Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Page 17

  “If you so much as brush my soldier or my queen one more time, you will find yourself without hands.” The captain’s eyes glowed so brightly that she could see them with her nearly swollen-shut eye. “Drop the axe, executioner, unless you plan to use it against me. I do not need wolfskin to leave you a pathetic heap among your compatriots. Will they show you more compassion than you give her?”

  He turned his burning, icy gaze to Cerval, who still held Asha over his body, his hand poised to strike her again—much less welcome than any battle the captain had fought with her, though the blows would seem similar to an untrained eye.

  “As for you, gold-gilded poisoner,” the captain said, “if you value your overpriced hide, you should release your queen before the king arrives and witnesses your hands upon her. He is most eager to retrieve his wife and most furious at whoever took her. He might not pause before lashing out at the one he believes responsible. But you, soft-handed as you are, did not orchestrate this theft. No, I believe the elders’ treachery runs deeper than the few who attempted to rout the king’s army from his castle.”

  “Release me.” Asha’s left eye had swollen completely shut now, but she still had the one good eye, like the captain. As Cerval had said, she did not need both, not to make her contempt known. “Unless you intend to quarrel with the captain and his entire guard.”

  “You and I are not finished. I paid well, and I intend to collect.” But Cerval shoved her away and stood without offering his aid, more concerned with wiping the dirt from his sleeves, as though the back of his coat was not still filthy with cobblestone dust and blood from Asha’s mouth, and the front torn by wolf claws.

  “What exactly do you intend to collect?” The dark misty figure of the king—robed, cowled, and masked—descended from the sky in a slow flutter to the platform that had displayed her.

  The king took in the sight of the square, his robes continuing to flutter despite the lack of a breeze.

  “So the rumors are true,” the king said. If the captain’s gaze was burning ice, the king’s voice could have sent a thin layer of crystalline frost over the entire Tapestry. “The posted parchments and the whispers could have been tales told by scandalmongers. Now I see none of them whispered lies. You intended to sell my wife at the first opportunity without the slightest attempt to consult me. You who wear the robes of the chief elder, am I to place the blame for this on you? You did not take her from me. You did not have the means to steal her so completely from right within my arms. But you were the one to put her to auction, were you not, with full knowledge of the element that might claim her after so graciously providing her to me?”

  The wolves had not frightened the new chief elder, but he blanched at the king’s entrance and intensifying attention. “I… I thought you the cause of her return. I believed you had finished with her.”

  “Had I finished with her, I would have called upon the tomb etcher to make a new stone, per the arrangement with my wives. I would not have included the rest of the kingdom, and I certainly would not have returned her to the world from which I took her.” The king turned his concealed head to her. “How terribly have they made you suffer?”

  “They had time to concoct their plans but not to execute,” Asha replied. “I was sold but not yet used.”

  “Keen sight suggests otherwise. You did not request those ropes nor those wounds.” The king raised his gloved hand toward the executioner without shifting his gaze. Jace’s axe, lifted to fell a new blow on Lysan, flew into his grasp.

  Jace shouted in outrage just as Lysan fell to his knee, clutching both his shoulder and his side. The skin stitched itself together where his hands could not cover, but the wounds reached deeper than surface, and blood loss had leached some of the warm color from his skin.

  Two wolves darted forward through the crowd. Callina shifted from her wolf woman form to help Lysan to his feet. Several of the men had to glance again when they realized her torso was almost as bare as the men’s. Even if they were accustomed to nudity among wives and whores, the kingdom’s men were unaccustomed to breasts so brazenly presented to them outside a bedroom or back alley. Swords all around lowered at the sight of a woman unattired, even as other objects no doubt rose.

  Cerval did not seem to notice. He lunged for the knife Asha had knocked out of his hands and roared in his own human way as he ran at the trio of wolves so near to him.

  Magic snapped the ropes from around Asha’s arms. This time she could leap on Cerval’s back and wrap her arm around his neck, snapping it back. She did not damage the spine, but she changed his trajectory. He plunged the silver knife blindly behind him. It glanced against her forehead and scalp, but the blood that dripped into her good eye barely registered as she buried her mouth against his neck. The now familiar sensation of flesh giving way like ripe fruit to spill blood down her throat excited her, especially when they hit the ground and she released him. Blood spurted out in arcs, her aim better this time for blood loss.

  She snatched at the knife in his hand and wrested it from his grip. Blood made her fingers slip on the hilt, but she applied herself with fervor nonetheless to ensure that even if he recovered from the rapidly spreading pool around him, his face would make him more pariah than the king in his cowl.

  Tumin started toward her at the first cut, but the king raised a finger, the only warning he needed to give.

  When she had finished the handiwork she wished she could apply to every man who had bid upon her, Cerval had ceased breathing and gone still. That did not impede her satisfaction.

  Asha straightened. Blood dripped from her face as it had before, coating her exposed chest and the front of her gown. She tossed the silver knife to the king, who spelled it away somewhere in his robes so that it could no longer threaten his wolves.

  “Did he harm you with the blade?” the king asked Lysan, who could stand on his own now, though his color had not returned.

  “I have been struck with several blades, none of them deadly. Yet.”

