Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Read online

  “Take me.” Asha did not ask, but she did not demand. Her request left room for refusal.

  “We will accompany you and your wolves to the kingdom.” The king’s request left no room for refusal. “Murial and the dragons laid it to waste, and smoke and death follow the wind to our windows and doors.” He lowered his head. “I would see what I have brought to bear.”

  Asha left her own motivations unspoken.

  “Very well, Your Majesty.” The captain’s temples twitched from clenching his teeth, but he remained civil, not enough burning in him to challenge the cold. “Your wish is our command.”

  “Rafe…”

  The captain edged away from the king before he could touch him. “We leave immediately. Callina and the others need flesh as soon as possible. You will have to wait for the sun to pass the edge of the mountains, but you fly faster than we run.”

  Asha knelt again next to the cot. She kissed Callina’s forehead, met the gaze of the servant. There were puncture marks on her neck, although it was impossible to tell from which monarch they had come. She had served her masters’ need of her own volition, which spoke of her continued loyalty, despite the leaders’ fallibility.

  “Keep her living,” Asha said.

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  THE WOLVES RAN fleet of foot, and Asha no longer needed the carriage to travel down to the kingdom. They made quicker time than horses, though the smoke from smoldering buildings stung her nose the closer they came. Death did not offend her anymore. She imagined the wolves found it just as appetizing as she.

  Upon crossing the walls into the kingdom, Asha broke from following the king and dove toward the darkness of the Gray. When she glanced back, the king did not seem to have noticed her departure.

  The ruins where she alit loomed above her, the scent of them as though newly scorched instead of standing decades upon decades through their destruction. Her soles gathered the dust that had colored her. The crackle and groan of straining infrastructure met her ears, as did the rustle of small creatures that feasted in the dragons’ aftermath. The buildings beyond the ruins, where people had managed to build their struggling professions and struggling homes, were largely undestroyed, at least more than they had already suffered.

  The neighborhood of makeshift houses from which the king had taken her showed the greater signs of destruction, flimsy as the walls had been. Under rubble of metal, wood, and fabric, a bloodless hand with fingers like petals showed signs that something had licked the blood that had dripped down her wrist, where she wore a bite mark. The rats had not yet reached it to nibble or perhaps had found tastier meat beneath the pile.

  Asha wove between wreckages to find her old home. She found the bodies of strangers, a mother and son, half-reclined over the inadequate bed.

  She left without covering them with the sheet.

  The rats and mice had emerged from the sewers when the bellows had not started bellowing, when the fires had not roared, when the machines of commerce had not screeched, when the shouts and harsh words of the workforce had not assaulted their ears. Their carrion friends, crows and vultures, joined them in the darkness. It was too cold for flies without the daily fires to offer them comfort. The Tapestry and Midland probably offered them better fare, more enticing decay.

  None of the vermin impeded her path, skittering from her way, parting as though in respect rather than fear. Their little hearts beat with the rapidness of short mortality. She would leave them to their pleasures for now.

  The Gray had never been so silent, especially at night, and the brothels smelled like slaughterhouses.

  The dragons had only ever tasted blood and sex from one woman. It did not surprise her that so many women in one place had drawn them. The marketplace, too, had been ransacked, the pungent odor of spoiled food mingling with the bodies. Winter acted as its own preservative, but the marketplace burned too much oil to preserve enough. Asha stayed at its edges, but the smell and predation drove her back to the Gray, back to the church that had never drawn her before.

  Her mother had not left too soon before the wolves and dragons had arrived. It was possible she had not reached the church in time to avoid the first wave of the dragons loosed upon the kingdom. But it was the first place Asha could think of to look.

  She had not believed herself sentimental or hopeful. But her mother should have considered her dead after marriage to the king, yet she had gathered coin to purchase her daughter, more coin than a woman working for the church should have been able to amass under short notice.

  The corpses were thick at the church. The accoutrements of sacrament had not dissuaded the dragons from entering the building and falling upon the tempting banquet. Piles of bodies lay upon each other, positions disrespectful and disreputable, their disposal careless once they had no longer given the dragons what they desired.

  Asha ran her hand along the wooden pews. It occurred to her that the dragons should not have been able to enter. Murial had been made in the castle, so she had been able to enter it, but she had not been able to invite her dragons in. The population of the kingdom should have been able to huddle in their homes, in their businesses, in their churches, to wait out the bloody storm. Murial alone could have convinced her victims to let her in; the dragons would not have convinced anyone. Neither man nor woman would have thought to invite them to slaughter, not without thrall.

  She reached the altar, with its silver chalice, candlesticks, and cross, the only pieces of worth in a Grayling church. Her fingertips left no smudge over the silver, as though her lack of reflection in their mirrored surface also prevented her from leaving a sign that she had touched them.

  Among the people in the pews, her mother was not included in their number.

  Asha turned her attention to the stairs behind the lectern. The convent was across the courtyard behind the church, but the stairs led to the rectory and the modest bell tower.

  She swiftly ascended. Only the bats in the rafters rustled at the movement, masking the brush of her dress upon the stone.

