Page 96 of In the Ravenous Dark
I frown, feeling like one of the poor monkeys in the marketplace, forced to do a dance on command. I glance at Ivrilos, and he gives me a reassuring smile.
“Why not?” he asks. He doesn’t seem concerned about the predicament we’re in. His calm confidence seeps into me.
Maybe it’s his essence,hisknowing, that tells me how to do it. But my lips and my mouth move, trying to form the shape I have in mind, and using the space of my lungs. Ibreatheit.
“Skia,” I whisper.Shadowin the older language of Thanopolis. Like a curl of smoke, darkness coils into the air before me, twining around my upraised hand. It feels cool and almost comforting against my skin. “This magic doesn’t hurt me anymore,” I murmur, half in wonder. And then I summon fire with barely a thought. Flame twists around the shadow. Darkness and light entwined. “It feels like it complements my blood magic instead of fighting it.”
“Because you are living a half life,” the queen says. “As good as dead.”
“Maybe,” I say, trying not to feel the sting in her words. “But I’m still here, aren’t I? And death would mean the loss of my bloodline, and it’s still here, too. Maybe this is the only way to truly use blood magic and death magic together. To inhabit the space between.”
The queen practically sniffs. “I’d rather be alive.”
“And go mad and rot?” I snap, and then nod at the two fading bloodmages, standing right next to me. “I hope they have fun with that. I’m trying to look on the bright side here.”
“Still, what else can you offer?”
I drop my hand in disbelief, the shadow and flame vanishing. “Shall we turn this into a trial by combat?” I look around and smile, and I know it’s feral. “Because I can also fight”—I toss my head at Ivrilos, whom they can all see standing with the relaxed confidence of one of those tigers—“like him.”
“No,” Ivrilos says. “Like never before. LikeInever have before.” He looks at me with pride. “You’re much stronger than I was in life.We’remuch stronger.”
I turn my smile on the queen. “There you have it.”
“Even so,” the queen says. “There’s one thing you’re forgetting.”
I blink at her.
“What do you need to sustain yourself?”
Oh yeah, that.
She nods at Alldan, and he signals to a couple of guards. They leave the courtyard for a few moments and return with a bedraggled man suspended between them. He’s wearing a stained, nondescript gray chiton, its edges fraying. He’s obviously a prisoner of some sort.
“What is this?” I ask nervously.
“I just want to show everyone what it is that you eat, before we decide what to do with you,” the queen says.
I want to snarl at her. “I’m pretty sureIdecide what to do with me, and don’t they eat the same thing?” I gesture at the two blighted mages, whose red eyes track the man.
“We limit them to pigs’ blood when we can help it, but our worst criminals we sentence to satiate the darkness. We… borrowed… this one from Thanopolis’s prison. He was destined for the chopping block.” She nods at the man, whom the guards force to his knees in front of me. He stares at me with wide, frightened eyes. He moans but can’t seem to open his mouth. A bloodmage has probably locked it closed. Nobody likes to listen to screaming, after all. “This man is a murderer.”
I’ma murderer: of the two men guarding Kineas’s quarters and the other people I’ve gotten killed. My father. My mother. Bethea’s mother. Kineas. The guards in front of the royal gallery. The list probably goes on.
And it’s going to get longer if I can’t avert an oncoming war.
“He’s also a rapist,” the queen adds, watching me carefully.
Well.I’m definitely not that. I try to picture Kineas as I look at him.
Maybe it’s my hunger trying to convince me more than anything. I want to decry this as disgusting, and say I won’t have anything to do with it. But my stomach gives a strange, slow twinge. Not like a growl, as if I were alive, but the feel of an awakening beast rolling over.
Oh no.
I can’t stop staring at his neck.NowJapha looks a little sick. Delphia starts backing away, as if ready to flee the courtyard. Alldan surveys the situation with righteous distaste.
I want to slap him. All I did wasdie—trying to help him, no less—and this is what I get?
But next to me, Ivrilos merely shrugs. He obviously doesn’t find this whole display as horrible as I do, not after everything he’s done to survive life after death.
