Inherit the Flame

Chapter Nineteen

Thratia led Detan to her bedroom, and his stomach was tied too tightly to make any smart remarks on the fact. Night had well and truly come to Aransa, and a small part of him was glad he could no longer see the city he’d abandoned. While the curtains were pulled back to let in the moon and starlight, their natural shine was not enough to dispel the shadows lurking in the corners of the room which was Thratia’s sanctum. The whole place, the whole night, made his skin crawl.

He hadn’t been sure what he’d expected, but he had an unsettling suspicion that even ascetic hermits holed up in caves in the badlands enjoyed more luxury than Thratia Ganal.

She moved to the window, put her back against its frame, and watched him while he took in her private space. A low bed, just wide and long enough to hold her, huddled against the far wall, its foot pointed toward the singular window she occupied now. Shelves filled the other wall, bursting with rolled maps, books, and hand-written folios. A desk, a chair, a wardrobe. Nothing else. Not even a rug on the hard, stone, floor.

“Are you a prisoner?” he asked, just to shake that low-lidded, intense look off her face.

“Only of myself.”

“Shouldn’t you have some sort of map on the wall, of all the lands you’ve left to conquer? Or, I don’t know, a tapestry of babies being chucked into a bonfire. Is there a special agency that handles interior decorating for mad bastards?”

A ghost of a smile, seen only in the brief gleam of her teeth. “I have all I need, and it is private.”

He swallowed, recalling the heavy lock she’d opened to let them in. He was quite certain no cleaning crew ever set foot in this room, and yet, even with the surroundings bled of color in the pale light, he could not find a speck of dust or filth. Her fastidiousness irritated him almost as much as her conquest. Almost.

“I mean, there’s not even a set of shackles. Or the ears of your enemies.”

“Honding. You’re rambling.”

“Haven’t you noticed yet that’s what I do?” The anger in his own voice surprised him. His hands had coiled to fists at his side, though he hardly knew how to use them. Some niggling in the back of his brain told him he was missing something, a sensation like deep hunger or thirst, ramping his irritation as surely as if he’d gone without food for a day. But he’d eaten, and… And skipped his daily meeting with Aella. Forgone the injection of selium and diviner blood that Callia had once been convinced would leash him to her, help him refine his power.

He shivered. The room was cold, but sweat sheeted between his shoulder blades.

He could push her. Standing with that smug little smirk on her face, back pressed up against the open window, she’d never see it coming. Her arms were crossed. It’d take her too long to mount a defense, to dodge his advance. The room was small. Four steps. Four steps and she could be plummeting to the dark.

And take her answers with her.

Detan breathed deep, smoothed his hair with both hands, and forced his shoulders to unbunch, letting his whole body slouch down into the languid posture he used to play the disaffected dilettante.

“Is this where you suck my blood, then?”

She snorted, a brief little laugh. “Don’t be stupid. I have lost count of the opportunities I’ve had to kill you. I suspect you even know why I’ve brought you here, though you’re too much the coward to face it.”

“You want me here, under your thumb, for the same cursed reason everyone else does. Why the whitecoats, why my own aunt, hounds my heels. Because I have a skill you want, a talent unique enough it cannot be replicated, and you want to make use of it. Chain me to your ships and turn me into a machine of war.

“But that’s not why I bent knee to Aella, and through her to you. Whatever you want me for, whatever blasted damage you think I can craft on your behalf – I won’t. Do you understand me? I will not be turned against innocents. I brave Aella’s lessons to gain control. To be less of a threat. I will not be your weapon.”

He stepped forward, heart thudding in his ears, anger making his cheeks and chest hot. At the vaguest edge of his senses he realized there was no selium nearby, nothing at all for him to channel his anger into should the desire arise. Just Thratia’s small, sharp face, half scarred by the damage he’d wrought, smiling up at him. Amused.

“Is that what you think?” she asked.

He’d moved close enough so that he stood over her, her head tilted up to meet his gaze, her breath a warm gust against his throat. He stepped back, unclenched his fists. “You may have the Saldivians fooled, but I’ve seen inside you, Thratia Ganal. I stared into those eyes of yours while you slit Bel Grandon’s throat just to make a point, and a poor one at that.”

The smirk vanished, and while her hard stare made his skin crawl he took small satisfaction in wiping any pleasure off her face. “You are, quite possibly, the most obdurate person I have ever met.”

“Thank you.”

