Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Page 19

  The king continued as though he had not heard her. “I would have rescued you from the elders’ clutches sooner, but we did not know you were gone until late in the afternoon. Rafe and I believed your absence meant nothing more than your need for solitude. When none of the servants could find you to give you food or drink, though, we searched the whole castle. Only then did we suspect you had been taken. Some of the wolves sought you in the forests, but your scent did not reach the tree line. Even had you been stolen by marauders, they would have left strange scent of their own, and they would have left a trail of yours to follow, but there was nothing—only the odd trace of a half-mine scent on the balcony window.

  “I did not suspect Murial. How could I? She was one of many, and from so long ago. I thought I might have missed one of the creatures from the northern kingdoms and that it had followed me home. But I did not smell your blood spilled, and a dragon would not have been polite enough to leave no blood trace. When the woods yielded us nothing, I sent the wolves into the kingdom, where they found your scent without accompanying blood. I feared the elders had perhaps found a monster like me and trained it through starvation, studying it in another effort to rout me from my throne. I never suspected this…centuries’ long conspiracy. In hindsight, perhaps I should have.”

  The king stroked her hair with more force than he must have known he applied, holding her against him as though the strength of his arms could convince her life force to remain.

  “I believed I had given my wives what they needed and that was why they never returned. Their absence ensured that I did not question their absence. But I loved many of them and believed some of them harbored some affection for me in return. It confused me that their previous affection never brought them back to my door. Murial was right. It was devastatingly naïve to believe I could forge passion, affection, and love, then send them away. How could I be so unable to see the consequences of my own treacherous actions?”

  “All you need to do is bring me back to the square and slash my throat, my lord,” Asha said. “She will return to you and leave the rest of the kingdom alone.”

  “I thought you cared not for the kingdom.”

  “I do not. I fear for my mother’s last moments, but she lost hope at the auction, and perhaps she will welcome the monster that comes to her, as I did. The rest of the kingdom can burn without regret shriveling my soul. But why risk your undead life or the lives of your wolves, the integrity of your castle, the claim to your kingdom, just for me, when you would have let me go anyway? To my final death, though you would not have known. It was foolishness to cast your wives out, but it was greater foolishness to take me away.”

  The king stilled his hand over her blood-soaked hair. “Did you wish for me to let you die? I thought…”

  “I did not wish to die. But neither do I believe you made the wisest choice to keep me alive a little longer. For what, my lord? To taste me one last time? You would have had Grayling after Grayling for your tastes had you let me go.”

  The king pulled away from her, withdrawing from the bed to stand over her, disbelief clear on human features. “You were never another Grayling to me. Having my wives for a year never diminished the strength of my emotions. I sought to offer them what the kingdom had refused to. I forged our affections from their beating hearts to mine, though it did not beat with theirs. With few exceptions from links never fully connected—at my wives’ behest, not mine—I regretted the parting every time. I consoled myself that they yet lived in death, that if they did not return, it was because they had found more of what they needed beyond the boundaries of my kingdom. Do not believe that any of my wives merge together in my memory. Each has been unique to save, unique to love, and unique to relinquish. But you, Asha…” He shook his head, anger sharpening his words like blades. “How can you not understand? How can you not see?”

  “If you would have rescued every one of your wives from that woman, then perhaps you are more of a fool than I thought.” Asha turned from him, but wrapped as she was and still weak, there was little else she could do. Instead of her extremities, the place behind her ribs felt hollow, deeper and emptier than mountain caves.

  “Not every one of my wives, Asha. Not even a few. If rescuing you makes me a fool, as you say, as she said, then I am a fool. When she finishes with the kingdom, our future is almost certainly hopeless. Yet here I am, and here you are, and if you wish to die to spare yourself her revenge, I will make your death sweet. But if you accept my blood, I will give you the prisoners and any of my servants who volunteer their veins, and you can fight by my side with all the viciousness I know you are capable of, my thorny rose.”

  He fanned his fingers over her shoulder, stretching his claws out the way he knew she liked him. His grip was stone but he did not turn her to him. Instead, he climbed over her bound body to face her again. “She has time. Experience. Cunning. Power. But with power comes complacency. I know this all too well. You are not complacent, Asha of the Gray. You have not had the time. Her ferocity arises from calculation and predatory instinct, but yours, even within a human breast, arises from rage and a desire to survive that an old immortal cannot comprehend.”

  “You are immortal,” Asha said.

  “And she outwitted me. She took you right from my arms, but I did not even realize you were missing until much later. And you, Ashling... You conquered me. I spent every hour away from this castle pursuing the answers to the ghost kingdoms with you emerging from the darkness but never there. When I came back, seeing you on the balcony, though we had known each other for such little time in an immortal’s life… Pain struck within my chest, so powerful I believed my heart might have beat once more after centuries of stillness and silence. When I believed you taken, I ripped up promises and contracts I had signed to find you, and I sacrificed the kingdom and all my subjects just to have you safe.”

