Page 99 of Pawn of the Cruel Princess
“Can I—get you something?” he rasps.
“Please don’t trouble yourself. I came to express my sympathy. About your brother.”
“The fireplace.” Ward drops into an armchair, and I take one nearby. “He burned to death in his own fireplace—passed out so hard that he didn’t even feel the flames.”
“Or someone killed him first, then dumped him into the fireplace.”
Ward’s swollen eyes blink at me, and tears overflow. Perhaps I should not have said that quite so bluntly.
“I don’t know what I’ll do without him,” Ward says faintly, reaching for a smokinghannasstick in a glass dish. “He was the strong one, the healthy one. Our parents will be heartbroken. And I can’t even tell them because of the godsdamned weather! They put my brother in the ice-house, Ruelle. In theice-house.” Another tear tracks a path along his cheek.
I am a decent judge of extreme human emotion—I’ve seen it all on the torture table—and Ward seems genuinely distraught. I can’t imagine him murdering his brother. What if it was a strange and terrible accident?
“Please, will you have a smoke with me? Please?” Ward’s gaze is bleary, pleading. “I need someone—no one else has come by today, except a servant to tell me that the Crown Princess is looking into Cowen’s death. As if that will do any good.”
He coughs and sags back into his chair, setting thehannasstick to his lips. They’re nice lips, thin and pliant, a match for the sharp, ascetic beauty of his face. When he passes me thehannas, I indulge him by taking a few hits before handing it back.
The effect is immediate. A thick veil drops over my brain, blurring my sight, and the room begins to tilt, slowly, terrifyingly, until I think I might slide along the slanting floor and hit the wall. But my chair doesn’t move.
“Ward.” My voice sounds garbled, as if I’m underwater. “What’s in thathannas?”
“I don’t share this blend with anyone,” he says. “Not justhannasorcinnar, my dear, but the best of both. It’s my orgasmic memory-melter. Gives you pleasure, helps you forget—about Cowen, about the others, about all of it. Only for a little while. I haven’t figured out how to make the memory erasure permanent.”
“But—I don’t take anything stronger thanhannas.” I blink, trying to clear the swirling black haze from my eyeballs. I clasp the chair’s armrests with both hands and attempt to pull myself up—at least I think I do. Maybe I’m not exerting any force at all. Or maybe the chair is sucking me back in, like a hungry mouth.
My laugh is slow, warped, shriller than usual. I try to stop laughing, to call out—call for whom? I can’t remember the name of the person I wanted.
And then colors bleed into the haze—beautiful spirals of the most exquisite color, separating into tendrils, weaving intricate patterns. I watch them, dazed. I cantasteeach distinct hue. They sparkle on my tongue, one crisp delight after another, while my nerves thrill unbearably. My sex tingles, tiny thrills racing through it, glittering along my spine, intensifying until I come hard, with a rush of more glorious colors—and I never touched myself.
Ward laughs while I gasp and quiver in the chair. “More?” He offers me the stick again.
I think I shouldn’t, but there’s no clear reason to latch onto. I can’t make my mouth form words of protest.
Ward leans over, shoving the end of the stick into my mouth. I try to hold my breath, but he pinches my nose until I can’t help inhaling more.
Color explodes through my brain while I stare, entranced. I’m motionless, helpless—paralyzed to the orgasmic bliss coursing through my body. Climax after climax surges through me, while dimly I can hear Ward sobbing, then gasping, then laughing.
Sometime later, in the wavery haze, I realize that I’ve stayed much too long. Ward and I are still in the chairs, side by side. The front of his pants is wet. My thighs are slick and trembling, and I’m coated with sweat, my hair damp and matted.
When he waves the stick toward me again, I push it away.
“Don’t be like that,” he says. “Think of how it could be—the two of us, married, studying and experimenting by day and then indulging in the wildest pleasures afterward. You and me and Ducayne, naked together every night, smoking this brilliant blend until we pass out from powerful orgasms. Not such a bad way to exist.”
“I need to leave.” I shape the words carefully. “Need to go. No one can see me—like this.”
“I have a balcony,” Ward tells me, and I listen hard because it’s so difficult to grasp words. “Walk along the balcony, open the door. That’s Cowen’s room. It exits into a different hallway.”
I manage to get to my feet. Gripping the furniture, I stumble toward the drapes along one side of Ward’s room. When I push them back, there are windowed doors and sheets of gray rain against a roiling black sky.
Reeling, I find a handle. Push a door open.
A blast of cold, rain-misted wind strikes my face. Under its bracing influence, I haul my scattered thoughts together and make a plan.
Walk along the balcony. Go into Cowen’s room. Exit by the back hallway so Penn doesn’t see you like this. Find somewhere to sleep it off so Ducayne won’t know.
After closing Ward’s door behind me, I sidle along the rain-slicked stone of the long balcony, toward the door that leads to Cowen’s room. I feel wretched, soiled somehow. My drug-addled brain can’t work out whether I’ve done something wrong, or if wrong was done to me.
How many doors have I passed? Gods… did I lose count? Which door was Ward’s? Did only two rooms open onto this balcony, or more?
