Her eyes peeled open, and she saw through a glassy vertigo that she was in a small room lit by several candles. Someone was holding her hair back, and though she felt her roots pulling, it didn’t hurt that much.
“Awake now, eh?” a man’s voice growled. “Well, drink, then.”
The hard lip of a bottle was pressed against her lips, and something wet poured into her mouth. She spit it out, confused, recognizing how she felt, remembering that something had happened but not sure what. There had been a woman, a terrible woman, a demon, and she had fled her, just as she had before…
“Swallow it,” the man snarled.
That was when Anne realized she was drunk.
She had been drunk a few times before with Austra. Mostly it had been pleasant, but on a few occasions she had been very sick.
How much had they made her drink while she was asleep?
Enough. Horribly she almost giggled.
The man held her nose and poured more of the stuff down her throat. It was like wine but oceans harsher and stronger. It went down this time, fire snaking through her throat and arriving in a belly already warmed to burning. She felt a sudden nausea, but then that cleared away. Her head was pulsing pleasantly, and things around her seemed to be happening much too quickly.
The man stepped to where she could see him. He wasn’t very old, maybe a few years older than she. He had curly brown hair, lighter at the ends, and hazel eyes. He wasn’t handsome, but he wasn’t ugly, either.
“There,” he said. “Look, there’s no reason for you to make this hard.”
Anne felt her eyes bug, and tears suddenly stung them. “Going to kill me,” she said, her words slurring. She wanted to say something much more complicated, but it wouldn’t come out.
“No, I’m not,” he said.
“Yes, you are.”
He frowned at her without speaking for a few moments.
“Why—why am I drunk?” she asked.
“So you don’t try to escape. I know you’re a shinecrafter. They say brandy makes it harder for you to use your arts.”
“I’m not a shinecrafter,” she snapped. Then, all restraint gone, she began shouting. “What do you want with me?”
“Me? Nothing. I’m just waiting for the rest. How did you get away, anyway? What were you doing alone?”
“My friends are coming,” she said. “Believe me. And when they get here, you’ll be sorry.”
“I’m already sorry,” the man said. “They left me here just in case, but I never thought I would have to deal with you.”
“Well, I—” But as soon as she started the thought, she lost it.
It was getting harder to think at all, in fact, and her earlier fear that she was losing her mind resurfaced as something of a private joke. Her lips felt huge and rubbery, and her tongue the size of her head.
“You gave me a lot to shr—drink.”
“Yes, I did.”
“When I fall asleep, you’re going to kill me.” She felt a tear collect in the corner of her eye and start down her cheek.
“No, that’s stupid. I would have killed you already, wouldn’t I? No, you’re wanted alive.”
“Why?”
“How should I know? I just work for my reytoirs. The others—”
“Aren’t coming back,” Anne said.
“What?”
“They’re all dead. Don’t you see that? All of your friends are dead.” She laughed, not quite sure why.
“You saw them?” he asked uneasily.
Anne nodded the lie. It felt as is if she were wiggling a huge kettle at the top of a narrow pole. “She killed them,” she said.
“She who?”
“The one you see in your nightmares,” she said tauntingly. “The one who creeps on you in the dark. She’s coming for me. You’ll be here when she finds me, and you’ll be sorry.”
The light was dimming. The candles were still lit but seemed to have faded somehow. The darkness wrapped around her like a comforter. Everything was spinning, and it seemed far too much trouble to talk.
“Corning…” she murmured, trying to keep a sense of urgency.
She didn’t fall asleep exactly, but her eyes closed, and her head seemed full of strange trumpets and unnatural lights.
She drifted in and out of scenes. She was in z’Espino, dressed like a maid, scrubbing laundry, and two women with large heads were making fun of her in a language she didn’t recognize.
She was on her own horse, Faster, riding so hard that she felt like vomiting.
She was in the house of her dead ancestors, the house of marble in Eslen-of-Shadows with Roderick, and he was kissing her on the bare flesh of her knee, moving up her thigh. She reached down to stroke his hair, and when he looked up at her, his eyes were maggoty holes.
She shrieked, and her eyes fluttered open to watery, half-focused reality. She was still in the little room. Someone’s head was pressed against her chest, and she realized with dull outrage that her bodice was open and someone was licking her. She was still in the chair, but his body was between her legs, which she could see were bare of stockings. He had hiked her skirts up all the way to her hips.
“No…” she murmured, pushing at him. “No.”
“Be still,” he hissed. “I told you this wouldn’t be so bad.”
“No!” Anne managed to scream.
“No one can hear you,” he said. “Calm down. I know how to do this.”
“No!”
But he ignored her, not understanding that she wasn’t yelling at him anymore.
She was yelling at her as she rose up from the shadows, her terrible teeth showing in a malicious grin.
4
A New Music
Leoff clung to his Black Marys. No matter how terrible they were, he knew waking would be worse.
And sometimes, in the miasma of darkness and embodied pain, among the distorted faces mouthing threats made all the more terrible by their unintelligibility, amid the worm-dripping corpses and flight across plains that gripped up to his knees like congealed blood, something pleasant shone through, like a clear vein of sunlight in a dark cloud.
This time, as usual, it was musicthe cool, sweet chiming of a hammarharp drifting through his agonized dreams like a saint’s breath.
Still he clenched; music had returned to him before, always beginning sweetly but then bending into dread modes that sent him plunging ever deeper into horror, until he put his hands to his ears and begged the holy saints to make it stop.
Yet it stayed sweet this time, if clumsy and amateurish.
Groaning, he pushed at the sticky womb of dream until he tore through to wakefulness.
He thought for a moment he had merely moved to another dream. He lay not on the cold, stinking stone he had become accustomed to but on a soft pallet, his head nested on a pillow. The stench of his own urine was replaced by the faint odor of juniper.
And most of all—most of all, the hammarharp was real, as was the man who sat on its bench, poking awkwardly at the keyboard.
“Prince Robert,” Leoff managed to croak. To his own ear his voice sounded stripped down, as if all the screaming he had done had shredded the cords of his throat.
The man on the stool turned and clapped his hands, apparently delighted, but the hard gems of his eyes reflected the candlelight and nothing more.
“Cavaor Leoff,” he said. “How nice of you to join me. Look, I’ve brought you a present.” He flourished his hands at the hammarharp. “It’s a good one, I’m told,” he went on. “From Virgenya.”
Leoff felt an odd, detached vibration in his limbs. He didn’t see any guards. He was alone with the prince, this man who had condemned him to the mercies of the praifec and his torturers.
He searched his surroundings further. He was in a room a good deal larger than the cell he had occupied when last sleep and delirium had claimed him. Besides the narrow wooden cot on which he lay and the hammarharp, there was another chair, a washbasin and pitcher of water, and—and here he had to rub his eyes—a bookshelf full of tomes and scrifti.