  He ran his fingers through her blood-soaked hair. “You were right. I failed this kingdom. I failed it too long ago to declare my rule upon it absolute again. The elders had already planned a coup, and though they would have failed, almost as much blood would have been lost in reasserting my command, and it would have begun with blood of those consigned to fight on the Tapestry’s behalf—your Grayling brethren. I cannot save this kingdom now any more than I could save them before.”

  “So you do not even try? It is yours more than I am,” Asha said. “Why succumb to a battle you are unsure to win when you know you could have won the kingdom?”

  “Murial was not going to spare me. Would you have spared me, Asha?” He arched an eyebrow. “Would you have spared me or my kingdom once you had decided to take it?”

  Asha opened the quilt, shivering until she did not have the strength for the tension required to shiver. She slipped out of bed, stumbling to the fire. Without a fever, the blood loss and the winter had frozen her to the bone. She closed her eyes against the heat, then collapsed before the hearth.

  The king was there before she could hurt herself upon the smooth stone—more forgiving than the cobblestone of the kingdom streets, but still an uncushioned fall that could jar her bones.

  “No,” she said. “If I were her, I might keep you alive, but I would not spare you.”

  “You would chain me in iron as we hold the wolves,” he murmured in her ear, holding her close. Though he did not need his breath, it quickened, and he grasped her tightly. “You would make me beg for your blood, beg for the loyalty that it brings. She was clever—even I did not know what sharing my blood with my kind would do. I have shared blood before, but it never forged loyalty such as the dragons show her. How long she much have infused them, that they could starve into such strength and slavery. You would want me as your slave as well, and you would want me monstrous.”

  “I would chain you, yes, but I would not want your slavery, my king.” Asha shifted in his arms until he released her, but she still reclined in his lap. Her fists rested white against her legs. “Your obeisance never interested me
, any more than mine interested you. I would limit your blood to keep you a monster, but not a dragon—I prefer your mind clear. You would still receive human blood, mingled with my own, the way you feed your roses.”

  “They shall have to go white,” he mused. “We need the blood more than they do. I have never deprived them of blood before. I wonder what the roses will become. Will their vines and branches become predatory, I wonder?”

  A clamor from outside the bedroom door raised their heads. Wolves half-turned forced their way through and caught in the doorway in their haste. The captain cuffed Callina, then darted through, followed by Callina and a still-healing Lysan.

  “She will live for a while.” The king’s amusement undercut his irritation. “But it is up to her how she dies.”

  The captain shifted furiously, parts of his wolf still in his man’s form. “What have you done?”

  “What have I done?” the king asked.

  “She will still come after us, but now that we are aware of her presence, we can better prepare. And you linger here wondering if you should kill the woman for whom you sacrificed your kingdom? If you touch a hair on her head in the interest of destroying her…”

  “There is little to be done to prepare,” the king interrupted. “Only to build your strength. She can enter the castle, because she was born in it, but her dragons cannot. Hunt in the forest while you still can. Take as much flesh as possible, as I must take blood.”

  “Asha, Cyric,” the captain snapped.

  “Will receive what she asks for. She has earned that right.” The king continued to comb his claws through her hair, seemingly unconcerned by the congealed blood gathering in the black curves. “Asha is a practical woman. I will understand if she wishes to avoid a lost cause.”

  “Then why build our strength?” Lysan clutched his side where the wound still healed. Asha had never seen him without light in his dark eyes.

  “If you would kneel before your new mistress, do so now,” the captain said with a ripping growl. “I will see to it that she finds your corpse genuflecting.”

  “I serve the king and queen,” Lysan replied. “But when we fight, it is in battles in which we will rise victorious, minimal casualty. We have only ever fought man. We are confined to the ground and hobbled by will. How can we fight mindless creatures of the air who obey with such ferocity? Did you see what they did?”

  “You shall have to ask your king how. I assume that if he could leave that witch to the kingdom, he has a plan to stun with its cleverness and cunning,” the captain said through clenched teeth.

  “I do not.” The king looked away from his wolves to frame Asha’s form instead. He hovered his hand over her length of limb, as though she seemed more delicate now to him.

  The captain pointed an accusing finger tipped with blood-stained claw. “You sacrifice not just your kingdom to her with that decision, but you sacrifice us. You sacrifice her. You never had the luxury to decide our fates so completely. You have sentenced us all to death.”

  “The only choice given to me was to let Asha live,” the king said. “The battle would have happened there or later. This gives us a moment to catch our breath. Now go, and do as I command. Just this night in the forest. Gather what you can for the cages, for you will need to slaughter for more than just one night. Slaughter the barn animals that you can as well, but do not leave our servants without their own sources of strength, to replenish what I must take. I do not trust that Murial’s influence will keep the dragons within the kingdom’s walls, not once they taste human blood and scent prey beyond it.”

  “Cyric…” the captain began.

  “I made the decision that might yet keep some of us alive. There is nothing more you can do for her. If your embarrassment I share that Murial took her from us so easily continues in this vein, you might say something to your master that you will regret.”

  The tension in the king’s spine softened only when the bedroom door slammed behind them.

  “The dragons will slay them like street-keepers end frothing dogs,” Asha said.

