"We can be civil about this," Fletch suggested, loosening the loop minutely.
Ember gasped and reeled to her feet.
Fletch, still wearing Bram's cloak, stood ready at the end of the pole, knees braced and black eyes wide with anticipation. Perhaps he wanted her to shift. No spells on the loop stopped her.
Ember sneered. "You want civility? Remove this restraint from my neck."
"My apologies, my dear," Fletch replied, guiding her away from the cage. "But we lack a certain trust between us. For now I will keep you in human form—it seems to suit you best, don't you think?—because I do have so many questions for you."
"But what about him?" Ember motioned back to Kitt. "Surely he has more answers than I."
Fletch cocked his head pitifully. "You still think he can be human?" He watched her for a moment, curious, before prodding her toward a wall with hanging iron cuffs. "I've dealt with many shifters, my dear, though none were as special as you. Many lasted a long time. Months, years. I let them be a human for hours or minutes, or until they could think enough to change to something else. It is so very interesting to watch the humanity slip away, the memories melt into something much more primal. Did you know that mindless shifters will almost always change to a bear when you prod them?" Fletch held her next to the wall, and the curiosity fell from his face. "Cuff yourself."
Ember ground her teeth and flicked a gaze to Kitt's cage, still in full view. Even if she were to shift now, she'd still be useless with the pole forcing distance between her and Fletch. But perhaps if she—
Wire tightened against her throat.
"Come now," Fletch urged. "Don't be stubborn. You have nothing left to lose, my dear. Your friends are all dead, or will be soon, and your lover will stay here with us."
Wheezing, Ember grabbed an iron cuff and clapped it around an ankle, then followed with the other.
"And the wrists."
She did so grudgingly. The loop loosened again, and she sagged against the wall.
"There," he sighed. "Now you are mine."
"The Council will have you killed for this," Ember spat, hoping it was true. The iron shackles were heavy and big, almost to the point where she could squeeze her hands through. The chains attached to the shackles allowed her a bit of freedom of movement.
Fletch smiled in amusement as he tossed the restraint pole on top of a nearby cage, causing a sleeping gorret to wince awake.
"My lord is the Council, my dear. He knows about you, and about your little shifter friends out in the mountains. They will be taken care of soon enough, if they haven't been already—"
A bear-like moan rumbled above the other noises of the chamber, somewhere on the other side of the room. Fletch grinned and raised his thinning brows.
"Ah, I think your father recognizes your scent! You remember him, don't you? You saw him at the feast before your little escapade."
Ember's heart banged once, twice—
"Yes, believe it," Fletch sang. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a collar. "He was certainly not disappointing. We captured him up in the mountains." Fletch stepped close. "If you try anything foolish, my dear, I will not hesitate to Freeze you. I recognized him as having assisted Lady Salena with your sister's birth," he continued seamlessly as he buckled the collar onto her neck. "I prodded him a bit for answers about the faction and instead he gave me a little piece of golden information. An affair, it turns out, that resulted in you. He didn't know about you, of course. When I informed my lord, he didn't believe me, just as he doesn't believe about you now. But he will, once he sees you, and he’ll let me do my experiments on you, because he always does give in after a bit of insistence. He has never understood my curiosity, but he knows how much information my experiments reveal. He cannot resist the gain of power through knowledge."
Ember's spit landed on his cheek.
He removed the spittle with a bony finger and tasted it, sucking long and hard on his finger as he closed his eyes.
Ember looked away when those black eyes opened.
"Hmmm, you are delicious, my dear," he cooed. “I have to admit I’m a bit fond of you. Obsessed, really.” His hands came back to her neck, brushing her skin as he began forming the complex spell. "You are a special flavor of woman, forged from a wizard and a shifter. And I am so very curious to learn more about you."
Ember stopped listening and focused on his spell. Binding knit with a Freeze and a Blinding. With the spells touching her skin, they started to spread like gauzy chain-mail against her mind. The cotton-lined stone wall again. A firm but invisible wall that froze her ability to change form. She watched Fletch's hand movements, or what she could see of them, scrambling to keep track of each flick of fingers, tilt of the wrist, and swirl of a thumb.
