‘I thought I was lost.’ Her voice came out as a broken croak. It felt like she’d been screaming for weeks.
‘You’re safe. You’re here. With me.’ He didn’t sound so sure. ‘Oh Grace.’
‘It had me, like it had that woman. That Loam…’
She’d seen the darkness in the woman’s eyes, the void after the light. Those who were hollow were wild, out of control, but the Loam had known exactly what she was talking about. Or rather something inside her had. The same voices now lodged in Grace’s own head.
Bastien held her tighter. ‘Nightborn.’ He said the word like it was a curse. ‘The Deep Dark took one of the mageborn, drew on all her fear and pain, and made her nightborn. And then it killed her. Just to show us that it could.’
His touch, his warmth… she curled in against his chest. She could feel his heart, thudding away in harmony with her own.
But the warrant was still cold against her skin. Cold and empty, mottled with darkness.
She needed to focus. That was key now. Calm down, gather information, so she could understand. Think.
‘I’ve encountered hollow mageborn before. This was worse. She was coherent. But her voice…’
‘I know, love.’
He was watching her too closely, as if he expected her to… what? Attack him? Break down? Change?
‘I’m okay,’ she told him, even if she wasn’t so sure herself. Something felt different. That dreadful emptiness… What had that woman done to her?
She struggled to sit up, even when he protested and tried to make her lie down again. Bastien still thought he could boss her around. Perhaps he always would. It was almost endearing.
Grace smiled at him and, instead of obeying, she got out of the bed before he could stop her.
Her legs felt wobbly but she hid it, steeling herself.
‘Tell me about the nightborn,’ she said. It was morning anyway, almost. Not quite dawn and the hour of Lauds. But she wasn’t going to sleep now, not with those nightmares waiting. She should get up and start the search for Ellyn again.
She heard him move, slowly, carefully, like a stalking panther.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ He stroked the skin of her neck, always sensitive, responsive, especially to him. Slowly, deliberately, he lifted her nightshirt and let his hands explore underneath.
‘Trying to distract me, your highness?’ she asked.
He kissed the place where her neck met her shoulder, then the nape of her neck, sliding his arms around her to cup her breasts. His thumb teased over the tightening buds of her nipples. It sent shivers right through her and she suppressed a sigh of pleasure and pushed the temptation away.
‘Is it working?’ That teasing tone, so knowing, so arousing… He knew exactly what he was doing.
‘Answer me, Bastien. You know you’ll have to eventually.’
He sighed. The rush of his breath on her bare skin almost made her lose her mind. But it was his final play, wasn’t it? In other circumstances she would have smiled.
‘Nightborn,’ he said, as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to voice the name. ‘It was… it was long ago. I barely remember. I mean, I knew the stories but not the reality. I didn’t remember at all for many years.’
She looked over her shoulder, met his gaze. The shame of it haunted his eyes. ‘Not your fault.’
He smiled, or at least tried to. ‘No. Not my fault. But still…’ He fetched that soft, silken robe she loved so much. He slipped it around her and tied the belt. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed.
‘During the Magewar we lost control. The Deep Dark rose from the depths of the Maegen, from the place where my sister the Little Goddess and I had banished it, and it took the mageborn, transforming them, so many of them. By the time I realised what the nightborn were… well…’ He hung his head, unable to look at her.
Grace drew him back to the bed and sat beside him, tucking her legs under her and leaning against him. She wrapped her arms around him this time, her head on his shoulder, and she waited for him to find the strength to go on.
‘By the time I did… It was too late,’ he said on a shaking breath. For a moment, he choked, unable to continue. He inhaled, let the air back out in a rush. ‘It infected people. That’s the only word I’ve ever found to describe it. It wasn’t their fault. It was… it was like a plague and it would strike at any time. Weak, strong, whatever branch of the mageborn, it didn’t matter. First they went hollow. Then… then something else stepped into the space their magic had carved out inside them. Our siblings… Once the mageborn were empty, darkness filled them. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes all at once. Like the Loam tonight. And like her… they did terrible things. At first, perhaps, with some reason, in defence, out of fear… and then… then they just kept killing. Celeste even succumbed. I was the last one. Lost and alone. They burned the valley, trying to drive me out. That was where Larelwynn found me.’
‘Lucien Larelwynn?’ He’d never talked about that, about the pact and the boy who became a king. She stroked his hair. It was silky and thick, so dark against her skin. He leaned in to her touch, seeking out that comfort.
