Page 145 of Deadly Maiden

I hiss at the burn. I won’t weep, but blood trickles from where the metal slices in.

And…I’m dead inside.

There is a silence I’ve never felt before. Even when I was a child my necromancy must have colored the world, made it different.

Now that is gone.

I ring with a hollow emptiness.

Doors are opened, and boots stomp and shuffle on stone. I think I know where I am.

“Put her there.”

They lower me to the hard floor and position me on my knees. Though I sway, I manage not to topple. I need to gather my strength. I never thought my powers would be gone. That puts a spanner in the mechanism.

A man hisses words an inch from my ear. “Bitch. Fucking necromancers. You killed m?—”

They go away. Someone has pulled them off me.

People file into the room. Clarity arrives and sharpens my senses. My mind seems to have recovered to a level close to normal. I’m sure I know where I am, and I’m going to kill everyone in here who gets in my way.

I shift my arms. My wrists feel the bite of the iron manacles, my flesh the bite of the hooks. My jaw clenches due to the pain but I think this through. Even through the hood, this place smells stale and old. The air is frigid. The sister told me Jennae was preserved by cold.

I can feel Rorsyd’s presence, no doubt with his shifting and his powers neutralized by iron.

If this is Jennae’s tomb, the others in here are predictable.

Seven of us? Including Jennae. Assuming the sister is here?

They whip the hood from my head. From beneath my brow I watch as the last soldier jogs up the stone stairs to the entrance and exits. The heavy doors are closed with a resoundingboom.

I can see them all now.

My counting is almost correct. There is one extra—Kroll.

The sister is at the rear, yards above everyone else, standing beside the door. Paloma, I assume. Purple robes, purple sheen from a pair of spectacles barely visible under the hood, an inscrutable expression on her delicately tattooed face. I pray she is on our side.

Directly before me, from left to right…

Queen Ruelle has a fancy smirk on her red lips. Her ebony hair is styled magnificently, raised, stiffened, and decorated with gems. It might kill something if it falls off her head.

King Madlin with his heavy coat and neat, side-shaven white hair, with gold-embossed sword hilt and gold bits and pieces on his black Aos Sin uniform—he is ready to kill me with pomposity.

Kroll, looking horribly ill, the burn scars barely fading, red, ugly, and distorting half his face. One arm is slumped low, so I figure his wound goes all the way down his side. Good.

Then there is Rorsyd, and here is where my heart whines and claws inside me and wants me to sob. I won’t. Not yet. Not until this is over, and by then it won’t be necessary…

Still, this is nigh on unbearable. I hate seeing him like this.

Like a noose, a large chain runs from an attachment on the ceiling to his neck then runs to his hands and ties them at his front. Iron chains, certainly. And a new spear has been run through his middle. It’s not as scarily thick as the original, but the spear point protrudes obscenely from his stomach, smeared with his blood.

I can see the old wound just below. I frown at that. How is it already so healed? My heartbeat does a small dance, fluttering faster. That. Seems…hopeful?

Yet Kroll stands with Rorsyd, and he has a large, rusty iron axe propped upright between his boots. An executioner’s axe. I’ve seen one before, in my childhood at a village whenFather and I wandered by, blissfully unaware of the upcoming punishment.

Is death a punishment? When you’re dead, you’re dead. Only the living remain punished.

Kroll wants to cut off Rorsyd’s head. He eyes his neck then swings his focus back on me, then back to Rorsyd’s neck. Then he slowly swivels the axe, back and forth, between his feet.

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