Page 104 of Destroyer

Nell had already gone, leaving Ru alone in the office without an announcement or explanation. Finally, she cleared her throat.

“Ah, Miss Delara,” Lord D’Luc said, looking up genially from his paperwork, white teeth flashing. “Do come in, take a seat.”

She slid into the leather chair facing his desk, folding her hands in her lap, trying to look composed. Whatever intensity of thought had come over her in the courtyard had left a sick taste in her mouth, a pain in her head. She touched her nose briefly and was relieved to find that her fingers came away clean.

“I suppose you know why I’ve summoned you.”

“To discuss my failure this morning.” It wasn’t as if his summons had been unexpected. She had gone to the courtyard to hide as much as to think.

He fixed her with an appraising gaze. Backlit from the window, his hair glowed almost white where the sunlight hit it. Haloed, like some figure from an ancient religion. Looking at him now, in the state she was in, Ru wondered why she had thought him so handsome. He was almosttooperfect in appearance, ethereal, untouchable. Nothing like Fen, whose nose was a bit too large, whose hair was always a mess, whose beard was never fully shaved…

“Focus,” said Lord D’Luc. “I see your mind wandering. I require every one of your faculties, please. I will need you to explain to me exactly what you attempted with the artifact this morning, why said attempt failed, and what you plan to do as preparation for your next demonstration.”

“When?”

“When what, Miss Delara?”

“When do you want a summary, and when do you request that I perform a second demonstration?” Her words came out dully, without inflection or an ounce of enthusiasm. She had lost all interest in Lord D’Luc, his nonsense, whatever he wanted from her and the artifact.

She didn’t need him. She didn’t need the regent’s funding, her fancy devices, or the Children’s prying questions. All she needed was the artifact.

“You know my paper on magic was absolute shit, right?” she added before he could answer her first question. Maybe she could push him away, make him leave her alone, make him give up on the artifact if he believed it to be a farce. An impossible project.

“Everyone laughed when it was published,” she went on, meeting Lord D’Luc’s cold stare with a fiery one. “Not a soul took it seriously. Because it’s a joke. I’m a joke. You’ll make a joke of yourself, pursuing some progressive, wonderful outcome with this artifact. It’s a rock. A fossil. A remnant of a city long destroyed by minds we can know nothing about, for purposes we’ll only ever guess. We will never understand what happened at the Shattered City, whether it was an echo of what came before, or something entirely new. Whatever it was, the artifact is nothing, a pebble, unrelated. May I go now?”

As she spoke, Lord D’Luc listened without reacting in the slightest; no movement or expression betrayed him.

And when she finally finished speaking, he sat up a little straighter in his chair. Tapped a finger against the desk. “I require a written summary by the end of the day, and a second demonstration tomorrow morning. You may go.”

* * *

In the next two days,Ru attempted two demonstrations. Both ended as well as the first — in utter failure.

The artifact no longer spoke to Ru as it once had, its connection to her still so weak that she was terrified it would sever at any moment. And with that fear came the knowledge that she had come to rely on the stone’s comfort. All that remained in its absence was a stark memory of Lady Maryn’s face, a burst of darkness in that desolate crater… and then nothing at all.

Lord D’Luc’s eyes chilled increasingly, icier each day that Ru failed to show him anything useful until they were icebergs in his ethereal face. It might have frightened her, once. But Lord D’Luc was no longer the source of anxiety, no longer holding power over Ru.

On the morning of the second demonstration, she had woken to find rusty brown stains on her pillow, her nose crusted with dried blood.

“You need to stop pushing yourself,” Gwyneth said, ministering to Ru with the patience of a sister.

“I’m not pushing myself,” Ru said, staring out her window at an unseasonably gray day as raindrops scattered the glass. But that was a lie. She was pushing herself — too hard, too far. The blood on her pillow said as much. What else could she do? Lord D’Luc wouldn’t let her stop. He demanded demonstrations. He demanded results.

And more than that, Ru wanted to prove to herself that she hadn’t lost the artifact altogether, that her convictions about its properties, its magic, hadn’t been madness. That she was Ruellian Delara, and Fen’s absence wasn’t gnawing a pit in her heart with every moment he was gone.

* * *

When Fen had beenabsent for almost a week, Ru began convincing herself that everything between them was imagined. That it had been a fever dream, every moment they had shared and every feeling that passed between their hearts was false, a phantasm born of the artifact. A lie.

“You’ve got to move on,” Gwyneth urged her. “You deserve better.”

Archie said, “He was a degenerate anyway. That wonderful hair of his was a smokescreen, a distraction. He was always going to break your heart, one way or another.”

* * *

On the tenthmorning since Lord D’Luc had arrived at the Tower, Ru woke, stretching stiff muscles. The sun shone through her curtains, casting soft light across her room. She dressed and went to the mess hall where she drank her coffee, and mindlessly ate a piece of toast.

Then she went to the dungeon.

---