No. Sibba remembered their connection and tried to push her out of her mind, to think of anything else. But instead of the beautiful, smoldering Isgerd, she saw a sharp, angled face and disappointed green eyes slashed black with kohl.
Isgerd must have seen her hesitation like a dog who could smell fear because her smug smile returned. They were just below her mother now, and she looked up. Sibba followed her gaze and saw the chief nod, a terse smile on her own full lips. From either side of the older woman, two other girls leaped into the pit. The three of them together made an intimidating display. One girl carried her own ax, while the other held two short knives in confident fists.
“You brought friends,” Sibba said.
Isgerd cocked her head. “And you didn't.”
Sibba turned to retreat but didn't get two steps before something hard cracked her square across the shoulders and sent her sprawling to the dirt. The girls were on her before she could even roll over, feet pounding against her ribs, fingers twisting in her hair, jerking her head up to meet black eyes. Blood stained Isgerd's arm and Sibba smiled just before the girl's fist connected with her jaw. Once, twice. Sibba raised her arms to try to protect herself but one of the other girls grabbed her arms. The spectators were shouting for blood, and Isgerd was giving them what they wanted.
“Enough!” called a woman's voice over the mayhem like the crack of a whip. Chief Isgerd was standing, and beside her was a tall, sharp-boned woman that Sibba would have mistaken for Tola if it hadn't been for the streaks of gray in her red hair. She carried the same brass staff as Tola, and darkness seemed to swirl around its base, not unlike the shadows she had seen in the draugnvithr. That sight alone was scarier than Chief Isgerd's grimace could ever be.
Isgerd the Younger leaned down and hissed in Sibba's ear. “Don't think that this is over.”
She didn't need to worry. Sibba knew that this was just the beginning. The elderly vala's hard green eyes were the last thing she saw before the third blow landed, this one to her temple, and she fell reluctantly into the darkness.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Rayne
Rayne existed only in the darkness, in the shadows that haunted the palace dungeon and kept her awake at night with their eerie keening.
“It's the wind,” Old Sim, the jailer, had told her, but Rayne didn't believe him. It was the ghosts of all the children that her father had killed, of their mothers raging in their own sleepless nights, of their fathers bound in chains and etching spells onto swords they would never get to use against the man who deserved it the most. And there were her own ghosts—Madlin and Merek, Imeyna and Tamsin. People who had died because of her, because loving her had been too costly.
On the first day, she had writhed in pain, the burns on her arm flaring to life with each movement, the heat of her skin at war with the burning shame that hid inside of her in a place she couldn't reach. She wanted to cut it out, and she might have if she'd had a knife.
“Please,” she begged Old Sim.
He had looked at her with his sad, drooping eyes. “No salve for prisoners,” he told her, even though that wasn't what she wanted. He did offer her a rag dipped in ice-cold water that she let fall to the floor. She didn't deserve the kindness.
On the second day, she screamed and beat against the iron bars. She yelled for her father, for Tierri, for the cowardly Prince Danyll. Anyone that could come down here and put her out of her misery. The other prisoners joined her and soon the dungeon was a riot of sound that she knew they could hear out on the streets, but no one came except Old Sim. He took one of the prisoners out of his cell—a dirty old man with a beard down to his chest—and gave him five lashes just beyond the door of her cell. Rayne had pressed herself against the bars.
“No!” she yelled. “Me, take me, beat me!” But Old Sim ignored her and droplets of blood flicked off of the whip and rained down on her outstretched arm.
That night, the shadows were louder than ever. They seemed to coil around her, swim inside of her eyes. In her head, she repeated her own sort of curse: Madlin, Merek, Tamsin, Imeyna. Over and over until finally, she slept.
The days lumbered on, and the pain began to subside. When Old Sim offered her a cold cloth, she took it and wrapped her burned arm, reluctantly glad for the relief. Sometimes, he would pull up a stool to the other side of her cell door and sit for hours, talking. He had been alive when the Blood Flu had swept Casuin and killed King Malstrom. It had taken his own father from him and left him to care for his mother and younger siblings. It was how he lost his fingers, when they were taken for thieving.
He had been a jailer during the Malstrom Massacre, and after, had buried the Crowheart prince’s body—Rayne’s uncle, Wynn. He had knelt on the marble steps and cleaned the blood with sopping rags and watched as any surviving Malstrom was marched to the executioner’s block.
“I can still hear it at night,” he said, “the thunk of the blade on the wood.” That sound, Rayne thought, was Old Sim’s own curse. “It is my greatest shame, to have done nothing. But it’s easy not to pick a side when you live in the shadows.”
Finally, one night after she had eaten the slop that Old Sim served her for supper, Rayne worked up the nerve to ask the one question that she both needed and dreaded to know the answer to. “Is Tierri dead?”
“King has his own problems.” Old Sim leaned against a wooden crate just inside the circle of torchlight beyond her door. “But no, he’s not dead, though he does not enjoy the same freedom as he did before your transgression.” Her transgression. Her fault. Her failure. The torch flame flickered unsteadily in an unseen draft.
“And Edlyn?”
“Locked up tight.” His eyes darted around her small cell. “Not quite so tight as you, though I doubt she'll be allowed to attend the gathering tonight. Not before her coronation.”
That was tonight? Tonight, the families of Hail would gather and her sister would ascend to the throne, and the country would continue on the same disastrous path it had started down after the Malstrom Massacre.
“At least, not if they're wise,” Old Sim finished.
“What?” Rayne asked, swimming back to the surface, trying not to fall back into the pit of despair from which she had just emerged.
“With the way they taunted the Knight King, the safest place for both of you is right here, behind lock and key. Or magical doors.”
“How did they taunt Wido?” she asked.
“They sent him the head of his daughter.” Old Sim pulled a dirty rag from somewhere in his pants and wiped his shining forehead. “Prince Danyll's messenger never came back from Torlan, so we can assume he got the message.”