The image rises in my mind as Kauko licks his thick lips. Sig, the night he told me not to let Kauko bleed me, pretending to drink from a cup. I’d thought he was saying something about drinking too much mead, but as Kauko lifts the bowl, understanding dawns.
And as Kauko begins to drink, revulsion makes my stomach clench, and I have to fight to keep that porridge I ate for breakfast from spewing from my mouth. I glance at Sig, expecting to find him just as disgusted, but instead he is watching Kauko with his head tilted, his expression blank.
Kauko lifts his head and shudders, his lips covered in my blood. He looks at me and smiles. “So much power,” he says in a low, shaky voice before lowering his head to drink again. The wet slurping sounds make bile rise in my throat. He drinks like a man dying of thirst.
“The magic—is it in my blood?” I ask.
Sig looks at me from the corner of his eye and nods. “Blood is magic.” He rolls up his own tunic sleeve and reveals a scar in the same spot as my wound, confirming my suspicions. Now I understand his pallor, the circles under his eyes, the way his scarred flesh stretches over his skull like thin fabric over a frame of twigs. I wonder how powerful he would be if he hadn’t lost this much blood—powerful enough to escape?
Horror flows like ice through my heart, turning it cold. Kauko has magic of his own, but he’s used it to dominate Sig and now me, just so he could have more. “Did you do this to the Valtia, too?”
The question springs from me without thought, as does the memory of the witch queen’s face. I’ve barely allowed myself to think of her since the day it was revealed I was her true heir, that her magic had entered me upon her death instead of entering the girl the elders chose as the Saadella—the girl who now sits on the throne of Kupari, trying to make people believe she’s the real queen.
Kauko slowly swallows a full mouthful of blood. “Every Valtia,” he says.
“Every Valtia,” Sig echoes, his fiery gaze on Kauko again.
“You were supposed to protect her,” I say, my voice breaking. I don’t even know where this anger is coming from, but it’s welling up from the same spot inside me where I felt the witch queen reach and touch that day on the Torden—my heart. She wouldn’t let her priests hurt me that day. She was protecting me.
From people like Kauko.
“You were her enemy,” I say. “Is all of this your plan to snatch power for yourself?”
Kauko’s thick, bloodstained lips curve upward. “Krigere will help me.”
I would bet every drop of blood in my body that he has the same strategy Nisse does—use your allies to get what you want, and then dispose of them when you want to sit on the throne alone. Nisse and Kauko use people like weapons, like tools. They don’t care about tribe or family or loyalty. They only care about themselves.
“I’m going to kill you,” I murmur.
Kauko chuckles as he upends the bowl and lets the last thick drops fall fat and crimson on his tongue. “No,” he says. “You are going to feed me.”
I struggle against my chains as his plan wraps around my throat, choking off any intelligible words, clouding my thoughts. The air in the room snaps with bitter cold, but Kauko dismisses the ice with a flick of his wrist. “Today the traitors die,” he says. “And then we march.” He grins like a drunk, revealing blood-tinged teeth and a slightly unfocused gaze. “To kill the impostor and take back my temple. I will . . . rule the . . . Kupari.”
As the manacles cut into my wrists, Kauko blinks a few times, like he’s trying to clear his head. He leans on the stones as he bends to set the bowl on the ground. He walks his hands up the wall to bring himself upright again, and he has the strangest look on his face as he turns to Sig. “You . . .” he says weakly.
Sig smiles, his eyes glowing now, pure sunlight. “Me.”
Without another word, Kauko sinks to the ground and slumps forward, his eyes falling shut and his limbs going slack.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
As soon as Kauko’s head thunks to the floor, Sig is on his knees and digging through the pockets of the elder’s robe. He comes up holding a little copper key, which he uses to unlock my manacles.
“You poisoned the cup,” I say, staring down at the now-snoring old man.
Sig pulls a small cloth sack from his breeches and waggles it at me. I catch a whiff of something that smells like a strange combination of death and springtime. “From Halina,” he says.
I press the cloth to the wound in the crook of my elbow, and Sig reaches over and ties it tight for me. As I roll my sleeve down my arm, I nudge Kauko with my toe. “Are you going to kill him?”
Sig stares down at the man, and now I can see the utter loathing he’s been concealing for so many days. “Yes,” he hisses. “But not today.”
“Why?”