Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Read online

  “Five hundred thirty-five.”

  The bidding slowed to the rich’s value of her abjection, barely a month of many of their yearly incomes.

  A man of middle age, with a gold ring in his ear to set off his silver hair and the tailored cut of his gilded coat—a merchant, and a successful one—raised his purse. “Six hundred ten.”

  The less prosperous who had viciously fought for lesser amounts glared at the merchant, then at her, as though to place the blame of their sullen moods upon her. For the amount the merchant offered, they would have to wait much longer than a few nights before they could view the despair they would have paid to witness.

  “Six hundred ten is the highest bid. Do any here challenge him?” Tumin said. “Two breaths to challenge… One… The winning bid is six hundred ten gold coins from gild merchant Cerval.”

  “Six hundred ten scars will I give you, sir,” Asha said, clear as ice. “The king taught me to draw blood. You will regret parting with what must be a negligible sum.”

  “I have my ways of convincing cooperation from you, Grayling. None of my fine bindings will leave marks on your coarse skin, and I am companions with one of the foremost apothecarists in seven kingdoms,” Cerval said.

  He gestured for his servants to bring his bags of gold coins to the platform in order to meet Tumin and two other elders who volunteered to count the coin—a formality to ascertain a valid bid, for Asha guessed his earring and gilded coat alone could fetch the same price he had dropped upon her.

  “If I were you, chief elder, I would hold the money until what I paid for has been confirmed,” Cerval said. “Otherwise she might consider her wages already won. Incentive should help make her more compliant.”

  He barely blinked at the excess of shine that emerged from the purses. He dismissed it in favor of running his gaze over what he had bought. Like Jace, he wore his desires plainly, but unlike Jace, the delicate stroke of his fingers along the grain of the platform suggested he planned more for pleasure—the sort an expensive apothecarist could provide.

  Asha shook from the furious injustice that even her resistance could be bought from her.

  Tumin nodded when the elders confirmed the amount and returned the rest he had gathered in preparation for a higher price. “Once an impartial arbitrator has determined that you have fulfilled your implicit contract, Asha of the Gray, I shall pass over your portion of the proceeds. Where do you wish to take her for the night, merchant? Does the good sir have a preference?”

  “My own domicile will serve my needs better than any tavern, hostel, or brothel. I have a room there for my purpose.” Cerval snapped, and one of his servants climbed onto the platform to undo the knots binding Asha to the pole, although he showed no signs of untying the knots binding her arms behind her back.

  “Your home is an acceptable location, as long as one of my men can accompany you for the night to determine the fulfillment of Asha’s side of the contract,” Tumin said.

  Jace raised his hand without his purse this time. “I volunteer my keen eyes and ears to the task. I’ll do it for a chance at her when you’re finished.”

  Distaste pursed Cerval’s lips. “I intend to keep her for the entire night, as paid for. You can have her when she stands outside the Gray whorehouses, executioner. I will have a more impartial arbitrator, chief elder.”

  “I know just the one, a servant of mine who is discreet and uninterested.” Tumin aided the merchant’s servant in easing Asha to the ground, her balance disturbed without the use of her arms.

  The men of the crowd remained, straining to catch glimpses of the merchant and the Grayling’s interactions. Every last one likely wished they could climb outside a window to peer in on what the merchant had planned. Every last one would also likely have donated their last bids to make the night a public one for all paying men to view.

  Asha presented the back of her head when the merchant bent in to kiss her. She and her mother were not tall enough to see over the gathering of men around them, but Thora had found a break in the crowd. Her expression remained unchanged, and in the stony stoicism, Asha read the apology—for not being able to save her from the king, for not being able to save her from a whore’s fate, for freezing nights and hungry bellies, for a lifetime she had been forced to give a Grayling daughter. Asha assigned her no blame, her mother the same victim Asha had become, but she could nonetheless mine little warmth for the one who had brought a girl into a world set upon destroying her.

  As she had done when Asha had followed a kingly husband out of her tiny family house, Thora turned away while her daughter was still bound. She walked from the square and did not look back.

