“Your new master provided a silk mask for the journey and a standard pureblood cloak,” he said apologetically, “but, as you are yet under Registry restriction, you must be delivered wearing this and the recondeur’s yellow. Your protocols within Prince Osriel’s house will be his choice, of course.”
No protections in a recondeur’s contract. My master could require that I wear this mask forever. My stomach clenched. Sweat dribbled down my back and sides as the pressure of Silos’s hand on my shoulder buckled my wobbling knees. He latched the band about my neck and secured the strip over my head, leaving me half blind, half deaf, and completely muted. Suffocating.
I panicked, trying to clear my clogging nostril, trying to suck enough air through the exposed half of my tight-bound mouth that I would not die. I scraped my arms across my face as if I could dislodge the hateful metal, and when I could not, I slung my bundled fists wildly into Silos, dug my feet into the rug, and lunged forward. My grandfather’s whimpers and screams drifted through the open doorway as they did in every hour in that house.
“Settle, plebeiu,” said Silos. He grasped my flailing arms and shoved me down again. “Settle. You’ve plenty of air, if you’ll just calm down.”
His firm assurances eventually slowed my heart, and my gratitude set me weeping. He knelt to shackle my ankles, then hoisted me up and propelled me through the door.
The unending symphony of madness from the corner apartments accompanied our journey through the courtyards and arches. Poor devil. I sniffled like a sentimental drunkard. I’m as mad as you, Capatronn. They’ll lock me up in my own filth, too.
Ssst…Silos. My sister beckoned to us from a grape arbor threaded with dead vines. We’re here to save him.
Silos did not turn his head. I slowed, glancing over my shoulders. Seeing with only one useful eye made everything seem flat and out of proportion.
I bumped Silos’s shoulder and nodded toward Thalassa, who now crouched behind a statue of Erdru with his goat’s legs. Or were they her goat’s legs?
The temple guard prodded me to keep walking. I stepped in front of him, forcing him to stop, grunting, jerking my head, and pointing my hands toward my sister. Look at her. Are you blind?
Silos paused and spun in a slow circle, stopping only when he faced me again. “Stop playing, plebeiu. I don’t know what you want.”
I whipped my eyes back to the statue. And then to the arbor. Thalassa had vanished. Far behind me, my grandfather cackled. Frenzied, the voice of my fear sealed behind the metal half lips of my mask, I dodged in front of Silos again, pounding my bundled hands on his temple badge and then on my own chest.
“No, plebeiu. I cannot take you to the temple.”
Grasping my shoulders, he turned me around and gave me a gentle shove toward the main house. Halting again, I tried to show Silos where Abbot Luviar perched beside a crow on a lichen-covered column. Then I pointed out Gildas, grinning from behind a dormant tree.
“What is it, plebeiu? What’s wrong with you? Move along.”
I hobbled forward. Blinked. The garden was empty of all but me and my jailer.
One more glance over my shoulder. The naked man sat cross-legged, tucked into the frost-glazed shrubbery, his gleaming dragon sigils silver in the morning haze. Eyes the crisp gold of autumn aspen observed us. Curious. Disdainful. The world blurred as I turned away, my throat swollen with grief. Illusions. Visions. Not real.
We passed through an arched gate and into the house.
Crystal lamps chased the gray morning from the columned reception room. I blotted my damp face on my sleeve and forced myself calm, trying to grasp what was real. I was surrounded by the familiar—the richly colored tapestries that my ancestors had brought from Aurellia, the luminous marble statue of Kemen and his belt of stars, wrought by some Pyrrhan master centuries ago, and the enameled urns and gilt caskets brought from exotic Syanar and set here on pedestals shaped like bundles of reeds. Beneath my feet gleamed the silver and blue mosaic tiles that my grandfather had salvaged from a ruined temple on the isle of Caraskan, shipped to Navronne, and reassembled here to display the order of sun, moon, and earth.
Just beyond the vulgar and exotic display of my family’s wealth shone the burnished breastplates of four well-armed warriors who flanked the doorway to the outer courts. The warriors stood at attention, lances at rest, their surcoats the rich, dark green of holly leaves and blazoned with the silver wolf of Evanore, a white trilliot under its paw.
Silos closed and locked the inner door behind me. Holy gods…whoever you are…please wake me from this nightmare. Where were distracting visions when I needed them most?
“This is he?” The words scoured skin and soul like windblown sleet.
The speaker walked in alongside my father. Though the mailed forearms that bulged from his holly-green surcoat were formidable, and his thighs might have been piers for Caedmon’s Bridge, it was his face that caused my bowels to seize. Where half of mine was encased in graven silver, half of his was fleshless scars, leathery creases and ruptures surely caused by burning oil or systematic beatings with hot irons that destroyed flesh and sinew and underlying bone. The eye buried within this horror was but a dark slit. The other, fathomless in its emptiness and limitless in its disdain, briskly scoured my sorry turnout.
When Silos prodded my back, I bowed ungracefully to my father and the visitor at once. The planets beneath my feet spun in their paths.
“Magnus Valentia de Cartamandua-Celestine,” said my father. “A male pureblood of seven-and-twenty years, his bloodlines registered before birth, witnessed and verified through ten generations. Contracted for unspecified service to His Grace, the Duc of Evanore, for lifetime duration.”
Of course, this grotesque man was not the prince. Osriel was the youngest of the three brothers, close to my own age. This man’s hair, trimmed close to his skull, was mottled gray.
He clasped his gloved hands behind his back, well away from the sword sheathed at one hip and the Evanori battle-ax ready at the other. “Recalcitrant, you said. Incorrigible. But I did not expect shackles in his family home. Is he violent, mad, or merely undisciplined?” He did not sound as if he cared which.
“Not mad,” said my father. “Undisciplined certainly. The hand bindings prevent his triggering any spellworking. The shackles prevent him trying to escape his duty. He has willingly participated in armed combat, so I would put no violence past him. Mardane Voushanti, I clearly spelled out his history when we spoke yesterday.”
Unfair! I yelled inside. To hint at violence to this stranger when I can’t defend myself.
“It is no matter,” said Voushanti, returning his gaze from my father to me. “My lord imposes his own discipline. He anticipates training a pureblood to his service, a pleasure he has not yet indulged as he has always found the standard contracts too restrictive. Now if your documents are in order…we are in a hurry.”
At a small desk of polished rosewood, my father unrolled the scroll he had sealed at dinner. Mardane Voushanti flicked a finger at one of the warriors, who opened the door. A servant carried in an iron casket and deposited it on the desk. The Evanori lord accepted the scroll. He exchanged bows with my father. And thus was I sold like a slab of meat. Silos’s iron hand gripped my arm, else I would have run, shackles or no, flaccid limbs or no, madness or no.
An excruciating cramp shot through my arms and shoulders, followed by a wash of heat and a shuddering release—an instant’s euphoria before my spirits plunged to the depths, as if an uncrushed nivat seed had only now dissolved to work its perverse magic. One rapturous sensation, swept away in a heartbeat, leaving me dizzy…hungry. The doulon, unmistakably. I had never experienced such a momentary burst, more than an hour after the use.