"Get your hands off of her!"
Ember's eyes flashed up in time to see Eawart, red-faced with billowing fur cloak, lunge at Fletch.
Fletch whirled to meet Eawart, both spindly hands latching onto Eawart's cloak, and suddenly Eawart was hurled against the wall.
Ember cried out as his head cracked against stone. Eawart crumpled to the ground, and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
Ember strained against the shackles. "He was harmless!"
Fletch shrugged. "I have no time for—"
"My daughter." Arundel's voice reverberated into the room. He stood by Kitt's cage, a tower held by a stillness that Ember knew only too well. Quiet rage lit his eyes like coals. "Why do you have my daughter?"
Ember's heart beat a maddening rhythm. Her limbs shook as she wiggled her hands, struggling to squeeze them through the shackles.
Fletch bobbed a half-bow with a look of triumph. "I have lured another shifter, my lord." He jabbed a finger toward Kitt. "That one had a lover, my lord, another shifter. Ember."
"No," Arundel said with conviction. "You've gone too far, Fletch."
"She's a shifter, my lord. I saw her change with my own eyes. She's been lying to you all the while, and so has your wife."
Arundel's hands curled to fists. "Release her from those shackles. Now."
Fletch tisked as though a child had said something naughty. "I can prove it, my lord. She's a shifter, and a very dangerous one at that." From behind a cage, Fletch picked up a spear. "She has a Binding around her neck."
Ember jerked against the shackles, feeling powerless, her mind screaming in panic. She needed to undo the Binding. She needed—
Fletch jabbed the spear into Kitt's cage.
Kitt's scream of outrage shuddered into her bones, rising a tempest of fury. Her muscles throbbed with the need to shift, and she tore against the walls holding her in. Her hands flew to her throat.
The pattern of spells burned in her mind, vibrant and strong but incomplete. She knew the motions to undo them, knew that they would require careful flicks and twists. Already her fingers moved the air, commanding Fletch's spells to release their hold. Every fiber within her willed the air to dissipate so that she could shift, so that she could morph bone and sinew and muscle into a cougar.
Arundel watched, frozen, but she didn't care. Kitt cried again and again, propelling her faster, and the tension in her bones sparked with hatred for the horrible man who was trying to kill him, and for all the cages towering around her, and for the awful hanging stench of dead shifters.
A left twist here, down and around while the other hand pulls back and flicks right...
The spells unraveled and recoiled like a snake preparing to strike. The gauzy wall around her burst open, and her need to shift consumed her.
Her skin melted.
Liquid movement slipped hands and feet out of cuffs and her mind snapped her body to cougar form. Instinctual fire exploded within her. Raw rage. Protection. The lust to kill.
She held back nothing.
Two leaps brought her to that vile man with the spear. Her jaws crunched around his lily-scented throat, sinking into flesh and fragile bone.
A hard jerk and he lay motionless.
The spear clattered to the floor, joining the scents of old blood and urine and feces.
"No... My daughter... I don't believe it—"
Arundel's words echoed in the chamber.
She turned to find him kneeling, his expression crumpled like the face of an old mountain. He covered that worn face with trembling hands.
She had never seen him tremble. Had never seen him look weak, or in pain.
Her chest swelled, and suddenly she was human again, and she couldn't take the sight of him hunched over, sobbing into his palms like a child.
"Father." He wasn't, really, but he was, and his agony strung her heart out on a line. "I'm sorry..." She was sorry she was what she was. Sorry she couldn't be something else, anything else.
She crawled to him, touched his hands. Cool, unsteady.
His hands moved away from his face.
Ember rocked back. His distant, sheening eyes could hardly look at her. Spittle clung to his beard as he clasped her hands.
"Ember," he whispered. "It's you. It's really you. I thought you were..." He caressed her hands, and then her hair. Nudged her cheek. "My little flame."