  Cerval forced Asha’s head back around and mashed his mouth against hers without a trace of kindness. Asha showed none of her own. She opened her mouth to bite his lips off, but he must have anticipated her attack, because he jerked back, his white gloved hand poised to strike if she lunged forward to follow through.

  “I know your kind, Grayling,” Cerval said. “I keep horses, and during my youth in another kingdom, my father taught me to train wolves. There is not an animal I cannot break in a night. Do not believe yourself the exception.”

  He pinched her chin as though her ferocity was simply play and directed the servant holding her ropes to bring her with him.

  The crowd parted to let them through.

  A wolf—much larger and more monstrous than any Cerval’s family might have trained—darted through the opening with a deafening roar.

  Black fur, with charcoal gray curled into the odd mat, marked him not as the captain but Lysan. He snarled at the men on either side of him, slaver stringing from his massive teeth and striking the crowd’s clothes.

  The Tapestry sons reeled back in horror, shouting with surprise, some screaming like children as the nightmare ran through them. Despite his claim that he could break any animal, this was a wolf the size of a small horse, with a man’s intellect that could not be cowed by a simple lifting of the hand and promise of a blow. Asha had whipped him herself; he would only look forward to that. She had also witnessed him kill without a second thought.

  In the places within Asha that were not yet dead, she would not have minded the sight of Cerval’s head separated from his body. His presence offended her senses. He still stood before her, not to protect her but because paralysis kept him from shifting away, which brought a growl from Lysan’s chest. When the wolf pulled his lips back, his teeth seemed even larger in proportion to his lean, tightly powerful body, defined in bone as well as muscle.

  “Were I you, I would move aside, merchant,” Asha said, with the same emotionlessness her mother had taught her. Lysan’s presence renewed hope she tried to extinguish, terrible as it had treated her. “The wolf is here for me. You may try to tame it, but it has only one master, and you do not wear his crown.”

  “Away!” Tumin shouted, as though Lysan were nothing more than an uncommonly large street dog wearing loose trousers and weapons. “You are not permitted here. It is written in the law that the warriors may set foot anywhere but within our walls.”

  “The treaty was nullified when the queen was taken.” Lysan’s partially transformed throat growled and grated through the words. Transformation, however, accounted for but half of the ferocity.

  “The king left her here. He forfeited her.” Tumin pushed through the frozen crowd, incensed by the wolf’s presence. It did not seem to have occurred to him that he faced down a creature crossed between the fiercest human warrior and most dangerous wolf of the dark forests.

  “So not a day passes, and you sell her to the highest bidder?” Lysan’s rising volume escalated into another roar. He threw back his head to turn the roar into a howl he sent into the night sky. “It did not occur to you to send even a single envoy to the castle to unveil the mystery?”

  “Back, beast!” The gild merchant had found the reserves of bravery, although nothing from his reserves of wisdom.

  Cerval’s imperiousness
might have impressed a lesser wolf, but Lysan raised a paw that became a clawed hand. He brought it down over the merchant’s fine coat, shredding it into gilded ribbons.

  “What would you do to me, man clothed in expense, with your cologned wrists and careful hand with pomade? Do you think I cannot scent the potions you intend to use? Do you think I cannot discern what they are made for? I smell intent on your skin as though you bathed in the mind poisons you were to give to her.” Growls ripped through his human throat as he lowered himself to coil energy for attack.

  “No!” Tumin pointed a finger at the wolf, scolding him for attacking a prominent citizen. “We simply followed the law. We were more generous with its letter than the law required us to be.”

  “This is generosity? A queen falls among you, and you consider her nothing more than a whore because she has performed in a marriage.”

  Jace pulled out his axe. “To the devil.”

  The men of the crowd who had not already retreated gave the executioner wide berth.

  Asha stepped from the servant’s grasp, distracted as he was. Her arms were still bound, but she insinuated herself between Lysan and the executioner. Her presence would not stop Jace for long, but because he still deluded himself that he could contribute to her destruction, she could dissuade his attack for a short time—enough, hopefully, for Lysan’s call to bring reinforcements.

