Inherit the Flame

Chapter Thirty-Seven

An empty third cup waited by Detan’s seat at the table, and he was proud his hands did not shake as he poured the pricklebrush tea into it. Misol stationed herself by the door, a threatening phantom, her hands loose at her sides though he could make out no weapon on her body. Not that she needed one. Detan wasn’t exactly handy with, well, his hands, and Aella had his sel-sensitivity locked down tight. That lockdown, more so than the presence of Ranalae, made his skin crawl. Whatever was about to happen here, Aella wanted to be certain Detan couldn’t fight it. Which was pretty rude of her, considering all the time she’d put into honing his abilities.

“It is such a pleasure to see you again, my lord. I hope your time in the Scorched has treated you well?” Ranalae smiled at him over the rim of her cup, all polite formality. Detan wanted to smash her smug face into the table between them, but he forced a cheery smile and put on his hapless-lord persona. He was not about to let her beat him at his own game.

“I find the wide-open skies suit me better than tower walls.”

She flashed him a toothy grin. “Such a pity. I had hoped you might come to enjoy my little tower. We were just beginning to know one another, before you took an early leave of my hospitality.”

Detan raised his cup to her. “Your hospitality, it must be said, has improved some since those days.”

“Oh, dear boy, I think you’ll find it hasn’t. Aella has been telling me so much about the progress you’ve made.”

He shot the girl a sharp glance. “Traitor.”

She rolled her small shoulders. “Oh please, you can’t be that forgetful. I am, as I’ve told you, only interested in what I might learn.”

“Your little friend here was preparing to vivisect me, last I saw her.”

Aella frowned delicately. “Well, we can’t have that. You’re no use to anyone dead.”

“Certain conclusions can be drawn from corpses,” Ranalae corrected with the same casualness as if she were discussing the weather. “But I find your methods thus far fascinating. This injection of Callia’s devising, what does it do for the deviant?”

Detan cleared his throat. “The deviant is right here, you know. You could ask him.”

Aella inclined her head. “The injection does not work for me. His experience may be more valuable than my observations.”

Aella had tried the injections, and they did not work. It took all his long-practiced control to hide his shock. At least he hadn’t been Callia’s first test subject. Pits only knew what went on between those two before they’d apprehended him, and Aella clearly held no love for her adopted mother, as the withered form at her feet attested.

Aella’s self-assurance, her cool distance and easy taunts. If Callia had done to Aella half of what Ranalae had done to him, then… Then he could not find it within himself to blame her for the way she treated Callia.

“Well?” Ranalae prompted. “If you are here, then explain. What does the injection do for you?”

“Increases my irritation with pushy bitches.”

That was probably not the smartest thing he’d ever said. Aella coughed to hide a strangled chuckle, but Ranalae was too busy glaring needles through Detan’s eyes to notice.

“Manners, please, my lord.”

“Manners?” He stared at the teacup in his hand, at the crisp line of his sleeves’ cuffs, so thoughtfully lined in flame-orange. He might be used to playing a part, to putting on a face and dancing to the tune. But usually he set the tune. And this… This twisted mirror of a tea party was just too much.

There was no thought to his impulse. He crushed the teacup in his hands, felt the satisfying give of the polished material shatter beneath his fingers. Hot tea spilled over them, trickled down his palm and forearm, scalding, blending with the blood small lacerations drew forth from his hand.

“Fuck your manners.”

Misol moved, but for once in his life Detan was faster. He grabbed the table by its lip and flipped it while he burst to his feet.

“Restrain him,” Aella snapped as she stood and brushed streaks of spilt tea from her robes.

“Stop,” Detan growled. Misol hesitated, hands up, ready to grapple him into submission. But Detan wasn’t moving toward either woman. He made his body language peaceful, inert. Let the anger in his expression do what he needed it to do to let the women who surrounded him know he was having none of their shit.

“Enough of this pageantry. You brought me here for a reason, Aella, brought me here to meet with this – this monster – to what purpose? Let’s get this horror show over with, and you two both stop pretending you’re anything but the twisted specks of humanity you really are.”

“Well,” Ranalae tsked. She stepped away from the flipped table and stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the damage to her room’s decor with a mild pout of annoyance. She had the look of a woman whose pet had just pissed on the rug. “I thought you had learned control.”

“Control and patience aren’t always bedfellows.”

“Clearly.” Aella shook her head and picked her way around the wreckage to pat a whimpering Callia on the head. The gentle stroking of the desiccated woman’s hair made Detan’s stomach lurch. “We had better begin, then, since the subject is so eager.”

Despite his bravado, Detan’s mouth went dry. “Does Thratia know about this?”

Ranalae said, “My dear, she does not care.”

Selium he could not sense while Aella kept him locked down poured from Ranalae’s sleeves, a neat little trick that he suspected was part of the latest Valathean fashion. He stepped back as the cloud billowed toward him, the raw glimmer temporarily blinding him.

“When did he last have his injection?” Ranalae asked. He could only see pieces of her now, a flesh of arm, a curve of a cheek, through the swathe of selium coalescing around him. He wanted to scream, to swat it back, but he knew that they wanted him to fight. Knew that, to test his control, they were going to make him suffer. Damned evil thing, having your deviant sensitivity tied to your anger. He wished his mother would have lived long enough to tell him how she dealt with their burden.

