Page 34 of Blood Slumberm

Troi stepped back to his own prison and entered through the gap she had left in the fire spells.

Sharp pain stabbed through the half-healed burns on his back. Troi crumpled to the ground, weakness spreading rapidly through his limbs. He lay helpless on his back and looked up at a leather breastplate painted with the Eye of Hypnos.

A Gift Collector smiled down at him, holding a dagger that dripped with magic and Troi’s blood.

Troi’s last coherent thought was that the necromancer could never have gotten through the Sanctuary wards unless an unspinner had let him in.

When Celandine came to, sunlight was glaring through the high, barred window of her cell.

It was dawn. How many dawns had passed? Sickening fear jolted her awake.

Everything after her capture was a blur of interrogation. She had no idea how long she had been there.

She didn’t know if Troi was dead or alive.

If he had returned to the manor, then it was all over now. Imagining what the Gift Collector had done to him, she retched on her hands and knees in the corner of her cell.

She had tried so hard to tell Troidon’t go back to the manor, to warn him before the guards covered her mouth. She had been too late. If only she had seen the truth a moment sooner…if only she had decided to fight for him the way he had for her…

Troi was dead because of her.

She curled around herself and wept for him. She, the merry widow, the Pavo princess always in command of herself, sobbed for him as she never had for her parents, husband, or throne.

She would join him soon. No life sentence in the temple for her this time. Not even a trial. The Inquisitors were determined to make an example of her on the Akron’s Altar.

She worried away at the traversal cuff on her ankle. She would die in the enchanted shackle that bound her. She couldn’t stop prying and pulling at it, no matter how much skin she lost to the effort.

She finally knew what made her happy, but it was too late.

As a girl, she had done as her parents required. As a wife, she had lived under her husband’s authority. As a mage, she had fought every day against the temple’s demands for her absolute surrender.

But for those brief, golden years as princess in her own right, she had obeyed no one but herself.

She didn’t need dances or power or revenge. All that had ever mattered to her was being mistress of her own destiny.

She had been happy when she had been free.

The answer had been right in front of her the night Troi had sworn to fight for her freedom.

The Gift Collector’s bounty wouldn’t buy her happiness. For a paltry bag of coins, she had traded the greatest treasure she had ever found.

Her last moment with Troi flashed through her mind over and over. Was there any chance he had understood her words? Could there be a shred of hope that he had fled to safety and not into the Gift Collector’s ambush?

After seeing him defeat eight fire mages, she wanted to believe he had somehow defeated the Gift Collector too. But even if he had, he might be in hiding now, suffering from his wounds with no one to give him blood.

She would never know his fate.

Troi counted how many times he had woken chained to his throne. Tallying the nights gave him a little piece of sanity as weakness and pain ate away at his reason.

“Did you poison me?” he demanded of the Gift Collector on the sixth night.

The necromancer put his feet up on the table and lit a smoke. “I didn’t have to. Those cursed chains are holding you well enough. You aren’t the immortal you were one hundred years ago.”

Troi wasn’t even as strong as he had been when he’d woken from his long sleep. This hunger clawing him inside out after six nights was a greater agony than the starvation he had endured for a hundred years.

The Gift Collector smiled. “The gnawing in your gullet will end soon enough. We only need to lie low until the Summer Solstice is over and the mages of Anthros miss their chance to sacrifice you. Then I’ll collect my bounty without their interference. You won’t feel hungry after I carry your head into the Temple of Hypnos in a bag.”

Troi didn’t reply, his teeth chattering with a fever chill. He could hardly concentrate on his enemy’s words. The thought of Celandine’s blood consumed him. The layers of her flavor…the feeling of her life force flowing into his veins…

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