Page 16 of In the Ravenous Dark
It looks as if there’s merely a shimmering glass pane between the outer farmlands of the city’s plateau, which are sunny and verdant, and the blowing expanse of ice and rock that sprawls across the horizon. The entire world outside is white, endless white, with huge clouds billowing up where the wind parts around the jagged black claws of boulders raking the blanket of snow. I’m facing north, then, not south toward the desert. I can see better than ever what the blight has done. It’s too much nothing. Too much death, especially with the jumbled ruins of old towns and cities poking up like broken teeth in a few places. The veil suddenly seems both incredibly frail and immensely powerful.
For a brief moment, I wish the veil would fall and the blight would bury Thanopolis. I wonder, too, for the first time, if my father has ever wished for the city’s demise after how its people have treated him.
My father is alive. I have to find him.
Casting around, I discover a length of cloth, deep green like the one my father wore, and heavily embroidered with twining vines. I throw it over my shoulders, partially covering my thin night shift, and push open the bedroom door.
I’m in a sun-drenched marble hallway, lined in arches as delicate as spiderweb and spiraling windows of cut glass that also look out over the city.
“Oh, mistress!” a voice squeaks behind me. I spin to find a girl, younger than me, in the simple tunic of a servant. “I knocked because I heard a noise… If you had told me you were awake I would have… Shall I help you dress and put up your hair? That cloth is meant to be pinned as a peplos…”
Wearing it as such would be far more elegant, but I don’t care about thatormy hair, which is already more brushed than usual. I’ve never had a servant try to serve me, besides. This is all too much, too overwhelming, and I need to keep moving.
I half trip on a rug too plush for my feet, and hurry down the hallway, trying to ignore the dizzying wealth around me. I have to find…
Him.
I practically burst into a marble dining room lined in graceful columns, intricate tapestries, and verdant plants growing in elaborate shapes. He’s seated at the opposite end of a long, polished wooden table that looks like a vertical slice of a massive tree trunk, with a strange woman and a girl about my age on either side of him, both dressed in practical, short, and yet finely-woven chitons, hardened leather bracers on their wrists and leather headbands strapping down their hair. The woman has a long dark braid tossed over one shoulder, showing the first signs of gray, and sun-bronzed light skin; the girl’s hair is almost black, her skin warm brown, and yet there’s an obvious resemblance between them, likely mother and daughter. Neither has a bloodline. There’s a pair of wooden swords leaning against one wall, as if the women have just come in from a training session.
There’s something so familial about all of them seated here like this that for a moment I think perhaps my fatherdoeshave another child. But it doesn’t seem likely that this girl is his, not with the woman and my father being so light skinned. Besides, the girl would have been born about when I was, and my father lived with my mother and me for another seven years after that. And why else would everyone be so excited to discover my existence, if he already has a blood child?
“Rovan,” my father says, sounding slightly breathless. His cane is propped near his chair, a fine green himation draped around his shoulders. Time has marked his face as surely as the bloodline his skin. He lookssomuch older. He leaps up, as fast as he’s able with his cane, and takes a few quick, lurching steps toward me.
I take a step back, and he stops. My mouth works. “What…?” I’m not sure where to begin.
His own mouth seems incapable of forming words. His eyes hold too much to decipher. There’s pain in them, despair even, but he also looks at me as if he’s thought he would never see me again.
My stomach is churning. I fold my arms across my chest, wrapping myself in the cloth like a protective blanket, and stare back at him, my throat almost too tight to breathe, let alone speak.
“We weren’t sure when you would wake up,” he finally says. “Are you hungry?”
A strangled laugh escapes me. Food is the last thing on my mind. “What have they done to you? What do they want with me? And who arethey?” I ask finally, waving at the other two at the table. The woman and the girl stare at me like I’m an animal on parade, and not a very special one at that. Neither of them has gotten up.
“Who arewe?” the girl says. “More like, who areyou? This isourhome.”
My father turns to them distractedly. “This is Princess Penelope, the youngest sister of the crown prince, and her daughter, Crisea.” He doesn’t call the princess his wife, even though I know she is, nor Crisea his child. “Penelope, Crisea, this is Rovan… my daughter.” He gestures to a chair. “Please, Rovan, sit. You’ve been asleep since yesterday. I know the process can be draining.”
“The process,” I repeat, without moving for the chair. “You mean when I was bound to a dead man against my will? The same dead man who is your guardian, apparently?”
My father’s half smile doesn’t crease his eyes. “There’s not much of me left for him to guard, I’m afraid.”
“Silvean, sit down if she won’t, before you fall down.” Penelope’s tone is stern, impatient, and wholly practical. No love lost between them, then. The princess turns the same coolly assessinggaze on me. “Carrying the weight of a bloodline, especially one as heavy as his, wears on a body. The more powerful the bloodline, the worse it is. He should conserve his strength.”
“That’s it, my dear,” her father says with a bitter twist to his mouth. “It’s only my bloodline that’s using me up.”
She rolls her eyes. “Don’t start with your theories again, Silvean. No one wants to hear them.”
Goddess.They sound like an old married couple. Theyarean old married couple, and I can’t stand to hear it.
“I want to know,” I say, my voice rising. “What’susing you up, and how do we stop it?”
My father’s expression seems to soften at my concern, but Penelope speaks over him.
“As for what my family wants withyou, other than to see all rogue bloodmages warded… You’re the only one who can receive Silvean’s bloodline, which is becoming too heavy for him to carry. It’s a bloodline they can’t stand to lose, which they will if he collapses under its weight. You’re their best hope.” She saysbestas if I’m not very promising at all.
“But I don’t want it!” I cry. “I don’t wantanyof this!”
“Believe me when I say this is the last thing I ever wanted for you, too,” my father murmurs. “But you may not have a choice.”
