it. “To be revenged upon the killers of my father.”
She was growing drowsy. “I thought … you did that … long ago.”
“On some of them. Not all.” Yarvi pulled the blankets over her. “Sleep, now, Thorn.”
Her eyes drifted closed.
“DON’T GET UP.”
“Your radiance—”