  “The contract with the king is abundantly clear. Your kind stays outside our walls,” Tumin said. “Your place is in the forests, not among the civilized!”

  “Uncivilized? I am uncivilized? Is it because my clothes are skin and my chest is bare and furred?” Lysan shifted until he could push himself onto two legs. “My attire might be made crudely, my talismans carved by hand, and my hair unruly, but I do not condemn women into sexual slavery because they no longer serve my purpose.”

  “Even the poorest whores are still paid handsomely for a simple task,” Cerval said. He thought he was circumspect with his slow movement to the dagger at his waist—weightier than Asha’s, but just as bejeweled. He had an eye on Lysan’s neck. It would require a simple cut, simpler now that Lysan had taken human form, his anatomy less mysterious. Asha could not protect both fronts, but with Lysan’s attention back on Cerval with his response, the merchant had to freeze, as though his intentions were not plain.

  “I doubt how well you would live on the poorest whore’s handsome salary,” Asha said. “Or that you would consent to a whore’s shortened years. I think the situation is clear, gentlemen. You can take your money back from the elders’ eager purses, sir, for you cannot buy another man’s wife. If the warriors roam the city, it is because the king considers this a breach of good faith from you as much as you consider them a breach of good faith from him. If the king is not responsible for leaving me here, then I am still queen. And if you are not responsible for bringing me here, then you have no reason to fear the warriors’ teeth. Just let me go. You shall never have to see me again. And if you do, you will know to bring me to the castle first.”

  “That still leaves the question of why you were brought here in the first place,” Tumin snapped. “I remain unconvinced that the king was not responsible. One soldier is no evidence that the king wants you back. If you play wife to the devil, why not play whore to the beast?”

  “Why not indeed?” Asha muttered. But she raised her voice again to reply. “It is your own depravity that assumes an affair out of the king’s soldier protecting a queen, your own sin that sees a whore as the only duty a Grayling woman can fulfill—and a dishonorable one because you would never do it yourself. You create the whores, then call them a disgrace. You marry a woman, then call her ruined when you believe her discarded.”

  “I had no reason to believe otherwise,” Tumin said. “Nor did you, if I recall.”

  With Tumin’s lack of fear in the face of the beast who now appeared more man, the rest of the men around them were losing their tension and terror as well, complacency creeping their hands to their own weapons.

  Asha had every confidence in Lysan’s abilities, but he was only one wolf, and there were several hundred men armed around him, including an executioner with more than passing acquaintance with his axe and the strength to wield it.

  “I know the legends of your poison, beast, and I hold it in my hand.” Tumin wrenched out a blade—no more than the size of Asha’s old flint knives, but its gleam was brighter than that of other daggers and swords. Lysan took a reflexive step back, his nostrils flaring when he caught the scent of silver.

  Cerval saw an opportunity. He darted forward, catching his dagger’s edge on Lysan’s shoulder with a practiced cut. Such practice came from a gentleman’s hunt rather than necessity, if Asha had to guess, but whether for food or sport, the origin of his skill made no difference. His blade struck just short of true. He did not cut the vessel where the blood would have flowed more freely, but Cerval caught Lysan by surprise. And Asha could not stop the merchant while she still needed to keep herself between Lysan and the executioner, who stepped forward now that the warrior had been distracted.

  “Stand aside, woman,” Jace hissed. “This beast needs slaying as much as the one that cut me.”

  “If you dare, I will ensure your member is removed before its own wont.” Asha stood her ground, though she caught Lysan’s wrist with one of her bound hands and pulled him back with her away from Cerval’s blade. “I would not grant you the same ‘mercy’ you intended to show me.”

  Lysan covered the wound with his palm, but blood bubbled up between his fingers. When he bared his teeth, they were again too big and sharp for his mouth.