  “I know what I intend to do to make sure that does not happen.” The king rested his chin against her head. “What do you intend?”

  Asha unsettled him as she turned to look up at his fire-lit face. With his mouth closed, he appeared much more man, much gentler, sorrow in the lines that threatened to appear at the corners of his eyes. He stopped short of despair, but not far.

  He did not expect to escape the wrath of his former wife. In the king’s eyes, the captain was justified in his anger. But Asha did not think he mourned for the kingdom that had denied him.

  She ran the blunt ends of her nails over his cheekbone, not as sharp as she would have preferred them. “If I were her, I would have slaughtered your wolves in the square before taking the kingdom. Why did she not?”

  “She wanted the power of men in the veins of her dragons.”

  “She wanted you to believe that you could never drink enough to defeat them. If that is so, it is not strength that will win the night to come. If only she can enter the castle, that will limit the dragons’ reach.”

  “It is the castle they cannot enter, but they can fly over the towers and ramparts. They can prevent servants and soldiers from leaving to maintain their life’s strength. We cannot stay huddled within the castle forever—I would not die, but I can only consume so many of my objects and servants before they, too, would rebel. Starvation would eventually convince us into poorer decisions. Years to wait are nothing to an immortal, and she has made us aware of her patience.”

  “The castle is still an advantage,” Asha said.

  “I do not know if she can invite them in. Has she been away from me for too long for her claim upon it to extend to such an invitation? Has she never been able to invite, the castle’s welcome to her a courtesy? I cannot know, so I cannot know how to proceed or protect.”

  “Guards in the entrances and exits to howl their alarm, iron in all the windows,” Asha said.

  “Do you not think her arrival has signaled the end of my reign?” the king said with an unhappy smile.

  “I think that you are more her weakness than she believes. She left you alive as you left her alive, giving you the same chance to fight back while the situation is more in your favor.”

  “Bound by blood and chains does not lend itself to favor.”

  “You can still hobble her reign by playing against her affections,” Asha said. “Her jealousies.”

  The king tilted his head with quiet curiosity. He parted his lips, his tongue pressing to a sharp canine in thought. “The greatest weapon in that arsenal is for her to see you still with me.”

  “She did not believe you would choose me, a mere surrogate.”

  “You are no surrogate. Her descendants populate the Gray. She mistook my preference for discarded Grayling women with remembering her. I never saw anyone but you when I sought you, Ashling.”

  He lifted her with uncharacteristic gentleness, bringing her close enough for her to curl an arm around his neck, although her strength would not be enough to keep her upright without his help. “You would never again know this weakness, Asha.”

  “I deplore my weakness. It has plagued me since birth. No more should I depend upon stone and blade to protect me.” Asha spoke into his neck, breathing him in as though the scent of blood through his dense flesh could fill her with as much strength as the blood itself.

  “Weak only in flesh and bone, my love. I will make your strength more complete. Do you give yourself to me? Do you give your life, blood for blood, that I might raise you from the dead?”

  “You have killed me a little every night since our wedding. It is time for you to teach me to kill, as you taught me to bleed.”

  “Oh, I shall also make you bleed, my ashen queen.” He trailed his mouth along the rhythm of her pulse, but he did not yet bite.

  The king shifted underneath her to his knees, his clothes pouring from his body like water until he was
nude. She managed a shudder when he called her gown from her as well, but the fire did its work, and he had convinced warmth into her with his whispers.

  “It would be a pleasure to kill you, then show you how best to kill. I only regret that I have to turn you so soon. I had not begun to mine the depths of your glorious depravity, my dear. To feel your heartbeat quicken with desire, to have the heat of your fever around me… I would have had those things until the new winter. But should we survive this night and the next and the next, there are many other things I have still to show you, as a woman and as one of mine. Only blood need be exchanged, but I selfishly desire your last bit of humanity against me without barriers.”

  He laved the place that Murial had punctured her, groaning, though he had been the one to close it. His thrall wrapped around her in lieu of her gown, bringing beads of sweat to the surface, an adequate mimicry of the fever not even her return to the castle could conjure.

  She wound her arms around him, convinced of strength as well as heat. It would not matter if she strained or overexerted herself—her living body would be obsolete. She curled her nails into his scalp, brought his head up so that she could press her lips to his. Each moment rang with significance, with finality, and though their kisses were slow, intensity stole her breath. It was like their farewell in the rose garden, their greeting upon the balcony, and despite her weakness and his strength—and the way they forgot both the deeper they went—neither could stop themselves now.

  He lay himself out before the fire to give her something more yielding than the stone beneath him. There was nothing violent, nothing fierce, nothing desperate in their motions. They did not play here. Asha memorized his body as she had once memorized his face—fruitless though such a task was for a creature such as he, who changed and who she wanted in every form at once—man, monster, and dragon. But the one she took now would suffice.

  The king tore his mouth from hers with obvious reluctance, knotting her hair in his claws and pulling her back when she pursued him. “You first, Ashling. I took away your frailty, but the sensations lie. Your heart is weaker than it seems. I cannot make your pulse race now as I do. It will not last without my blood.”