Reign of Beasts (Creature Court)

PART VII

Oathbreaker

19

Tasha let me fight the sky properly when I was ten. It scared the cack out of me, but I did it. The thing that kept me going was that I had killed Saturn and that made me as wicked as the rest of them. Most of the time I tried to forget that I was the one who’d done that, the worst of the monsters, but in the sky it was an odd comfort. It meant I could take care of myself. I could be something, someone who mattered.

Things were different with the cubs. With Garnet. After Saturn, he fell apart, drinking hard and taking every potion and powder he could get his hands on. It was like he had given up. Total despair. Ashiol and Lysandor were run off their paws trying to keep it from Tasha: how bad things were, how far he had fallen. It was my fault, and I knew it. I was sick about it. Something about me and what I had done to Saturn was killing Garnet slowly, from the inside.

Liv and I tried to help the others cover for him, but we weren’t much help.

Livilla had decided she was in love with Ashiol, but whenever Garnet crooked his finger at her, she went to him instead, kissing and making up to him. She was trying to make Heliora, Ash’s pet sentinel, jealous, I think. Everyone knew Heliora was after Ash. The cubs were all of age now, but they still acted like boys.

One nox something changed. Ashiol found Garnet off his face in the middle of a skybattle and sent him home. Somewhere between the Forum and the Arches, Garnet sobered up and then some.

I’d got back ahead of him, Livilla half-carrying me after a scorchbolt had torn a layer of skin off my back. I was sick and sleepy, dazed from the pain, but Livilla wasn’t allowed to heal me until Tasha came back and decided whether I deserved it or not.

Garnet entered like Harlequinus in the final act, power pouring off him. He ignored me and strode straight to Livilla, drew her up off the couch and kissed her until she could hardly breathe.

‘What happened to you?’ she asked. ‘You feel —’

‘Sick, hot, weak, marvellous, tremendous?’ Garnet teased her. ‘I’ve never felt better in my life.’

He danced her around the rooms, humming a song he’d picked up somewhere.

‘You quenched someone,’ Livilla said, pouting at him. ‘You didn’t share!’

Garnet mimicked her sulky expression. ‘Ask our lovely Tasha if there was a death call this nox.’

‘You’ve eaten someone,’ Livilla protested. ‘You must have.’

‘Me?’ he laughed. ‘I’m just naturally talented and wonderful, you know.’

As he danced past me, I felt the throbbing pain in my back ease. I stared up at him in alarm. ‘You’re not supposed to —’

‘Leave Tasha to me,’ he carolled, kissing Livilla again, rougher than before. ‘Call that a gift from a little brown mouse.’

I thought he had finally run mad.

Tasha knew what he’d done before she even stepped over the threshold. She was alone, no sign of Ashiol or Lysandor. She must have left the battle early, as soon as she felt Garnet healing me.

‘Get up,’ she demanded, dragging me out of bed so that I fell on the floor. ‘This is what I do to disobedient little boys,’ she added, eyes fixed on Garnet as she pressed her palm against my back, burning a handprint of animor between my shoulder blades.

I screamed, too shocked with the pain to do anything else.

‘Stop it,’ Garnet snapped, dragging her away from me. ‘I did it; punish me.’

‘Believe me, I will,’ she snarled, baring her teeth at him. ‘I am your Lord and you will not forget that. Cub.’

Garnet shoved her hard, knocking her to the floor. ‘For now, perhaps,’ he said, standing over her. ‘But I won’t be your courteso forever. I’ll be a Lord and then a King, and you can never be anything more than you are now. Woman.’

Tasha screamed soundlessly at him and shaped herself into the lioness. She pounced and bit, and he let her tear at him, laughing helplessly though the pain must have been overwhelming.

‘You can’t kill me,’ he said finally, pale and shuddering under her teeth. ‘You don’t dare quench anyone. Not if you don’t want to end up like Samara.’ We all knew the story of the female Lord who tried to be a King and burst apart from her own power. Women could not be Kings.

She shaped herself back into Tasha, golden and naked, pinning him to the ground. ‘I can kill you without quenching you,’ she gasped.

‘No, you can’t,’ said Garnet. ‘You don’t have it in you to hold back, you know that. You can’t trust yourself.’

Tasha turned away from him and punched the wall in anger, enough to scrape her knuckles bloody. ‘You are mine. You will not speak to me like I am the dirt under your fingernails. I own you, boy.’



‘Aye, you do,’ Garnet said, and there was blood in his mouth now. ‘But we are here because we love you, not because you own us. I want you to swear an oath that you will not raise a hand against one of us again.’

His eyes were serious. Had he meant this all along?

Tasha laughed hollowly. ‘Who do you think you are?’

Garnet stood up then, which was a surprise to me, even through my distracting haze of pain. He shouldn’t have been able to do that, shouldn’t have had it in him with his body torn and bitten raw, but he had managed to boost his power somehow. He wasn’t a Lord yet, but he wasn’t far off being Tasha’s equal.

‘Swear the oath,’ he said dangerously. ‘Or I will leave and take them with me when I become Lord. They love me more than they love you.’

Livilla and I both avoided Tasha’s sudden, penetrating gaze. It was true. Tasha was glorious, but Garnet was ours. If we had to choose, we would choose him, even if we hated ourselves for it.

He wouldn’t make us choose, would he?

‘I will destroy you for this,’ Tasha whispered.

‘You can try,’ Garnet replied. ‘But I’m not Saturn. I won’t go down so easily.’ He pressed a hand against his chest and blood oozed through his fingers. ‘Swear the oath, Tasha. You will not deliberately harm any of your courtesi. Not a hair on their heads.’

‘You’re a fool,’ she whispered.

Garnet raised his voice. ‘Poet. Livilla. We’re leaving. Celeste Lord Owl will take us in.’

‘You can’t threaten me,’ Tasha spat.

‘On the contrary,’ said Garnet. ‘You are the one with something to lose. You owe everything you are to us. Swear the oath, Tasha. You can hurt us as indirectly as you like, but no more pain from your hands to our bodies. We have suffered your tantrums long enough.’

Her eyes blazed at him, but she swore the oath. Garnet fell to the couch halfway through, and I saw an expression flicker across her face as she considered ending him once and for all. But she didn’t. Instead, she promised not to hurt any of her courtesi with her own hands from that nox onwards.

Ashiol and Lysandor came in later, punchy and high-spirited from the battle. None of us told them what had happened. At least, Livilla and I never did. I think Garnet kept his mouth shut, too, even from his closest friends.

Tasha brought a cage into the den, and coils of skysilver wire from the Smith. If one of us displeased her, she would order us to bind one of the cage’s bars in tight skysilver coils, smirking as it burned our palms and fingertips. Even Garnet did it when she told him to, though he knew she couldn’t enforce the order. He seemed to enjoy it, or was good at pretending so. Once the bars were all wrapped in skysilver, the cage made an effective prison for recalcitrant cubs. I don’t think Ashiol or Lysandor ever knew why she had changed her methods of inflicting pain.