Her eyes grew warm, and suddenly she was in his embrace, a child again, swaddled in love and pride and all the warmth a child longed for.
He still loved her, despite what she was, and all the pain and worry of her life had been for naught. She was still his daughter. Still a Thackeray. Still in her father's heart. And she had nearly killed him.
Arundel's grip tightened.
A pinprick against the pain of her heart. Cold metal against her back.
But it was wrong. All wrong, because her father hugged her, and they were alright—
The pain sharpened, like fire spitting into her body, a blade twisting into her spine, and she bent with the pain, morphing away from it, shifting into something small, narrow.
A deathrattler.
The mountain shook beneath her. Fury, and fear.
Snap!
She whipped around him and sank fangs into his side, terror spurring the release of venom.
He screamed and beat himself, and she fled to a dark crevice.
The mountain man writhed on the floor. His dagger lay forgotten, bloody, as the fury in him succumbed to pain.
He would die in minutes, she knew. But it seemed hours that she watched him go. With his every gasp and clutch of pain, something dark twisted in her.
"Salena," he muttered.
The woman within the snake couldn't look away from his face. Stretched in agony and sheening with tears. She didn't know this sad man.
Shattered.
Broken.
Alone.
The darkness gave another twist.
His face took on a purplish hue as he squeezed his knees to his chest. He moaned, shuddered, and went still.
Something pulled her to the cage with the cougar. Scales melted back to skin, bones grew and solidified, and her snout reformed into a mouth and nose. She knelt before the cage.
Kitt, bloody and panting, lay on his side. His golden eyes stared warily at her, but he seemed too weak to do much else.
A simple latch on the cage slid back with a metallic click. Fletch hadn't bothered locking it with his key. Ember eased inside, ignoring the blood and feces in the cage, her eyes on the collar around Kitt's neck.
The spells glowed in her mind. Similar to the one that had been around her own neck, but more complex. Fletch had known she would try to free him, and had made the spell more difficult.
A tremor shook her hands as she reached forward.
Kitt lifted his head with a growl, but rather than bite her hand, a pink tongue flicked out and licked her palm.
Ember's heart kicked. "Kitt?" Did he remember? Was he there?
The cougar set his head down and closed his eyes, his stomach shuddering with each breath.
Ember shivered as a wave of cold crept over her. Stiff-fingered, she grasped at the strands of spells to begin their unraveling. She would need to move as quickly as possible, but the chill seeping into her bones pulled on her limbs.
"Kitt, it's me, Ember," she whispered, weaving her fingers left to right, down and over. She strove to remember how she undid the Freeze before. A fuzzy memory, but her hands recalled the motions and worked the strands efficiently. She stared at them, following the intent to flick this finger and that thumb, feeling as though the hands belonged to someone else. "Kitt, it's me. Ember," she repeated. She said it again. And again. The chant brought a bit of warmth back to her muscles.
The room fell away, and her own body. The spells on Kitt's collar pulled her in and narrowed her vision. Outside, out there in the room, she was aware of footsteps and voices.
Someone touched her.
"Leave me," she said. "It is mine to undo. It is mine to undo..."
No one else touched her, and she sank more deeply into the spell. So close to the end, she no longer followed every movement of her hands but concentrated on the next step to take, the moves to make further down the strands. Her hands flew, and the spells obeyed.
Unraveling the last of the spell felt like running into a wall.
She collapsed beside Kitt, her arms numb, her mind suddenly unable to focus.
"Kitt, it's me," she repeated, her tongue and lips stiff and dry. "You're free now. I know you're in there. Please come out. Please..."
She pulled her head up from the cage floor. The cougar still slept, and his wounds continued to bleed. Too much blood lost. Too much time stuck in the same body. He was gone, just as she had feared.
Her throat burned and heat rose behind her eyelids.
"No, no, no. Kitt, please come out. I removed the spells. It's okay now. Please come back." Her voice cracked, and with it, something inside her shattered.
