“No!” she gasped, horrified. “I have! I’ve done everything you asked!”
“Have you?” The question was met with a low chuckle. “Or have you been trying to sell me a lie?” He spun her around to face him, his gaze bitter in its coldness. “This is what happens to those who betray me.”
His face faded away, replaced with a cascade of images, too grotesque to process. Papa’s body facedown in a field while scavenger birds picked at his insides. Anna and her two younger siblings locked in a cage while goblins jeered and stabbed them with sticks. Nickel and Fricz fed to the hellhounds, ripped to shreds by their merciless teeth. Leyna and her mother together as a flock of nachtkrapp came at them again and again—their sharp beaks targeting their vulnerable eyes, their kind hearts, the hands that tried desperately to hold on to each other. Gild pinned like a moth to an enormous spinning wheel that whirred and whirred and whirred?…
A feral roar reached her across the plain of nightmares.
The claws on her shoulder were torn away. The shriek was silenced.
Serilda tried to climb back to consciousness, but the nightmares clung to her, threatening to drag her back. Somewhere beyond the darkness, she could hear a fight. The drude’s angry hisses. The strikes and grunts of a battle.
His voice—You will not touch her again!
She didn’t think it was possible, but Serilda managed to pry her eyes open. They immediately shut again, flinching away from the faint candlelight. But in that moment she’d seen him. A figure armed with a sword, an actual sword. Except, instead of flashing silver and steel, it appeared to be made of gold.
She squinted her eyes open again, lifting one arm to block her view of the candle.
She was just in time to see Gild driving the weapon clean through the drude’s belly.
A gargling sound. The stench of entrails.
Another beat of wings, another deafening cry.
She gasped. “Gild!”
The second drude dove for his head, claws dragging along his scalp.
Gild roared and yanked the sword out of the first drude’s body. In one ferocious swing, he turned and cut off one of the second attacker’s wings.
The sound it made was agony and horror as it collapsed to the ground. Sitting back on its haunches, its one wing flapping uselessly, it hissed at Gild with its sharp pointed tongue.
Fury twisted Gild’s face as he lunged, stabbing it in the chest, where a heart might have been.
The drude’s hiss turned into choking. Black liquid spilled from its mouth as it slumped forward onto the blade.
Panting hard, Gild yanked the sword away, letting the drude crumple in a heap beside its peer. Two grisly piles of bruise-purple skin and leathery wings.
He stood for a long while, gripping the hilt, his eyes darting madly around the room. He was shaking.
“Gild?” Serilda whispered, her voice hoarse from screaming.
He spun toward her, wide-eyed. “What is wrong with you?” he yelled.
She jolted. His anger helped her shed some of the lingering paralysis from the nightmares. “What?”
“One battle with a drude wasn’t enough?” He held his hand toward her. “Come on. There will be more coming. We have to go.”
“You have a sword?” she said, a little dazed, as he pulled her to her feet. To her surprise and a bit of disappointment, he yanked his hand away from her the moment she was standing.
“Yes, but I’m out of practice. We got lucky. Those things can torture me every bit as easy as they can torture you.”
He stuck his head out into the hall, making sure it was empty, before waving for Serilda to follow him. She started to, but they hadn’t rounded the corner before her legs gave way and she collapsed against the wall.
Gild wheeled back to her.
“Sorry,” she stammered. “I’m just … I can’t stop shaking.”
Sympathy flashed across his features. Stepping closer, he took her elbow, infinitely more gentle than he’d been moments before. “No, I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re hurt … and scared.”
She hadn’t been thinking about her shoulder, but once he mentioned it, she could suddenly feel the sting where the drude’s talons had dug into her.
“So are you,” she said, watching as a slim trail of blood made its way down Gild’s temple from the wounds in his scalp. “Hurt.”
He winced. “It’s not so bad. Let’s keep moving. I’ll help you walk.”
He carelessly tossed the sword off into a corner so he could support her around the waist, one hand gripping hers tight as they passed the stained-glass windows and headed back down the stairs. He led her into the great hall and set her down in front of the fireplace. The rubinrot wyvern peered down at them from its place above the mantel, eyes glittering with the light of a hundred candle flames. Its lifelike appearance made Serilda uneasy, but Gild seemed hardly to notice it, and so she tried not to be bothered, either.
Kneeling, Gild reached for her forehead, as if he intended to check for a fever. But then he froze and reeled his hand backward, tucking it close to his chest instead. A flicker of anguish passed over his face, but was gone in an instant, replaced with concern.
“How long did it have you before I got there?”
Serilda started to sit up straighter, and again Gild’s fingers flexed toward her. The movement was brief before he was pressing both of his palms into his knees instead. She looked down at his hands, noting the way his fingers were clawed, his knuckles going white.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It happened so fast. What time is it?”
“Maybe … two hours after sunset?”
“Not long then, I don’t think.”
He exhaled a long breath, some of the worry clearing from his brow. “Good. They can torture you for hours, until your heart stops. When you can’t handle any more terror, and you just sort of … give up.” He met Serilda’s eyes. “What were you thinking, going back there?”
“How do you know I’ve been there before?”
He reacted as if this was a ridiculous question. “After the Hunger Moon! When you were running for your life. Then you show up on the equinox, when the king didn’t even summon you, and head straight back to that room of horrors?”
Despite his lecture, Serilda felt her heart expand. “It was you. With the candelabra. You attacked the drude last time, too.”
“Of course it was me! Who did you think it was?”
She had thought … had even hoped. But she hadn’t been sure.
Ignoring his frustration, she asked, “How did you find me? How did you know I was there?”
Gild rocked back on his heels, withdrawing inch by inch. “I was in the gatehouse when I saw you creeping across the courtyard.” He shook his head, and he looked pained when he added, “I thought maybe you were looking for me.”
“I was!”
He scowled. Unconvinced, and rightfully so.
“I was going to,” Serilda amended. “I just thought this would be my best chance to see what’s in that room.”
“Why do you care what’s in that room? Drudes are in that room!”
“I thought the castle would be empty! Everyone was supposed to be at the feast!”