  “We defended ourselves against your barbarians, our right once they crossed over the borders,” Tumin insisted. “How were we to know that they were not the bearers of your queen back to us?”

  “They crossed into the borders of my kingdom,” the king said. “I had every reason to send my army in when I believed Asha might have been in danger. Your own right to find them frightening is the only thing that keeps me from tying you to this pole where you bound my wife, then setting it ablaze. But if you ever think to do anything again with one of mine, warrior or queen, without my consent, I shall leave nothing but the Gray standing. Do I make myself clear, chief elder?”

  “What of our gild merchant, then?” Tumin said. “She killed him in cold blood. They will be calling for her blood in payment.”

  The king’s face did not have to be visible for disdain to come through his demeanor. “You have what he used to purchase my wife for a night. If that is inadequate payment for his death, then he should have offered more.”

  “But—” Tumin began.

  “You sold her. There is no precedent for your betrayal. Those who bid upon her but did not win are just as complicit in this crime. They should consider themselves fortunate I would rather return to my castle than exact vengeance as I did in the old times. No more protests, chief elder. You are the most fortunate of all here that I do not hand the axe to her to do as she wills.”

  He swung the axe to bury the thick blade into the wooden platform. Then he held out his gloved hand to Asha. “Come with me now. You never have to return to this place. I will ensure it.”

  “Well, that was disappointing.”

  The king froze, still as a statue. Even his robes dared not move.

  Asha lowered her hand with which she had reached for the king and turned toward the courthouse.

  Another shadow emerged, much like the king had—with the same seamless darkness, with the same silence to her step, and the same hood concealing her face, although she wore no mask.
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  When she pushed the hood back, she revealed a face as pale and gray as Asha’s deadened skin, though with none of her scarring. She wore her black hair, also streaked with charcoal gray, loose over her shoulders like a second hood. It gleamed with vitality that made her gray skin seem healthier than Asha’s could hope for. Her lips faded to black where it met the flesh within her mouth, and her sharp, conical teeth appeared almost delicate when she parted her lips in a smile.

  Her eyes were black as ink wells, black as the king’s.

  “I expected a massacre, not this dull restraint of empty threats and violent promises. The Grayling was the most entertaining of the lot of you. I could watch her carve the faces of the men gathered here for weeks. Well done, this year’s queen.” She brought her ungloved hands together in slow applause. Her black claws clicked every time they struck each other.

  Her feet were bare under the hem of her black gown, yet the woman stepped over the frigid marble of the courthouse steps without flinching.

  She stopped when she reached the cobblestone, her gaze firmly upon Asha, yet her attention somehow remained on the king. “You always liked the ones that looked like me, Cyric—Graylings from my family’s line. Did you even realize you kept choosing me all these years whenever you chose one you wanted rather than one who needed you?”

  The king lifted his cowl and hood away, as though he needed to confirm what he had seen through the fabric. It did not have the effect upon the crowd that it might have a few weeks earlier, before Asha’s blood had restored him. But those not completely distracted by the strange woman retreated a few steps away. As with the woman, an observer could not fail to notice the signs of the monster he was under the human guise.

  Surprise nearly erased the troubled furrow to his brow.

  Asha did not run as the woman continued to approach Asha, despite the fact that the woman’s amusement mingled with harnessed anger behind the politeness.

  “I cannot decide whether to be honored that you still desire me or insulted that you believe I can be replaced. I think I like this one better than most of the others, though. She smells a treat indeed, lined with blood inside and outside. You just yearn for your claws, do you not, Asha of the Gray?”

  Faster than a blink, the woman was in front of her. She stroked the curve of her own claws over Asha’s chest above the sodden neckline of the gown, gathering Cerval’s blood.

  “Between us,” the woman whispered, though not quietly, “which claws do you really wish to have? I found you tangled between the monster and the beast, and the wolves have sought you as earnestly as the king. I watched you with the king, and I watched you with his captain. I think you do not know whose teeth you would rather have in your flesh. I cannot say I know your dilemma. I always wanted the king alone. Though his methods were far rougher then, I recognized the power of his desire to sink into me, innocent though I was when he taught me his particular brand of pleasure. Do you remember now, Cyric? I was not your first, but as seventh, I was one of your earliest wives, back when the Crimson Kingdom did not have to wrap their contempt in the words of law and piety. They simply handed you the women they hated.”

  “Murial.” The name was almost a breath on the king’s lips.

  “You remember my name.” She disappeared in a blur from Asha’s side and appeared upon the platform, running her bloody claws along the king’s mouth. “Do you remember this?”

  The woman chased the trail of Cerval’s blood with her tongue, then closed her mouth over his in a kiss.

  The king slowly closed his eyes, raising a hand to her face as he parted his lips. Murial sank into the kiss with a hum of approval. His groan made the whole platform shudder.

  Asha watched them, but the sight almost did not seem real, as though she viewed through a veil of dream or nightmare. Her veins shifted in her body, aching from fingertips to where her heart skipped against its own beat.

