by Claudia King
“Rat told me who Netya is,” Thakayn said quietly. “You changed her spirit to be like yours, didn't you?” He punched her again, scraping her hair beneath his knuckles as he caught her on the side of the scalp. Adel swallowed a gasp of pain, biting the inside of her cheek until the room stopped swimming around her. “Give me that magic. Do for me what you did for Netya.”
Adel tensed in anticipation of another blow, but it did not come just yet. She didn't intend to tell him anything. He could leave her beaten and bloody, and she would endure it as stubbornly as she had endured every one of her father's beatings. The longer she held out, the longer Thakayn would let them stay alive. She didn't believe for a moment that he had any intention of allowing her to leave, with or without Jarek. He was a fearful man deep down, and fearful men with power sought to destroy the things that unsettled them. Perhaps all she could do was delay the inevitable, but at least that was something. Every moment Thakayn spent doing his evil inside this chamber was a moment the world outside was spared from it.
Adel listened to the sound of her breathing, letting her aches meld together and join the throb of her cracked rib. She stared into the fire, drawing her mind forcibly away from Thakayn. He could only hurt her body. Her spirit would always be her own.
When he grew aggravated by her silence he started hitting her again. This time the blows felt numb and distant. Blood began to pool in Adel's mouth, and when Thakayn picked her up off the floor she spat it into his face. With a snarl of anger he shoved her to her knees, bending down so that he could look her in the eye. His grip squeezed tight around the base of her jaw, forcing her to stare at him. This close she could see every line and pore in his face, the healing scar across his nose, and the smear of wet blood trickling down his cheek. His breath huffed against her chin, carrying with it the sickly scent of some sweet food. If this man had ever been beautiful before, Adel could not see it now. He was a beast, his eyes darting excitedly back and forth like a vicious child tormenting a small animal.
It was those eyes, rather than the pain of his blows, that beckoned Adel's fear back to the surface. Recognising her unease, his lips perked upward, his mouth parting in an unconscious motion of pleasure. There was nothing distasteful to him about what he was doing. He was enjoying it.
“Oh,” he said, breathing out the word as if it were a gasp of ecstasy. “I knew there was a mortal woman in there somewhere. You're no demon. Demons aren't afraid of men like me.” With a jerk of his hand he send Adel sprawling against the floorstones. She felt herself trembling. This was different from what her father had done to her. Ulric had been brutal, but never merciless. He'd never enjoyed it. Violence had simply been a means to an end for him.
Adel's eyes flitted about the room, suddenly desperate to find a means of defending herself. Because unlike Ulric, Thakayn was not going to stop, and the look on his face had been that of a man who might lose himself in his ecstasy. Before she could begin crawling toward the toppled stool Thakayn grabbed a handful of her long hair and dragged her to the edge of the hearth. Panic gripped Adel's chest, the pain in her ribs driving the breath from her lungs in a cry of anguish. She tried to pull away, but Thakayn shoved her face closer to the flames, pinning her down with a knee against her back. Her face was so hot that her sweat felt like boiling water.
“Stay quiet if you want,” Thakayn said, his voice breathless with anger. “One of your people will give me your magic eventually. I want you to feel every moment of this. Look me in the eye like Atalyn did, and then remember how you thought you were better than me.”
As hard as Adel struggled, she could do nothing to stop him as he grabbed a burning brand from the hearth and touched it to her mane of dark hair. Flames raced to engulf every tinder-dry strand, licking with terrifying speed up her shoulders to sear her scalp.
Even her own screams weren't enough to drown out the sound of Thakayn's vicious snarling in her ears.
—46—
Sister
Netya had prayed to Syr, Heron, Wolf, her ancestors, even the spirits of the forest. Most of all she'd prayed to Caspian, hoping that her voice would somehow reach him across the spirit world and call him to her side. He'd been there for her when she lay dying from the sickness of Khelt's bite. He'd pulled her out of the water when she'd been ready to drown herself in Alpha Miral's river. Fate had brought him to her in her times of direst need before, and it had to again. It had to. If not him, then Fern, or Kiren, or Jarek, or Kale. Surely one of them would come to save her from this darkness?
