Page 43 of In the Ravenous Dark
No one else visits me. Not Penelope, not Japha, and not—I shudder even to think—mybetrothed. I sleep fitfully, but never for long. I’m tired, bone deep, but as soon as I close my eyes, I see my father fall to the ground, and I feel blood and fire wash over my skin, leaving behind the burn of these sigils.
The bloodline itself doesn’t hurt after a while. It swirls in my head like a braided river, beckoning me to follow its sinuous lines, to make a path of its sigils, to weave their glowing strands into a tapestry magnificent or terrible.
But not all hurts affect the flesh. Some reach the spirit.
My father is gone, nearly as soon as I got him back. It’s almost worse this way—not only a fresh pain, but a reopening of every deep cut his absence inflicted upon me as a child, which I’ve tried so hard to bandage over the years.
But the thought of my mother always keeps me from falling. I try to stay strong for her, to see her safe at home and supported. There’s still hope for my mother, and even for myself, much more distant. It’s that hope that reaches out and lifts me up.
I’m not allowed to see my mother, no matter how many times I ask, and so I refuse to leave my bed until I feel ready. It doesn’t hurt that I truly need the time to heal and regain my strength.
No more than a week after I’ve received my bloodline, no more than a week during which I cry all the tears I have inside me and heal all the wounds Icanheal, I finally get up.
I have three weeks. Three weeks to either enjoy the last of my life as I know it, or three weeks to find an alternative to my fate.
And there’s an alternative I haven’t yet considered. I don’t want to, but it’s there, another path branching. Except this one is much darker.
The apartment has been emptied of all but my meager belongings and the furniture. Drifting around, I feel a little like a ghost here without my father or the others. It seems my aunt, now without her daughterorher husband, has moved out, leaving the whole place to me alone. I have a hunch where she’s gone, but I have more important things to investigate and I don’t really care.
I can’t celebrate my solitude, besides. I won’t be left alone here for long. Either I’ll be forced to marry Kineas and join him in his quarters, or I’ll escape from Thanopolis… or I’ll be dead.
14
I assume I’ll meet resistance trying to go to my father’s office, either from the dead man or any number of people who might be overly curious about the whereabouts of the late Silvean Ballacra’s daughter and Crown Prince Kineas’s new betrothed. But everyone seems content to let my guardian keep track of me. It’s the one benefit to being warded, I suppose, and the dead man doesn’t seem to have any objection as I steal out of my palace apartments in the early morning and venture down the long, blossom-entwined marble corridors. It’s peaceful at this hour, a breath of morning dew and the perfume of flowers in the air. It perturbs me that I’m already growing used to the ridiculous wealth surrounding me.
At my destination I finally meet some resistance, but only in the form of the vine-carved wooden door. It doesn’t seem to be locked, at least not with any physical mechanism. My father opened it with sigils.
I havethousandsof sigils as my disposal now, thanks to my bloodline, but I don’t know how to use them properly. My father never got the chance to teach me like he promised, and now he never will. I hate the sight of them. Their true meanings come to me in flashes of inspiration or murderous rage—a glowing path of them opening in my mind, guiding me to wondrous or horrible possibilities. And yet, something as mundane as opening a door seems beyond my reach at the moment. Or at least nothing comes to mind, no magical way forward, as I consider the door.
Maybe if I simply try tomovethe door…
At the thought, the jamb explodes inward in a shower of splinters, whipping the door on its hinges to crash violently against the inner wall.
I glance around in shock. “Oops.”
The dead man shoots me an exasperated look as he appears next to me. The only other people nearby are across the gardens that sprawl before my father’s office. I quickly duck into the ruined doorway to avoid their notice.
I leave the dead man outside. He doesn’t try to follow me, only looks mildly amused as I try to close the door in his face; it hangs crookedly now and doesn’t latch. And yetthisI can do. I simply move all the wood back into place… except with more delicacy this time. When I’m finished, it looks as if I never touched it.
After I’m standing inside, safely alone—though nevertrulyalone with the dead man lurking who knows where—I don’t know where to begin. I light a lamp near the door with a wave of my fingers, tracing the less familiar sigil in the air. Other lamps follow its lead, one by one, around the office.Igniteis a sigil I’ve only just learned from Japha. My father never trusted me with it as a child—perhaps with good reason.
I step carefully over piles of books and papers on the floor that my father already managed to displace since I organized the space for him before he died.
I have to blink the sting from my eyes as I imagine him leaning against his desk, tired but smiling at me. He wasjusthere, in this spot, and now it seems so impossible and wrong that he isn’t. That he’s simplygone.
Icannotget lost in crying again. To distract myself, I move to study the piece of paper tacked to the wall, the one he seemed to indicate was important last time I was here with him. I stare at the sigil: a strange crisscross formed of thick, red lines, as if it’s been drawn in blood by the tip of a finger. I still have no clue what itmeans. Maybe one of the many books scattered around could tell me, if only I could read better.
You might just have to follow in my footsteps.
Follow your eye.
My father knew I couldn’t read well, sigils or otherwise. Maybe he left me more of amapto follow.
And maybe he drew that map on my skin, with his blood. He contributed new sigils to the bloodline as he gave me his life—his magical footsteps, in a sense.
I just have to use my eyes to find the path. He left me a starting point on the scrap of paper tacked to the wall. I look at the first place on my skin to occur to me, raising my right hand. And in the center of my palm, as if my father knew I would look there first, is the exact sigil on the wall. The only problem: It’s surrounded by other sigils, just like every other sigil on my body aside from the lone one on my cheek. If this is a map, a pathway, I have no idea where to go from here. But I can’t help the burst of hope that tears through me, and I grin like an idiot.
Then I realize Iaman idiot, and drop both my hand and my grin. The dead man can’t read my mind as far as I can tell, but heisincredibly adept at reading my body language. For reasons I don’t want to consider, the thought brings warmth to my cheeks.
