Page 93 of Crown of Darkness
Because nobody’s looking at them anymore.
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Chapter Eighteen
“What in Maia’s name just happened?” Finn groans, sinking into a seat at the council table. “I stopped to sit on the dam wall for a second and now I have thorns embedded in my ass.”
Thiago woke me an hour ago and I’d crawled out of bed for the meeting. He’d been wearing muddied leathers, and his dark hair was grimed with blood and dirt the last I saw him.
And now he’s late.
Finn and Thalia are the only ones pacing the council chambers.
I couldn’t be bothered dressing, so I simply drew a dressing gown over my nightrobe and ventured down here with bare feet.
“Maybe if you ask nicely, Eris might remove them,” Thalia tells Finn with a sweet smile.
Finn cuts her a look. “If I asked her to remove them, she’d pour salt in the wounds.”
“Few rewards are won without enduring great hardship.”
The pair of them bicker back and forth, while I lean forward and steal a handful of dried figs off the plate in the middle of the table. It groans with soft cheeses, hard-baked biscuits and dried fruits. Thalia’s doing, no doubt. She seems to take it upon herself to feed us at any and all opportunities.
“Speaking of Eris, where is she?” I stretch and yawn, tucking my feet up beneath me on my chair.
“Ransacking the city,” Finn says absently, staring at the map on the table.
“Cleaning the blood from her sword,” Thalia replies.
The double doors to the room slam open and Thiago strides in.
“Torturing our enemies,” Thiago says curtly.
Baylor follows at his heels, his green cloak swirling around his boots. I didn’t see him after Thiago rescued me, but he looks none the worse for wear.
“Princess,” he says, going to his knee in front of me. “Forgive me. I failed.”
“You didn’t fail,” I point out. “An enormous thorny rosebush attacked you and I had to run. I shouldn’t have left you.” I glance at Thiago. Bruises darken the side of his face and I’d been so exhausted when he put me in the bath, that I can’t even remember getting out of it. “What happened to your face?”
He gently touches the darkest bruise along his cheekbone. “What do you remember of your mother’s attack?”
Water gushing. Explosions. People screaming in the streets. A shiver runs through me. “That we drove her back.”
He bends to press a kiss to the top of my head. “You drove her back. I was too busy trying to defeat an enormous bramblethine that someone had dropped in the dam. It was punching holes straight through the stone walls.”
Not explosions then. But a bramblethine’s knotted power.
“Someone must have dropped a seed in the dam.” That’s why Mother’s Deathguard had been sent. Not just to attack the city and draw resources away from the dam, but to allow the bramblethine time enough to grow to full size.
I know I shouldn’t be shocked by now at the depths my mother will stoop too, but a hex like that? Bramblethine’s are twisted semi-animate creatures with no will of their own. They’re hexes brought to life. Take a wolf’s heart, knot a twisted string of brambles around it and bind it all together with a rabbit or squirrel’s entrails, until they form a kind of ‘seed’. Curse it and whisper enough hate to it over the years, and the hexes grow in power until you can practically feel the rage emanating off the seed.
Then all you need to do is add water.
They’ll grow several feet in a day, until they’re a monstrous creature that will lash out and kill or destroy anything that comes into close contact with it. They’re difficult to stop, and have ruined entire cities before.
They say there’s a castle in Somnus that is wholly swallowed up by a bramblethine. Originally it was in order to protect a princess cursed to sleep inside, but some stories say that when she woke from her enchanted sleep, the monster wouldn’t let her escape and so she lies there still, only now her sleep is eternal.
“How did you kill it?” Anger brews. There are innocent fae in this city. I blink and water is gushing toward me again, Ayelet’s arms wrapping tight around my waist as she screams—