  She wiped blood from her mouth with the back of her hand. Asha’s gray hair was lighter and coarser, but otherwise, the woman kissing the king could be her sister. All this time, the way the king had admired the attributes that marked her a Grayling, had he seen this woman rather than her? Rather than similarity to his own flesh, had Murial been the one to teach him to find such qualities desirable?

  Yet she was not jealous. Bemused. Bewildered. But not angry at the woman, not for taking Asha from the king’s castle, not for the mystery, not for kissing the king who had once been her husband. But Asha was troubled as to her intentions. She had not emerged when Cerval had started to lead Asha to his home; she had revealed herself only when the king had arrived and signaled that he would soon depart.

  The king broke the kiss, his expression as though he were the one struck rather than Asha. But a new emotion crept through his transparent face—suspicion, cautious but undeniable.

  Murial licked her lips with relish and smiled brightly, heedless of how the sight of her sharp teeth affected the crowd around them. The woman was one too many monsters in the square. The men’s swords rattled, and their boots shuffled over the cobblestones as they inched away, but surrounded as they were by wolves as bewildered as everyone else, there was nowhere for them to escape.

  “I had forgotten how good you taste. All this time, and you have remained unchanged.” Murial nipped his chin, dragging her teeth across the skin.

  “You have changed.” For a moment, the king’s hands hovered away from her in uncertainty, neither pushing her away nor bringing her closer. Then he grabbed her arm and dragged her against him, cradling her cheek as he kissed her once more, tasting her more thoroughly as though to assure himself of his own senses.

  Without warning, she shoved him away, laughing. Asha found herself less discomfited by the woman’s strangeness and more by seeing someone who looked like her smiling with such ease.

  Her laughter abruptly ceased, all mirth vanishing from her severe but beautiful face. “And who holds the responsibility for changing me? After all these centuries, I could never escape you. You flowed through my very veins and into the veins of all my children. Even to your own army, I smell enough like you to confuse them. But you were never there. Your wolves trampled the trails I left behind, but never did you cross those paths yourself until your army gave you a reason to come calling. Who do you believe was responsible for leaving more interesting bait?”

  “Murial, what have you done?” The king slowly stepped toward her.

  “What have I done?” Her laughter took on a hysterical note. She had curled her fingers to prepare her claws, whether she had noticed or not. “What did you think would happen, oh wise and wonderful king? Did you believe your wives would content themselves with the single year of the delights you offer them? Though your delights seem so much more delightful now than they did then, if my brief glimpse into your new wife’s experience extends beyond my witness. You make us want you. You convince us that you want us. You tie us to you with prickling rose vines, kiss us until we lose our breath, then change us and tell us that the world is ours but not your little piece of it. You make us love you if you can, then cast us out.

  “I tried to find what you offered out there in the world, but there is always a Gray, one way or another. I avoided your other children for a time, reminders that I was not the first nor anywhere close to the last. Then I could no longer avoid them. For over five hundred years, you have taken daughters of your kingdom into your castle, filled them with your poison, then forgot them in the wake of a newer girl to break. It was kindness that I gave to the others. I bound them, gave them a loyalty, listened to the distress you caused, learned how you chose them, how you seduced them, how you changed them, how you convinced them that freeing them was the best gift you could offer.”

  “Murial, what have you done?” the king repeated.

  “Over five hundred years, Cyric. Over five hundred wives. I did what I had to do once they had given me what I wanted. It was no different than what you did to them.” Murial straightened, smooth
ing her palms over her gown to appear civil once more. “You could not send so many of your kind into the world and expect there to be no repercussions. Did you never wonder why none of them ever returned, even briefly? Did you never wonder how so many monsters could go unnoticed? After the first time you found a woman who replaced me in your affections, I began to seek them out every year. Some winters, all I had to do was wait for the night before Longest for you to send your dead wife away with well wishes and a small allowance. I would take them underground a mere call from the castle to extract the information I desired. Then I would put them out of the misery you returned them to.”

  The king took a step back, but the first obsidian glint of fury hardened his dark eyes. “All of them? You killed all of them?”

  “Some of them took longer to track down than others. I did not always arrive before you sent them away, and I had my hands full beyond the mountains. But all I had to do was follow the scent of you that I knew was not mine. A few of your wives had decades to survive on the blood of men—half of them hated what they had become, and they came to me willingly with my promise of release, a monster capable of killing another monster. The other half had to be coaxed, coerced, captured. You gave some of them spirit, true, but any spirit can be broken with the right tools. You taught me that, lover. How you break us, and how we beg to be broken. Would you not agree, Asha of the Gray?”

  Asha idly sucked on her fingertips, the blood a dark, metallic layer over her tongue. The captain had not advanced, and Callina, Lysan, and the other wolves stared up at the woman in identical confusion. The stunned expression the king wore had not quite been pierced by the anger that had him curling his hands into fists.

  Disbelief still dominated the monsters and beasts around her; fear paralyzed the men. Women like Murial did not walk their streets—her coloring was familiar, but her demeanor was not, her monstrosity undeniable but as indeterminate as the king’s. A demon, a devil, true, but the only devil they had ever dealt with was a devil king. That there were more—that the king had made this one and many more, albeit many more no longer treading the earth—could not have been an easy potion to swallow.