“Perhaps I’ll kill you myself,” she said, trying to inject some menace into her voice. The dragonmark on her back began to itch, and the tips of her fingers began to numb with cold.
“Take her,” Ibrido said.
For an instant, Esprë wondered whom he spoke to. Then the twin skeletons darted forward and grabbed her by her elbows. They shoved her back into the overstuffed couch and pinned her there.
Esprë struggled against the skeletons’ grasp, but they held her fast as steel. She kicked out at them, but they just draped their leg bones over her and pressed her feet to the floor too. She grabbed at them with her grave-chilled fingers, wishing them to die, to fall over at her feet into a pile of shuffled bones, but they ignored her.
“Your dragonmark has no power over those already dead,” Ibrido said. “Of all the creatures on this ship, only you, I, and the terrified bosun flying this ship still draw breath. They exist to help maintain this ship and to protect me. If I die, they have their orders.”
“Which are?” A ball of ice formed in Esprë’s gut.
“To kill you. To rend your corpse to pieces. To scatter it across open leagues of land.”
One thought speared through Esprë’s mind, and she gave voice to it. “What happened to Te’oma?”
The dragon-elf let loose a low, rumbling sound that Esprë guessed was meant to be a laugh.
“We had a parting of the ways,” Ibrido said. “She became a loose end, and I tied her off.”
“Where is she?” Esprë whispered, barely audible over the whistling wind.
Ibrido pointed a taloned finger over the young elf’s shoulder. She turned to gaze out the window and saw that something had been thrown through it from this side: something—or someone—who had probably fallen to her death.
Esprë bowed her head, her shoulders shaking. After a moment, she realized she was crying. How could she mourn for this twisted creature who had brought so much misery into her life? She didn’t know. She couldn’t explain her sadness to anyone, not even herself. All she could do was give herself over to it or fight it away.
She wept openly and unashamed.
“How ironic,” Ibrido said. “If she were here still, you’d be threatening her life as well. Now that she’s gone, though, you mourn her passing.”
The dragon-elf shook his head. “I do not understand the cruel tricks that fate plays on us all. That one such as you should have a gift like the Mark of Death bestowed upon you is beyond my ability to fathom. Is this a random world in which little makes sense, or is there some higher purpose to this choice that only the gods could possibly understand?”
Anger flared in Esprë’s heart. It was one thing for Ibrido to threaten her, but she could not abide being mocked. She kicked and struggled with the skeletons pinning her in place, but she made no headway against them.
As she tired, she glared up at the dragon-elf and said, “Why don’t you come a little closer and find out?”
Ibrido snorted at the young elf. Then he spoke to the skeletons. “Release her.”
The two creatures let Esprë go and stood up flanking her, ready to move against her again at Ibrido’s word. She rubbed the spots on her arms where they had pressed their thin, hard finger bones into her flesh, leaving livid marks. She wondered what the dragon-elf’s game might be, but she was willing to let him keep talking while she tried to figure a way out of this trouble.
Ibrido stepped forward until he was only a few feet from Esprë. She gauged the distance, wondering if she could reach out and touch him with her deadly power before he could dodge out of the way. It would be close, she was sure, and she was not ready to take that chance yet.
Then Ibrido leaned down until his snoutlike nose rested only inches from Esprë’s face. “Go ahead and give it a try,” he hissed through his long, sharp teeth. “You can kill me right here, right now. You can put an end to all of this. It will only cost you your life.”
The dragonmark started to burn on Esprë’s back. She wondered how it could get so hot and not scorch her shirt. She brought up her right hand, which felt as if she’d plunged it into a snow bank. She raised it toward Ibrido’s scaly face but stopped just before touching it.
The dragon-elf bared his teeth again. Esprë could smell old meat and fresh wine on his breath. “You may have something of the killer in you after all,” he said. “The changeling doubted it, but I can see it in your eyes. Still, you value life too much to risk tossing away your own, don’t you?”
Esprë growled in frustration as she threw herself back against the couch again. The icy sensation in her hand and the fiery one between her shoulder blades ebbed, each seeming to wash away the other.
Ibrido snorted as he stretched to his full height and glared down at Esprë with his unblinking, reptilian eyes. “I want you to remember this moment,” he said. “Etch it in your mind. Think back to it when you are brave enough to consider raising your hand against me again.
“I gave you your chance. I put myself almost literally in your hands. My life could have been yours to devour like an overripe fruit, but you were too cowardly to pluck it.”
With that, he spun on his heel and strode out the door. The two skeletons stayed there, standing at either end of the couch, undead escorts who gazed past her with nonexistent eyes.
37
“Who is your master?” Kandler asked.
Te’oma sat up in the bloodstained bed, the chains hanging from her collar and manacles rattling as she did. “You don’t want to know,” she said. “It’s not important any more.”
“Whoever you serve sent you along with a pack of bloodthirsty vampires and Karrnathi skeletons to destroy my town and kidnap my daughter from her own bed. It’s important to me.”
Kandler had chased this changeling across the whole of the Mournland and through the Talenta Plains into Karrnath. As long as he had her, he was determined to pump as much information out of her as he could.
Te’oma considered his words for a moment, staring up at the justicar with her blank, white eyes. Then she nodded. “I work for the Lich Queen.”
She paused for a moment, as if waiting for a bolt of lightning to come crashing out of the clear night sky and strike her down. When it failed to happen, she continued. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“She’s a powerful, undead wizard who lives among the pirate nations in the islands to the northeast of here.”
Te’oma shook her head. “That’s accurate but insufficient. It’s like calling a dragon a large lizard. It sells the creature short and illustrates your own ignorance.”
In the corner, Burch—who still sat perched in the room’s lone window, as he had for hours—lifted his crossbow off his lap and sighted down the length of its loaded bolt. The changeling eyed the tip of that bolt for a moment before turning her attention back to Kandler.
The justicar leaned forward. “Enlighten me,” he said.
“The Lich Queen lives in Illmarrow Castle, high in the Fingerbone Mountains, which rise out of the Bitter Sea as the island called Farlnen.”
“That’s on the northwest side of the Lhazaar Principalities?”
“You’re not as ignorant as you seem.”
Kandler gave her a mirthless smile. Let her underestimate him. Let her tell him things he already knew. He wasn’t here to impress her.
“What does the Lich Queen want with Esprë?” Kandler asked. “Mardakine is a long way from the Bitter Sea.”
“The lich queen wasn’t always a lich. In her breathing days, she was a powerful wizard by the name of Vol. This was back in the years of the Elf-Dragon War, which pitted the continents of Aerenal and Argonnessen against each other in a bitter conflict.
“Vol’s parents were the daughter of the leader of the House of Vol and the most powerful of the green dragons in all of Argonnessen. Their own parents arranged the marriage in an effort to bring the two factions together and perhaps put an end to the war. It did unify the elves and dragons, but not in the way the House of Vol had hoped.