  The room was one for an ascetic Grayling—stove for warmth and food, bed to sleep, small rug before it for prayer, a rack for vestments. The other half of the attic room was storage for the church. Moonlight poured in from the bell tower.

  The bell would no longer ring on its own, not even in a bracing wind. The body hanging from the rope had likely sounded an abruptly halted note through the Gray to mark despair.

  The priest had not been drained of his blood; he had already been dead before the dragons had come to take him. Behind the priest’s body, the tithe box rested opened and empty, the padlock undone on the floor.

  Asha turned away from the priest and approached the bed. The closer she came, the more she noticed—nun’s garments on the other side of the vestments, the rumpled bedclothes, rope tied to the bedposts, a women’s pair of shoes.

  The coins had poured from the bag, silver and gold. Thora rested next to it as though she had merely fallen. Froth had left bubbled remnants on her mouth. The blood mingled with it was tainted. A small brown bottle nestled among the coins. If Asha were to count them, she guessed they would fall a few gold pieces short of what Thora had bid. Some poisons were not too dear to obtain.

  The bedclothes smelled strongly of the priest, of a man who had spent his need into the sheets more often than not, but it also smelled of her mother. And that scent was too embedded to have been from a single desperate tryst in exchange for several weeks’ worth of donations.

  The askew nun’s gown revealed chaffed bruises on Thora’s wrists and ankles.

  Had Thora even known there were dragons before her body had gone cold?

  The bed restraints had not kept her from the convent or the auction, which meant she had been free to escape at any time, but to where else could she go when her husband was dead, her daughter as good as dead twice over, and her last place of refuge wreathed with the same scent as captivity?

  Asha examined the ropes that ha
d been tied around the bedposts. Then she lifted the entire bed above her head and flung it at the corpse on the other end of the room. The wood splintered around the body and collapsed upon the floor beneath him. The construction that had been strong enough to hold Thora bound under the priest’s thrusts split like kindling.

  The body swung. The church bell sounded with each pendulous rock of the broken body.

  She snapped the rope. The bell continued to ring as Asha threw what remained of the priest over the railing of the room and into the rafters, which cracked from the force of the priest’s body. She followed him into the expanse, floating above where he had fallen, where he should have hung himself in the first place for the eyes of all of his parishioners to witness his cowardice.

  She vibrated in the air, her muscles tightened into stone. Her mother’s death did not surprise her, but her long-suffered cynicism had never extended to the piety of the priest. Thinking of her mother in the weeks following Longest Night—trapped in a place where she had sought final refuge, while the king, his servants, and his soldiers had spoiled Asha more than a Tapestry woman could hope for—proved too much for her to accept with grace.

  She tore down the rafters, the structure less sound than the Tapestry cathedrals or the castle’s arches. She flung the beams, one after another, against the plaster walls. Dust shuddered to the stone floor, the whole building trembling, as well it should have.

  When the roof began to collapse, Asha ducked and flew out through the double doors at the front of the church.

  She nearly flew straight into the king, who blinked.

  “Do you not remember what happened the last time you disappeared from me without a trace?” He grasped her shoulders, guiding her down to the cobblestone. Then he wrapped his arms around her with strength that would have cracked the beams she had brought down.

  She gave him but moments, frozen inside and unable to move. Then she shoved him away.

  “Asha.”

  “You invited them. Murial might have been able to enter these buildings, this kingdom her home before the castle, but the dragons would not have been able to. This is your kingdom as the castle was your home, the grace of your protection upon its entirety, but you let them in when you saved me. By offering Murial the kingdom in exchange, you allowed them free reign. And for what, Cyric? The loss of your kingdom, the loss of too many of your warriors… For what? For me?”

  The king stayed some distance from her, holding his chest where she had pushed him. “When my roses grow too numerous, their ivy a tangle and the branches twined about branches, I must prune them before the buds bloom. I feed them to fire to keep the rose garden healthy, contained, more easily loved and the limited blood I provide them not stretched so thin.”

  He surveyed the empty buildings around him. “When I found you tied to the auction block, Asha, I realized I had let this kingdom grow too wild—not wild as creatures of the forest or even the dragons, bound to a beast’s instinct, but entangled as my roses’ vines and branches. Growing too thorny on poison left my kingdom in a state of decay, yet it still thrived on its own self-consumption.”

  He turned back to her, extending his hand, but she stepped away, closer to the church. When he came after her, both hands reaching now as though to become her shackles, she struck his cheek with her knuckles.

  The king did not strike back, but that did not stop her from shoving him again, this time angling him down so that he fell to the stones, cracking them in his wake. Again, he did not resist, though he grunted, wincing in pain.

  “You were right,” he said quietly, remaining on the ground. His eyes stared somewhere to her left, but his attention bored through her. “I am the monster that created this nightmare. And I am the monster that accepted its destruction, setting these common roses ablaze with the same callous regard the woman showed for my far more precious roses—every last one of them, flower and wife. I thought that in shedding the conqueror, I could become a savior, but I am still the monster, Asha. Destruction runs through my blood, through the blood of all my children and hers. It now runs through you. I never pretended to be anything less, and once, you embraced it. Is it truly this kingdom for which you mourn, this kingdom you wished to see burn?”

