Page 32 of Brought to Light
And in a great wooden throne-like chair at the far end sat Lord Evalt, clad in black robes trimmed with gold, and with his black hair and beard flowing over his chest and shoulders like ink. His shrunken, white-eyed seer sat beside him on an ottoman. Lady Lisandra and my mother, holding hands, knelt before him. Lady Lisandra’s cheek bloomed red and purple with a swollen bruise, and her hip-length mahogany curls hung loose and tangled around her torso. Blood stained her torn silver robes.
My mother looked less battered, possibly because she hadn’t fought as vigorously; Lady Lisandra was quite the swordswoman, and I doubted they’d taken her without losing a man or two in the process. But I took after my mother, and neither of us had any skill with implements of war. Her plain gray dress didn’t have any blood on it, thank the ancestors, but her hair, pale blonde like mine, was frizzy and mussed, and her face was bone-white except for her red and puffy eyes.
When she saw me, her mouth fell open, a hand flying up to her face. New tears spilled over, trickling down her beautiful face and glinting like diamonds. I didn’t know what to wish for, that she died first and didn’t need to watch Evalt slit my throat, or that he killed me first, so that my last moments wouldn’t be an agony of grief.
As if it mattered much at all.
My mother’s mouth moved, but no sound came out.
And Lord Evalt laughed. It rolled around the room like a peal of thunder, rich and deep and far too resonant for the lungs of a normal man. “Your whore of a mother made too much noise, and I tired of her whining,” he said, his voice less full than his laugh but still enough to reach every corner of the ballroom. “I silenced her. Don’t fret. I’ll give back her voice in time for you to hear her final scream.”
Well. That answered the question of whom he intended to kill first.
“This isn’t necessary,” I said, my voice quavering, even more pathetic in contrast to Evalt’s arrogance. Oh, couldn’t I at leastsoundbrave? “I never wanted to kill you. I was never meant to kill you. Your seer has it wrong.”
“So you would like me to believe.” Evalt languidly raised one long, ring-bedecked hand and brought it down across my mother’s cheek. Her head snapped back, and I knew she cried out, though she made no sound. Lady Lisandra caught her, cradling her against her shoulder, and if she could’ve killed Evalt with a look alone, he’d have dropped dead.
I lunged, howling in horror and rage, and my captors brought me up short, casting me down onto the floor. My cheekbone hit the boards hard, the impact stunning.
“Put them together. We can allow them this last moment, can we not?” Evalt’s voice echoed oddly inside my skull along with the ringing in my ears. Footsteps vibrated through the floor, and then my mother and Lady Lisandra landed hard beside me.
My mother caught me in her arms, lifting my torso off the floor and smothering me against her chest. For a moment, one single, shining moment, I closed my eyes, forgot everything else, and breathed her in: the familiar scents of lavender from the sachet she kept in her wardrobe, spices from the kitchen, warmth and safety and love. She shook with silent sobs, her voice still muted. I felt a hand on my shoulder. Lady Lisandra. She squeezed me, and while it could have been comfort, I felt her other message. I needed to sit up, to face Lord Evalt with more courage than this. More dignity than huddling in my mother’s lap like a child.
So I struggled up, my mother and Lady Lisandra helping me on either side, and I looked Lord Evalt in the face. “I will not die in fear of you,” I said. My voice still shook, but I meant it. I had to mean it, because on either side of me, the two women who had raised me knelt with their backs unbowed. I owed it to them to die with the same strength they possessed.
A slow, sickening smile crept across Evalt’s narrow, angular face, his mouth a slash of white in his dark beard. He rose, looming until I had to crane my neck to stare him down, and began to rotate his arms and move his fingers in a complicated flickering dance of magic. Purple sparks shot from his hands in patterns I couldn’t interpret, mesmerizing me with awe and horror. “Yes, you will,” he said, that smile widening into a rictus grin. “You’ll die terrified, and I’ll feast on it. On all of you. Every moment of your terror only feeds my magic and makes me stronger.”
I leaned closer to my mother, wishing I could put my arms around her as she had hers tightly around my waist. My whole body throbbed with bruises, some from the soldiers’ rough handling and some souvenirs of Callum’s possession of me the night before. It felt like a lifetime ago. I’d never see him again, and anger warred with relief in my tight, aching chest. Maybe he’d left us to die, but at least he might live. He’d never wanted to be involved in this. He deserved to live, after saving my life in the human realm and fighting side by side with Oskar in the ambush.
It didn’t matter that he’d left me. It didn’t matter. I’d be glad he lived, that was all.
Lord Evalt took a step forward, and the sparks flowing from him doubled in size, their brightness flaring. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll go slowly enough to savor it.”
Callum
Finding the hidden garden gate proved impossible once I’d looped around to the other side of the house, but I didn’t try all that hard. I needed speed, not cleverness.
Oskar might’ve struggled to scale the high wall; he was too heavy. Linden and Kaspar probably didn’t have the upper body strength for it. Well, lucky they weren’t there. I was trying so fucking hard not to think about why they weren’t there, but images of Linden lying dead in front of his mother kept popping into my head, and I had to fight to keep them out.
Focusing on climbing the garden wall helped for a minute, finding footholds in the stone and avoiding the wicked thorns on the vines that grew all over it, and mostly failing at the latter. Stinging gouges covered my palms and fingers by the time I dropped down on the other side, an easy ten-foot fall. Fuck this place. Even the fucking plants were trying to kill me.
The garden might’ve been a good distraction, too, if I’d had time to stop and gawk at it. I’d never seen plants like that. They looked like something out of an episode of originalStar Trek, one of the ones where the flowers shot pollen in people’s faces and they all started fucking like rabbits. Technicolor and bizarre, with oblong, fleshy shapes that didn’t seem like they belonged on my planet. Mixed in were normal things, roses and ferns and crap like that, but that couldn’t overcome the overall weirdness.
I cautiously pushed my way through a bush covered in some kind of blue, star-shaped berries, hoping they wouldn’t try to eat me, and peeked out through the foliage. I’d managed to get twenty yards from the house, more or less, with the main bulk of the building directly in front of me. It looked like a goddamn wedding cake, all white and fancy and swirly where it didn’t need to be. A terrace ran the length of the back of the house, with doors all along it and steps leading down to the garden at intervals. A swath of grass separated the terrace and the flower beds.
Lots of access points.
Too many access points, and too much visibility.
And I could practically hear the clock ticking.
I couldn’t see anyone, though, and I couldn’t decide if that was a good sign or a bad one. Maybe they weren’t expecting anyone to come in through the back of the house. Or maybe there were soldiers fucking everywhere, invisible just like the ones that came out of nowhere in the field.
Two choices: One, creep along the taller bushes at the back of the garden and stay out of sight as long as possible, approaching the house at the end of the terrace, where at least I’d only be visible from a couple of the glass doors, and not fucking all of them at once.
Option two: Run like hell across the garden, and the lawn, and the terrace, and get inside, single gun blazing if necessary.
Linden would probably die either way.
