Page 12 of In the Ravenous Dark
“Well?” Acantha demands.
“Damn it,” Marklos growls. Because, of course, my mother’s blood—which I borrowed both twelve and a half years agoandjust a moment ago, moving it from her finger to my own in droplets too small to spot—doesn’t have any power in it.
“See?” I say, unable to rein in my grin. “I told you I’m not a—”
Marklos backhands me, snapping my head sideways and causing black stars to explode in my vision. Before I know what’s happening, he unsheathes his dagger and draws it across my palmin a burning slash. I cry out, trying to wrench my hand away, but he doesn’t let me. There’s no way I can withhold the flood of blood, not with how deep the cut is and how badly my skull is ringing.
The captain jerks my wrist, whipping a red splatter across the marble in front of us. At his gesture, it turns to fire that burns brighter, hotter, and more violently than if fueled by a barrel of pitch. Anyone nearby has to back away from the inferno.
“Nowdo you see?” Marklos cries.
That’s all he manages to say before he’s lifted off his feet and thrown across the hall. He slams into a marble pillar with a sickening wet smack.
I see my father’s arm outstretched before him. It’s shaking.
“Never touch her,” he snarls, and his fingers twitch to sketch more sigils. But before he can, he doubles over as if in pain, then collapses to his knees. He’s immediately surrounded by wards, and I can’t see what’s happening no matter how I try.
Marklos peels himself off the pillar, clutching his head and leaving a misty red outline of his body behind on the white marble. My father moved the captain using his blood, just how I slowed Bethea’s fall, except so forcefully that some sprayed out the back of him, never mind what’s now oozing through his fingers from his cracked skull.
That doesn’t stop him from finally saying what he’s wanted to all along. “This,” the captain snarls, pointing a bloody finger at me, “is Silvean Ballacra’s daughter, and probably the most powerful bloodmage in the city, second to him.”
For a moment, there’s silence. And then shouting as I’m swarmed by wards, my arms seized. I can’t spot my mother in the writhing chaos, but I hear her scream my name and then—agony in her voice—my father’s name. Struggling against my captors, Icatch a glimpse of my father dragging himself to his feet with his cane. Between the sound of my mother and the sight of him, I feel like I’m tearing in half.
None of the wards try to hold my father, either to help him up or to restrain him. And then I see it: the pale hand resting on his arm that’s attached to nothing but air. No, not nothing. It comes from the shadow at my father’s side.
His guardian. My father has been warded. Of course he has, if he’s now part of this world and living in the palace. I just hadn’t had the chance to realize it yet, to spot the smudge of darkness behind him. Now it’s all I can see, even after the ghostly hand vanishes back into shadow.
A deep stillness settles over the dark blur. It almost seems to be looking right back at me.
Feeling drains from my body, leaving me numb. I shudder involuntarily.
Lady Acantha calls for order until everyone falls quiet. She sits in a pillar of sunlight. “While most unexpected,” she begins in a normal voice, clearing her throat, “this is most fortuitous.” She turns to my father, who leans heavily on his cane for balance. “You desperately need to pass on your bloodline, don’t you, Silvean? It looks like we finally have an heir of your blood to allow it. Though, by the sound of it, she’s not turning out to be any more biddable or loyal to her polis than you.”
“This is not my polis,” he hisses, panting with effort.
“But it is hers,” Acantha says with a brisk nod toward me. “And perhaps she will be made fit to serve it with the right guidance. And with a guardian, of course.”
A guardian. I will be warded, just like my father. This is everything we wanted to stop. I’m not sure what the councilwoman means about my father passing on his bloodline, but I know it can’t be good, not with that look on his face.
He meets my eyes. There are tears in his. “I’m so sorry, love,” he says.
And then he collapses.
I let out a wild cry, a terrible emotion sweeping me up on its crest. Before I can lunge for him, Marklos makes another one of those twisting, slashing motions with his hand—plenty of blood on his fingers to aid him—and I join my father on the floor.
4
I’m having a curious dream. At least, I hope it’s a dream. I’m laid out on a cold stone slab in a dark room, naked save for a white sheet draping my body up to the shoulders. A few candles surround me, illuminating a haze of incense drifting in the air like a low fog and casting faint light on my too-pale skin. I look dead, and someone is chanting something that sounds suspiciously like funeral rights nearby.
I can see all of this, because I’m not reallyinmy body, but floating above and looking down, as insubstantial as the incense. Am I a spirit, cut loose from my flesh? Am Iactuallydead—a shade? With the weight of my physical form has gone all my earthly cares. I really don’t mind that I might be gone.
“You’re not dead,” says a calm, deep voice.
I turn—thoughturnisn’t really the right word. Rather, I redirect my focus, and suddenly I’m in a black stone chamber with no doors or windows. The room with the stone slab, the chanting, the candles, and the incense have all vanished. I’m somehow standing on two feet in a body that isn’t quite substantial. Thank the goddess I’m clothed in a simple white chiton and not naked, because I’m not alone.
A man stands in the chamber with me, in the shadows opposite. When he sees he has my attention, he shifts forward into better lighting—which is still minimal but enough for me to make out his features.
Black hair falls in curls to his shoulders, tucked behind his ears by a dull silver circlet. His face is beardless except for a slight shadow of stubble on his pale skin, and he appears to be in his early twenties. He almost looks normal—though abnormally striking—except he wears a strange knee-length chiton all in black, layered with a breastplate, sword belt, and skirt of featherlike strips that I’ve seen warriors wear—pteryges, I recall—all in black leather. Bracers of the same material, with silver studs, adorn his forearms, studded black leather greaves his legs, and black sandals his feet. His eyes are no color I can detect, like his pupils have swallowed the irises.