  “The destruction the dragons rained down upon this kingdom did not just eliminate the Tapestry, which holds no part of my heart. If I could have joined the dragons in orchestrating their gilded demise, I would have.” Asha stood over him, bare feet on either side of his legs. “But the people of the Gray—rough, crude, unpleasant as we are—needed no more sorrow. The dragons were indiscriminate, taking even the line of their master.”

  “What did you find in the church, Asha, that the peeling of church bells would call me to you?” The king made no move to regain his greater height or use his greater strength against her. The sight of his submission deflated a fraction of her wrath.

  Asha considered her answer, but a shuffle whispered over the snow-powdered stone, and she jerked her head up.

  Three women in whore’s gowns clutched each other close. A man holding a tiny boy who might have been his son—but just as easily could have been another’s—peered through a doorway many buildings over. Three other Grayling survivors who had been creeping closer froze against the walls. None of those she saw carried weapons, not even a primitive club or piece of wood to defend themselves.

  The church bell. They must have heard the bell, just as the king had heard it and come for her.

  These people had not come for her. They had come for refuge but met instead the demon king of their kingdom and an Ashling that did not appear quite as she had.

  When she revealed her teeth, the women scurried backward, stumbling, then falling over bodies strewn in the street.

  “You promised me everything,” Asha said, although she curbed the wickeder edge of her tone. “You took me from the Gray, and for that, I cannot show enough gratitude. But you offered her no comfort, no compensation. She succumbed to a life of humble service instead, and that might have been solace enough, if the church’s promise had been kept.” She stepped back from the king, who raised himself up with her retreat, as though in a dance where they did not touch. “She knew nothing but despair from the time she became a whore to the moment she swallowed poison because of the guaranteed devastation of her daughter.”

  “Asha, forgive me—”

  “Her daughter would be ruined not by the monster, but by the men that the monster allowed to reign. Corruption that you allowed to foment for so long tormented every last second of her life under the panting bodies of men, every last one whose throats should have been slit to make them die slowly—not discarded to the dragons, not to die of their own volition and at their own hand, with a merciful, quick end. You should have had them all brought before a guillotine, their blood to drain into your roses. She deserved none of this, and neither did I.”

  Asha could no longer control how her voice rang and echoed among the emptiness—though the Gray was not nearly as empty as before, with more living bodies emerging, all called by the pealing of the bell.

  “Not every women you took would have asked for their family’s asylum as well, but not once did you offer it.” She fought against the extension of her claws, called out in her defense. “You would only save one woman to play with and discard, no more.”

  They continued to dance, circling each other before the new ruins of the church. She was crouched to spring, but he remained wary.

  “She bore me, raised me on her sweat and misery, gave me willingly to the devil to save me, ran to a God that listened to not one of her prayers, and still could not earn enough letting the priest screw her against his vows to buy her daughter back. She did not need to die. She never needed to suffer.”

  “You never asked,” the king said.

  Asha lunged.

  The king feinted, turning as though continuing the dance and catching her around the waist with an arm and around the neck with his long fingers. He was not li
ke Murial. Murial had wanted the fight; the king fought instead to contain her.

  “If it suits you to blame me, Asha, I will accept the blame, for your mother and for this fallen kingdom. But you yet live in your death, you destroyed the blighted winter rose of my garden, and my villages are not yet dead. See how many have come with the hope you promised from their fallen church.”

  “What hope will they find, my lord, but decay and disease when the winter thaws and the bodies remain? What hope will they find, now that even corrupt law has died at the hands of your descendants? Do you think they will accept that you were merely cutting branches back?” Asha struggled, clawing at his hands and arms, trying for his face, but he evaded her, holding her against him.

  “The deed is done. The dragons are dead. I am still their king. And you are still my queen.” When she elbowed his ribs, he grunted, but he only let her go when he decided to, pushing her away from the church toward the small crowd of survivors who had gathered.

  He panted from effort rather than breathlessness. She had conjured scratches on his skin, but they closed before the curious gazes of their audience—afraid of the monsters but willing to stay as long as those monsters were occupied with each other and clearly not interested in hurting them.

  “Asha. Asha of the Gray.” The king slowly lowered himself to his knees. “I told you when last you struck at me, and I tell you again. Place the blame, the weight of the unjustly dead, upon me. Demand my service and shame. Scream, scratch, tear at me. Hang me from the scaffold and whip me until my back is bloody, if that pleases you. I can bear the blame. I can bear the weight of responsibility, or I would never have claimed the responsibility of king.”

  “But you did not claim the responsibility, only the title.” Asha spat onto the stone. “From conqueror to savior and seducer, my lord, but never a king in anything but name.”

  “Then I shall be king.” He shrugged out of his robes and tunic, leaving his chest and back bare to fulfill his promise to her. “And you shall be queen, if that is your desire. These people will be taken care of. The bodies will be tended to. The kingdom shall be rebuilt, and I shall not let my kingdom grow so untended and heartless again. I cannot bring back the already dead, but life feeds upon ashes as we feed upon blood, my love. Draw what blood you may, to feed the ashes.” He held out his arms, as plain an invitation as he had given Murial to take his kingdom.