  “Stop them,” Tumin directed Cerval’s men and the rest in the crowd. He then handed Cerval the silver blade. “Use this if it tries to steal her from you. You paid for her fairly.”

  Howls rose up from all over the city, identical to the one that Lysan had lifted, and many of them close. Shivers shot down Asha’s spine as she fought not to join the howl—quite different from a call but seductive nonetheless. That, more than anything before, drew Asha’s attention away.

  The executioner experienced no such lure from the wolves’ howls. He struck her head with the flat of the axe.

  Her grip on Lysan’s wrist loosened, and vision fogged. She barely had a sense of falling, not even when her body struck stone without her hands to stop her fall. That part was a blur to her, but the boot in her stomach that stole her breath came through the fog quite clearly.

  “Don’t worry, merchant. She was already bruised before the battering,” Jace said through the roaring in her ears. The whistle of metal parting air also made it through as she gasped for breath that did not come. As did the yelp of pain—one of an animal rather than a man.

  The first gulp of air was like fingernails in her lungs, but the second and third cleared her vision. She managed to roll onto her knees despite the sensation like molten metal where the executioner had kicked her.

  “Do not for a moment think that you have slithered from my grasp, Grayling,” Cerval’s slippery voice murmured in her ear. “I find myself more eager to have you now that the beast has attempted to thwart my plans.” He lifted her up by the rope around her arms and pushed her behind him for two servants to hold this time.

  Cerval tossed the silver blade Tumin had given to him up to adjust it in his palm. Then he started toward Lysan, who circled with the executioner while also trying to avoid the sharp tips of the weapons around him. Their stabs were becoming more brazen, drawing more blood in addition to the first stab and the large axe gash in his side.

  Asha screamed, not in terror but in approximation of her own beast yet to find an adequate throat. She wrenched against the hold of the servants before employing her boots, one in the right’s belly and one in the left’s groin.

  She had almost reached Cerval, but Tumin himself grabbed the ropes to hoist her off the ground and back again.

  “They will kill him!” She wriggled like a fish on a hook, striking out wi
th her feet again but unable to do more than bruise Tumin’s leg.

  “It is nothing more than an animal that must be destroyed. There is a reason we do not allow them within the kingdom’s walls,” Tumin replied. “Do not think to repeat your attack on the chief elder’s vizier upon me. You might be as feral as the beast, but you have none of the curses upon your form that give you unearned strength. You have no power here, Asha. It is time for you to accept that.”

  “Kill them!” Asha shouted to Lysan. “Kill them all. They knowingly break the pact. Protect yourself.”

  She bit a piece from the hand of one of Cerval’s servants when he covered her mouth from issuing more edicts. His blood covered her face as she ripped the flesh entirely off. After the servant jerked his hand away with a shout, Asha spat the flesh over her shoulder into Tumin’s face. He recoiled on impulse, disgust twisting his countenance. His grip on the ropes loosened.

  She tore from him and ran into Cerval from behind. She did not need to hurt him or kill him herself, and without her hands, she would be hard-pressed to do either. With Lysan shifting back into wolfish form, all she needed to do was stop Cerval from using the blade. They tumbled onto the cobblestone, less dirty than the ones she was accustomed to falling upon, and the blade fell from Cerval’s hand, spinning and stopping too far from his grasp.

  “You little slut.” Cerval whipped around to take her by the hair and throat. “When I finally have you alone… Do you know you will be aware of your own supplanted will the entire night as you obey my every desire? And you do not need both eyes for any of those things.” He struck her where the captain had left her face swollen, wresting vision from her again.

  At that moment, the square flooded not with men or guards but with snarling, barking wolf warriors, each in his and her wolf form and panting from the run to answer Lysan’s call.

  The captain—in a man’s form, though his sides heaved as though he had run as fast as his wolf’s body could—stepped from behind the wall of wolves surrounding the crowd. Lysan alone might have viewed the multitude of sharp weapons as a threat, but dozens of wolves curled their lips at what mere men aimed at them. Only the executioner and a few of the servants could claim more than passing familiarity with their own blades.