“Detan,” she said, and the sound of his first name from her lips sent uneasy ripples through him. “Listen very carefully.” She peeled herself from the window frame and stepped forward, tightening the distance between them so that he could feel the heat of her. She cocked her head, put her lips by his ear, never touching – not even allowing her breath to gust – as she whispered. “I don’t need you in order to crush Hond Steading.”

He resisted an urge to reel back from her nearness. She was a rock-viper of a woman. Sudden movements triggered sudden strikes.

“Yes. You do.”

She threw her head back and laughed, hands folded over her stomach. The very sound of it drove pins and needles into Detan’s skin.

“Oh, my Lord Honding. You are but one man. An exceptional man, in some ways, but not at all instrumental. Unless you choose to make it easier for all involved.”

He felt himself drawn up on the edge of a precipice, wary and uncertain. Thratia was dangling what she wanted from him like bait on a string, teasing him forward into asking, demanding, just what exactly she wanted.

Whatever it was, he would pretend to give it to her. Pretend to bend his knee, as he had to Aella, just so that he could be closer to the inner workings of her machine. Whatever she wanted from him, he would pervert it.

First, he needed to master himself. To calm his revulsion from the Saldivians’ story and see her as she was, as she always had been: a puppet master, hungry for power. Even if he believed her reasons for taking the Saldive Isles, for taking Aransa, he was convinced they were only set-dressing. A flimsy framework to prop up her own hunger.

She wanted him to ask what she wanted of him, what she’d planned for him. And while he knew full well he’d have to give it to her – if only briefly – he’d be spit-roasted before he made it easy on her. “If the whitecoats are such a scourge to the well-being of the empire, then why did you not go to your empress? Don’t tell me you didn’t have the access, nor the will to make her listen. Your family’s as old as mine.”

The quick breath she took told him all he needed to know – he’d pushed her off balance. “My empress is dead.”

He would have laughed in her face, if her voice weren’t so obviously shot through with the brittle edge of real grief. “I would have heard. Everyone would have heard.”

“Spare me your false naivete. Shortly after the whitecoats arrived in the Saldives, personal correspondence from the empress to me ceased, and her son began to answer in her stead. Such a stupid, pliable boy. I knew his handwriting, though he signed her name, and I knew the strings pulling his hand. I returned to Valathea at once, while my garrison stayed behind in the Saldives. I was denied all access to her, and Ranalae…” She sucked air through her teeth. “Ranalae had her claws in the young prince’s shoulder. The empress is dead, and Ranalae Lasson pulls the prince’s strings. If you believe me ruthless, Honding, you have only to meet Ranalae to then think me a lamb. She desires the puzzle of sel-sensitivity solved, in whole. She will not stop until she’s acquired it, no matter the imperial legacy she tears apart in the process.”

He’d gone cold, the only sound in his head the steady thwump-thwump of his heartbeat. Thratia cocked her head, sensing his unease, but he ignored her regard. He licked his lips, ignored long-buried images surfacing through the many vaults of his memory. Ranalae Lasson. There was a name he’d buried, a woman he’d erased from his own mind – had thought only of in terms of her long, white coat. Director of the Bone Tower. Founder of the whitecoats. The woman whose scalpel had danced across his skin long before he’d ever fallen into the clutches of Callia and Aella his last time in Aransa.

That name. That horrible, horrible, name.

“We’ve met,” was all he could manage to say.

Her gaze flicked to his arms, to his chest. She knew what lurked there, though she’d never acknowledged it outright. Had to know, to know where to look. No doubt Aella sent her back a detailed description of all the torturous injuries he had once endured, perhaps she’d drawn a cartoonish little map of his scars for her mistress.

“And did she find what she was looking for in you?”

“I don’t know,” he grated. “I escaped the night I heard her say the word vivisection.”

Thratia winced. He was sure of it. She was a master at controlling her expression, her body language, but he’d caught her there – struck her hard. The subtle ripple at the corners of her eyes, the pressing of her lips. That was real. That was horror. A crack in her iron-fast facade.

He shoved a wedge in that crack, and pushed. “But you knew that. Maybe not about me, not specifically, but you knew what she was capable of by the time you came to Aransa. You kicked her agents out of the Saldives, kept those islands all to yourself while you came here to set up a base of power. And what did you do, Thratia? What did you fucking do?”