A wave crashed over her, and she gave into it. She let herself sink beneath the roiling surface until she felt nothing beyond the blackness and her inability to breath.
chapter fourty
Ember jolted awake.
A gauzy wall fastened her mind and body, and the constraint caused panic to well up her throat.
“No—”
“Ember, you’re alright.” Salena appeared beside the bed, the bed-curtains drawn back to frame her slender form.
“What is this for?” Ember shook her wrist, which was cuffed in a golden bracelet.
“A precaution only. The Council requested it. I would suggest leaving it alone,” her mother added when Ember started to undo the spell. “They also requested that you be guarded so that you are less inclined to tamper with it.”
A guard stepped forward from the doorway. A wizard dressed in violet, with an expression as unreadable as stone.
Ember smoothed her palms over her face, willing away the sudden wave of heat behind her eyes. She needed to stop panicking. The spell wasn’t harmful to her, not when she was in human form.
She breathed slowly, and focused on the soft sheets she sat on. Her old bed, in her old room. Her limbs tangled in her chemise and silky sheets dyed a shade of pale green.
Ember kicked the sheets off. "I must see Kitt—"
Salena gave a strained smile. "He's sleeping in the room next door. As a human," she added.
For a moment, the tension slipped from her shoulders. Her pulse beat in her temples, and her breath slipped in and out of her lungs. Relief, and something warm to replace the cold dread that had coiled around her heart the night before.
The relief nudged aside as Salena's weary, pink-rimmed eyes watched her. Unbound, her hair hung limp over her shoulders, its coppery tint dull in the dim light, and her face looked as old as Ember ever remembered seeing it.
Ember studied the silk sheet in her hand. An unbearable weight huddled in her chest. "And Eawart?"
"Recovering from a contusion to the head." Salena sank into the bed. "The others are dead," she stated.
The others. Arundel. Fletch. Ember's throat constricted. "I'm sorry," she whispered. Meaningless, frivolous words. She had no i
dea what Salena felt, but certainly it must be hatred toward her. With a strange certainty, Ember knew things would never be the same as they were before, and that she was the cause of it.
Salena touched her hand, then clasped it. "I'm sorry, too. For not knowing what Arundel and Fletch were doing down in the dungeon, for staying out of his affairs, for what you had to do to fix it. A part of me loved that man. But I can't help feeling relief that he's gone." A hand flew to her mouth and she squeezed her eyes shut.
Ember stared as tears fell over Salena's trembling fingers. She had never seen her mother cry.
"He would have been punished, you know," she said after a moment, wiping her cheeks. "All those spells to torture and control shifters... I remember him working on them at the Academy, but the others looked down on him for it, and by the time he was asked to leave, he promised me he would stop. I should have known, when Fletch followed him to Silverglen. He would've had both his hands taken. What would he have done then?" Salena's eyes shone, and she regarded Ember with the grasping gaze of a woman drowning.
Ember had no response, because she knew nothing she said could soothe her mother, and she knew her mother would somehow pull herself from the murky waters without anyone’s help. Salena was strong that way.
She gave Ember's hand another squeeze. "You can see your friend, but the Council will hold a judgment about Arundel and Fletch’s death. They should all be here by tomorrow." Salena stood.
Ember twisted the sheet tight in one fist. "Fletch told me about my real father."
Salena stiffened. She sat back on the bed, her lips compressed into a hard line.
Ember took a breath before continuing. "Fletch found my father and tortured him until he told Fletch about your affair. Fletch drew his own conclusions about me—that I was a shifter—and kept him as Arundel's pet."
Ember forced a lump down her throat before continuing. "The bear at the feast was my father."
Salena's eyes closed. The divot between her brows deepened. "Did Arundel know?"
"Fletch told him, but he refused to believe."
"Just so," Salena muttered. "He always suspected."
Ember pushed her raven-black hair back from face in an effort to remain patient. "Why did you never tell me about him? Why lie to me, even when I knew Arundel wasn't my father?"
Silverglen: A Young Adult Epic Fantasy Novel Page 24