She'd been praying for what felt like half the night after the guards had dragged her away. They'd shoved Adel into a dark chamber ahead of her, then taken her to the other end of the hall and put her in a similar room. There was no way out, only a hearth with a smoke vent too small to squeeze through and a doorway closed off by a heavy screen. When at last a distant rumble of voices sounded outside the chamber and the screen slid aside, it was almost a relief.
For a moment no one entered. Shadows flitted in the doorway, joining the whispers of the people standing there. It sounded like a man and a woman. Netya tried not to be afraid.
“Come here,” a male voice called in. She obeyed. One of the temple warriors stood in the doorway pointing his spear inwards. Next to him was a shorter figure dressed in a hooded robe, and behind them stood a second warrior holding up a torch. The faces of the two people in front of her were cast in shadow.
“Turn around and put your arms behind your back,” the man with the spear said. Once again Netya did as she was told, and a moment later she felt thick twine being wrapped around her wrists. The bonds dug in tight, leaving her even more helpless than before. If only she'd been able to summon her wolf.
The hooded woman lit a fire in the hearth and told the two warriors to leave them alone. Netya wondered who she was. There were no women of power within the temple, and she doubted Thakayn would have sent in one of the concubines to speak with her. The woman's presence made her uneasy, though she was not sure why. Perhaps it was only because it was so unexpected. Netya waited in silence as the warriors left them and slid the screen back over the doorway.
When the woman spoke again the tone of her voice carried a quavering note that unnerved Netya even more. “Come and stand by the fire,” she said. “I want to see your face.”
“Who are you?” Netya asked, trying to get a proper look at the woman as she edged cautiously forward.
The woman spat out an angry huff of breath, vicious and tearful. Netya could still not see her face beneath the hood, but she could see the knife clutched in her hand. She stopped at the edge of the firelight, tensing in fear.
“I wondered if you would recognise me,” the woman said. Every word she spoke sounded brittle with barely-restrained emotion. “I even hoped that you would. But you don't recognise me, do you? You didn't when you saw me in the hall. There's nothing of my sister left in you.”
Netya frowned, hopelessly confused. She did not recognise the woman's voice. She couldn't possible be another one of the Moon People, could she? She'd called her sister, yet Netya would have recognised any one of her sisters instinctively. If she hadn't been so frightened she might have been able to make sense of it, but all she could do was shrink back as the woman stepped forward and lowered her hood.
“I want you to see my face,” she hissed. “Every single one of you will see my face before I kill you.”
Now that the firelight fell upon the girl Netya could see that she was softly featured. A grown woman, but one whose face was still rounded with the traces of youth. Like Netya she had dark hair and light skin, yet her eyes creased with malice and brimmed with tears. There was such hatred within her that it masked everything else, burying what might have been a sweet girl beneath a warrior's harrowing grimace.
Netya took another step back, startled by the look. Then a tear spilled down the woman's cheek, and for an instant she looked like a distraught child. A child Netya recognised. A child she had always comforted wh
en she came to her in tears.
“Sayla?” she gasped.
The woman curled her fingers around the handle of her knife. Her lip trembled. “I'm no more her than you are Netya.”
“But you are!” Netya could see it now. The last time they'd been together her sister had still been a child. Now she was a woman, fierce and determined, just like their mother had been, yet smothered by so much terrible anger. Overcome with emotion, Netya stepped forward, but Sayla brought up her knife, levelling the point toward her sister's breast.
“You only know my name because the seeress told you. My true sister would have recognised me right away.”
Netya shook her head in desperation. “You were just a child! Oh, Sayla, you don't even sound the same! How did you come here? How did you find me?”