He couldn’t help it now. She knew. She’d always known. And that realization was acid in his chest. “You sold them to her. You thought to yourself: Hmm, I need some weapons. Some nice shiny swords. You know how I can get them? Trading deviants, trading human-fucking-beings, to Ranalae Lasson to carve up for jollies. To the very woman you claim you want to stop. Pitsfuckitall, Thratia, you were going to sell her Pelkaia, going to sell her me, just to get a few crates of weapons in your bloody hands. What good is that? What’s the fucking point?”

She’d gone still, her slim frame so very solid he half expected her to radiate cold as if she’d been frozen through. After a long pause, wherein the only sound was the panting of his own breath, she licked her lips. “A few, to save many. That was my trade. My bloody bargain.”

His wrist was in her hand, her grip coiled so tight his skin bulged between her fingers. He stared, open-mouthed, at his upraised hand, his flat palm. He’d been going to slap her. Hadn’t even thought about it. Hadn’t even realized it.

And then, the sudden realization: he could have reached for selium. Would have, months ago, but with the sharpening of his anger that sense had closed down, a safety valve switched shut. Tibs would be proud. He almost giggled.

“I lost only two,” she said.

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Two went to the Bone Tower. The rest were still on Callia’s barge.”

It was rather hard to think through the thundering of the rage in his ears, but he got there, eventually. Recalled what little Aella had told him about her return to Aransa, her whitecoat mistress Callia struck ill, Thratia their only port of refuge. Detan had long suspected Aella of poisoning Callia to take her place, to take control of her research under Thratia’s direction. He hadn’t considered that Thratia had orchestrated the whole thing from the start.

“You’re insane.”

She smiled, and the expression was so genuine and girlish she almost transformed into another woman right before his eyes. “I am determined.”

“And what do you want me for, then?” he demanded, hating himself for letting her push him into that corner but needing, so desperately, to have something real to hold onto. Some kernel of truth from which he could begin to spin a plan to undo Thratia and Ranalae and any other cold-hearted bastard he stumbled across on his way to kicking her teeth in. “Am I trade goods for your enemy as well? A way to fake yourself close to her so that you may strike?”

“Haven’t you figured it out yet? Your blood is the only thing of use to me.”

His blood. His deviation. The horrible perversion of his sel-sensitivity, twisted into a weapon to throw at his home city. The city he’d promised his mother he’d protect. His stomach churned. To pretend to be a weapon against them, well, he’d expected as much, but – no.

That wasn’t what she wanted. She’d said as much, when she’d laughed him off.

What what what.

She reached for him. His skin crawled all over as her fingers curled around his neck, palm pressing against his jugular, the rising beat of his heart heavy and hot against her hand. If she choked him, he could twist away, throw her out that open window. He’d escaped from direr places, it wouldn’t take more than a week to reach Hond Steading if he could steal a flier –

Her fingertips, nails trimmed away to nothing, pads firm with callouses, traced the outline of the family crest branded into the back of his neck. The crest that marked him the sole heir of the city she intended to take. He swallowed, pulse kicking, skin heating.

There were other reasons to want his blood. Older reasons.

That smile returned, though this time there was nothing of kindness in it. “I see you understand.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Once, what seemed like lifetimes ago, he spotted Callia’s barge flying into dock at Thratia’s compound and, not knowing what it was, cracked a joke about her finally giving in to a political marriage. He did not feel like laughing now.

“I am. Your family’s city is unique of the cities of the Scorched, in its de facto independence from Valathea and its insistence on a hereditary leadership. Quaint ideals, but useful to me. I want Hond Steading whole. With one little contract, you can give it to me. No siege. No war. No one has to die.”

He’ll do.

The distance between them shortened, but did not close, the heat of her body radiating through a tunic that seemed, to his eye, suddenly too thin, his own clothes too tight. He cleared his throat, swallowed hard, tried to get a handle on – on – anything, and came up floundering. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he was at a loss for words.

“You have until we arrive at Hond Steading to decide, and make no mistake, I am marching for that city prepared to break it regardless of your answer.”

So perfunctory. So matter-of-fact. He caught himself staring at the ripple of a scar that marred the side of her face, the brutalization that was his doing. The evidence of which she wore proudly, black hair pinned back to reveal the whole scope of the damage.

He’d done that. Hadn’t meant to, not really, but he hadn’t felt sorry about it, either. And here she was, the distance between them gone now, the hard warmth of her pressed against him, head tilted in question, fingers stroking, stroking, and he could hardly catch his breath let alone decide if he wanted to scream or laugh or weep.

He brushed her ruined cheek with his fingertips, and she did not flinch away.

And then they were together, merging, forceful and firm and breathless.

He forgot himself. For a little while.