“Right before we left for Hond Steading. I wanted to test how long the effects would last, and his ability without regular maintenance.”

“Hmm, interesting. You have the capability to make more with you?”

“Of course. I have a fresh vial on me, in fact.”

“Wonderful.”

He could scarcely hear them over the thundering of his heart. The realization came to him, rather belatedly, that he had not had much direct interaction with Ranalae in the Bone Tower. He had no idea what her sel-sensitivity was like – deviant, or imperial standard. If she were deviant, than the sel getting close and personal with him now was real bad news.

He opened his mouth to protest, to ramble, to stall whatever was about to happen, and choked as sel poured down his throat.

“Ah, there we go,” Ranalae said. “Knew he couldn’t keep from speaking for long. Are you prepared?”

“I am.”

“Trigger Callia now, please?”

“Certainly.”

Detan clawed the air in front of him, indistinct wisps of selium tickling the fine hairs on his hands, the aching cuts in his palm fading now as his mind burst with panic. They would not kill him here, he told himself. Not intentionally.

But all his calming techniques had been stripped from him – his deep breaths, his distracting banter. His coping methods crumbled around him and he wanted to scream but the breath just wouldn’t come and he fell to one knee, eyes bulging, clawing at the ground as if he could dig his way to clear air. Nails bent back, cuts opened wider, a little pool of slick blood spread beneath his hands and he’d be pits-cursed if he wouldn’t rather be drowning in that than sel and he tried, tried so damn hard, to open his senses. To grasp the sel being shoved inside him and rip it out and bore it straight through Ranalae’s thrice-cursed eyes and oh holy fuck he was going to die here bug-eyed and useless and what was the fucking point after all–

Callia’s ability hit him.

Perversion. That was what she was. Long before Aella’s poisons had reduced her to a withered husk of a woman, Callia’s deviant ability had been the corruption of everything good – an extension of herself, if Aella’s theory of deviancy was true – and the poison had only concentrated that vileness.

He roiled with it. Every muscle in his body twitched and shuddered and clenched and cramped as his body fought against what Callia did to the selium inside him. It was not changed, not fundamentally, and he kept on telling himself that but all his body knew was that the selium inside him was now poison – rot and bile and decay – and he had to get it out.

His throat spasmed as he tried to scream though he had no air to do it with. Limbs he only vaguely recognized as his own twitched and writhed on the floor he’d bloodied.

He was dying and he knew it and something inside him broke.

A fire in his veins. Fire that was not his, had never really been his, that simply coexisted with him because it had no choice, burned within him hotter than anything he’d ever felt in his entire life. Some distant part of him wondered if this was the fire that had eaten his mother up – not bonewither, not after all – and was silenced. The fire would not die with him. It wanted release, and Detan was a whole pits-lot stronger than anyone had ever expected.

Aella’s will held his sel-sense in check, that part of him that he had mastered, in a sphere of influence. He was aware of her range now as if it were his own, as if he could see a fine gleam of a soapy bubble wrapping them both, keeping him from affecting any selium within its volume.

But Detan’s sphere, the fire’s sphere, was bigger. A lot bigger.

He fought it as he realized what was happening, what was going to happen. Clamped down on everything that he was, everything that he could be. But his body panicked and reached without his consent and–

Screaming. Curses. The floor juddered under him, the thunderous crack of stone filled the air and not just nearby – it was heavy and hollow and huge. And the whoomph of what came next shook him to his very bones.

The selium withdrew in a rush, the perversion with it, and all his strength fled.

He lay limp and shuddering, overworked muscles pinging and twitching with jelly-soft weakness. For once, just once, his mind was truly blank, as if everything that he was had been siphoned free, drained out in that one terrible moment.

“What have you done?” Aella demanded. Her small hands grabbed his shoulders and shook him until his eyes slid open. Real fear etched her young face. He’d never seen anything like it before.

He tried to say something, anything, but his mouth was mealy and his lips wouldn’t obey. Misol crouched at his side, grabbed a fistful of his too-fancy coat and dragged him to his limp feet. He wanted to fall, everything in his body wanted to fall, but she wouldn’t let him. She shoved him along until his hips rammed into a windowsill.

Ranalae stood next to him at that window, her fingers clutching the rail as she leaned forward to see better. If he had any strength left in him, he would have pushed her out.

“I had him shut down!” Aella protested against reality, stomping her small foot.

People were running in the halls. The air tasted of ash. He squinted against the light, too dark for the hour, and saw –

The firemount nearest the palace had awoken. Grey soot spilled from its mouth, illuminated from underneath by the orange-red smear of molten rock. Same color as his cuffs, he thought bitterly. Thratia had gotten that much right.

The echo of its awakening thrummed in him still. A pocket of selium, near to the conical plug, had been his target, and now the people at the base of that firemount were paying for Ranalae’s experiments. He wanted to ask how bad it was – if there was anything he could do, anything at all, that might help, but his mouth still wouldn’t work and it was getting really hard to keep his eyes open.

“Beautiful,” Ranalae murmured.

Detan vowed to make her suffer as he slipped into unconsciousness.