“Don't speak to me, demon!” Sayla twisted the knife in the air, her face contorting with grief as she tore her gaze away from Netya.
“I am no demon. I am your sister. Sayla, Mother turned me away, please don't be the same. I love you still. I have always loved all of you.”
“Then why did you do this to us?!” Sayla all but screamed, jabbing the knife forward. “You are just one of them now. The Moon People. You're their slave, or their ghost, or a demon, but you are not my sister!”
Despite her hands being bound, Netya stepped forward again, letting the knife come within a hair's breadth of her neck. She could not believe that sweet little Sayla would ever hurt her. Sayla had always been the soft-hearted one. The one who cried when the hunters killed a hare, or when the other children told her she was not as pretty as her sisters.
“Let me tell you what happened to me, Sayla.” Netya felt herself smiling. It was a half-hysterical feeling, so confused that she barely understood it, but somehow seeing Sayla again felt like the light she had been searching for in this terrible darkness. “It has been so long. I have so many stories to tell. I was going to go back to the village, with the Dawn King's blessing. He wanted me to share my stories with you too.”
“You're a liar,” Sayla sobbed.
Netya shook her head, adopting the same soothing tone she'd used to calm her sister's fears so many times when they were young. “No. I am Netya. You don't need that knife. I want to go back to the village with you. We can watch the men fishing in the river, like we used to the season before I left. You enjoyed that so much, except when you saw the fish flopping around in the baskets.”
Sayla's face tightened with anguish. Her hand was trembling terribly, but she raised the knife until it was level with Netya's face.
“Stop. You're wicked, just like all of them.”
“Why?” Netya implored her. “Why must you think that of me? Was it Mother who made you like this? Was it Thakayn?”
“It was you!” Sayla yelled. “It was all of you, when you burned our village!”
A cold feeling spread through Netya's chest. “The village?”
“I wish,” Sayla gasped, “that I knew who was alive and who was dead. After the Moon People came everyone I found was burned or torn apart. How can you call me your sister after doing that?!”
Netya stepped backward. Her knees felt weak, her stomach roiling. “When did this happen?”
“A year back, or two, it doesn't matter! Tell me why you did it!”
“I didn't.” Netya shook her head. She felt numb. “None of my pack would have done it.” Sayla did not say anything. She only held the quivering point of the knife in the air between them until Netya asked, “Is everyone gone?”
“I wish I knew,” Sayla repeated, this time enunciating every word with bitter force. “I searched for days. I went to every village I knew. I almost starved.” A tearful sniff interrupted her. “But if they were alive I would have found them, wouldn't I?”
Netya thought she had let go of her family years ago. She'd lived with the grief of losing them almost as certainly as if she'd known they were dead, but there had always been that hope, that unspoken comfort, of believing in her heart that they were still alive and well. Even if they hated her, even if she would never see them again, at least she would know they were safe back in the village. But they had not been safe. The Moon People had come again, and this time the men had not been able to fight them off. Khelt would never have been so ruthless as to kill women and children, but other alphas like Ulric might. Perhaps some roving pack of barbarians had happened across her village and ravaged it for their own wicked pleasure. Even if others like Sayla had managed to survive, there was little hope of her ever finding them now. Her mother. Her other sisters. Her friend Layon.
Netya sank to her knees, feeling tears of her own rolling down her face. Whatever Thakayn had planned on doing to her, it could not have been any worse than this. Yet Sayla was still alive. Her family was not lost to her entirely.
“Please put down the knife,” Netya whispered. “You don't need it.”
“I'm going to kill you!” Sayla tried to yell the words, but there was no conviction behind them any more. She'd come into this room looking for a beast who would fight her, not a woman who would collapse in grief.
“Will that make you happy?” Netya asked.
“It's not for happiness. It's because I have to.”
“Why?”
“Why else would I still be alive?! Why would the spirits leave me like this unless they wanted me to avenge my family?”
Netya swallowed and breathed deeply. The only thing worse than the news of her village's destruction was seeing what it had done to Sayla. For a moment she wondered whether her sister might be right. Why would the spirits visit such needless cruelty upon her unless there was some purpose behind it? Yet Netya did not believe in blood for blood. The spirits, for all their mystery, were kinder than they were cruel.
“Perhaps you lived so that you could find me,” she said.
“You aren't Netya.”
Netya shook her head in frustration. “Don't I look like her? Don't I sound like her? I remember watching the fishing with you, and holding your hand when you tried to walk on top of the wall! You knocked all the stones off and cried. Everything made you cry. Leyah and Neve always teased you for it, but I never minded. I may be one of the Moon People now, but I am still every bit the Netya you knew.”
Sayla shook her head, as if willing herself not to believe it, but the killing fury had gone out of her. She lowered her arm and let the knife drop to her side. “It doesn't matter anyway. It's too late.”
“What is?”
“The only reason I have to lift my head up at sunrise is to kill people like you. It's been seasons. There's no other reason for me to be here.”
Netya shuffled forward on her knees. “I want you to be here. Can that not be reason enough? Come with me. We can leave this temple. Forget whatever else brought you here.”
“I won't help the Moon People.”
“Then would you let one of them help you?”
Sayla stared at her, the girl's tears painting dark spots on the floorstones as they dripped from her face. Now that her anger had lost its fire she looked weary and confused. There was a desperate sadness in the girl that made Netya wish she had her hands free to embrace her.
“We couldn't leave,” Sayla said quietly. “Thakayn would never let us.”
“You could go and get Jarek's help. Do you know Jarek, the high priest?”
Sayla shook her head. “It's too late. Thakayn is the Dawn King now. I helped him. He is the one who told me the seeress was a demon. He said he wanted to protect the people from her, but now he says he wants to keep you all alive.” She threw her knife against the wall suddenly, the sharp crack of wood on stone making Netya flinch. “I don't understand!”
Netya gave her sister a moment before saying softly, “All people can be wicked, whether they come from the sun or the moon. Thakayn is like the ones who burned our village. You, me, the seeress, Jarek; we are all different.”
“Thakayn promised me he would help,” Sayla said, drawing her arms tightly aro
und herself. “He let me come in here with you.”
“What did he tell you to do?” Netya asked, edging forward again.
“He wanted me to hurt you. To make it so that you would tell him anything he wanted.”
“He does not want to protect anyone, Sayla. He wants the Moon People's magic for himself. For days now he has been trying to make Adel share her secrets with him.”
Again Sayla fell silent. She fretted and fidgeted, turning back and forth, bringing a hand to her mouth, then rubbing her eyes, then staring into the fire. Netya did not know what to say to her. Her poor sister seemed so fragile, and so much might depend upon the choice she made in this moment. She wished they had been reunited in a different place, at a different time. Everything about this meeting was awful, yet Netya believed there might still be some hope left in it. She struggled to stand up, and when she moved forward Sayla did not back away.
“I don't know what to do,” her sister said in a small voice.
Netya leaned forward and put her head on the girl's shoulder, offering her the embrace that her arms could not give. For a long time they stood there, hearing only the sound of the crackling fire and Sayla's quiet sobs.
Then, like the twisting of a knife, Adel's muffled scream reached them through the wall.
—47—
Good Men
“Coward!” Kiren yelled when Radeen-Na came back into his domicile. She used the Sun People's word, and it drew an immediate look of outrage from the warrior. He'd been gone most of the evening ever since Adel and Netya had been taken away, and one of the guardsmen was keeping Kiren from leaving the high priest's domicile in the meantime.
Kiren jabbed a finger at Radeen-Na's chest and said it again. “Coward!” Then, not knowing the words to properly express herself, she lapsed back into the Moon People's tongue. “How could you let him take them?! He's not fit to be your alpha! You know he isn't.”