‘Yes. Lucien. He was… he was a good man. Kind. They never tell anyone that. I wouldn’t have trusted him otherwise. And I did, Grace. I trusted him until the day he died.’ His voice suddenly tightened. Grief. She recognised grief. Divinities, she had heard it in enough voices and she should be used to it by now. But it still hurt to hear it in his. Even after so long. But then, part of the cruelty of all of this, of Bastien’s stolen memories, was that he was reliving his losses over and over again. Every time he remembered, he lost his friends again.
‘You loved him.’ She wasn’t naïve enough to think she was the first person he loved. He’d lived so many lives. She took his hands in hers and squeezed.
‘I suppose…’ He hung his head again, and then lifted her hand to his mouth, kissing her skin. ‘It was long ago. Each of the nightborn was… is part of the Deep Dark incarnate. And the Deep Dark is legion, beyond counting, beyond number. It could overrun this whole world if it escaped. And that’s what it wants. It was only because of the pact with Lucien that I managed to bring it to ground, to shut it away beneath the Maegen. And now…’
Grace sighed, suddenly understanding. It finally made sense. ‘When you pulled me out of the Maegen’s depths, out of its grip, we broke something. We let it out. We gave it a way of escape. But the Loam died.’
‘Yes. It killed her. Deliberately. It only wanted me to know what it could do, I think. And to see you, and mark… mark the warrant…’ Mark her, that was what he meant. Change her.
The chill void inside her stirred a little and the warrant felt strangely heavy. Grace closed her eyes.
‘What did it do to me? To the warrant?’
‘I don’t know,’ he whispered. He wasn’t telling her everything. She knew that. She’d be a fool to think he’d share everything if he thought he was protecting her. Which he clearly did. ‘I need to go back to Thorndale. Where it all began. The source of all the mageborn power is there. And… and it’s where the Deep Dark comes from, too. I’ll be able to undo all this. We can make a stand, keep you safe, stop whatever it’s done…’ He paused, and she looked up to find him staring down at her.
‘But you don’t want to go back,’ she whispered.
He winced. ‘I don’t … I don’t remember everything that happened there. Not really. What fragments I have are dark and terrible, a bleak place of pain and fear… But, Grace, there’s no choice now. If going back there means stopping this, all of this…’
His hand lifted to the warrant, and he brushed it with a tentative finger.
Nothing happened. No reaction. It still felt icy against her skin. Like something dead.
‘What do you mean?’
He closed his eyes and leaned forward, pressing his forehead against hers, forcing his breath in and then out again. For a long moment she thought he wouldn’t answer and when he finall
y did, his voice was soft as a sigh.
‘The Deep Dark is coming, and all the nightborn will be coming with it.’
‘Coming?’
‘For me. For you. And for everyone we love.’
Chapter 7
Danny had always said Kurt would end up in more hot water than he could handle. Kurt had always told his little brother that he liked his water as hot as possible. The moment it cooled down he got suspicious. Because unless you were in trouble, how could you know you were truly alive?
It had always worked as a theory of life. For him anyway.
Sooner or later, he knew he would overdo it. But not yet.
The voyage home from the Valenti Islands had been peaceful enough. He’d enjoyed seeing his brother and surprising Grace Marchant. He even prided himself that there had been a bit of concern for him in her words. Just a little.
He liked his Duchess. Liked her fire and her fury, her straight-down-the-road attitude that always set his brother on the right path, too. It would have been far too easy for Daniel to have ended up in the same life as him. And he wanted better for the younger Parry than that. They had never had a dad. Or at least not one that stuck around for more than a year or so. Ma Parry had been tough as nails, too. Whoever fathered Daniel had left him something of a delicate nature compared to the rest of them.
Kurt had never bothered to ask if they had the same father, but he doubted it. It didn’t matter. Daniel was all he had since Ma died. And it was good to see him safe on Iliz, living in a palace with his pretty harper beside him, and if Kurt missed having Misha’s talents at work for him, there were others. He could spare him. The harper had been the best envoy he’d had, but he couldn’t begrudge Danny his happiness. Or his safety.
That was his one priority.
That and the remaining people of Eastferry. Mageborn and quotidian alike.
Melia was waiting on the quay. She’d been City Watch once. Before the Watch had been destroyed by the Royal Guard at Aurelie’s command, along with the Academy and pretty much all law and order in Rathlynn. She’d been a godsend for him as it turned out – careful, pragmatic, hard as any of the Eastferry gang members he usually employed. But she had a way with people. They weren’t terrified of her. That was useful.
He disembarked, paying off the final amount to the captain, who uttered nothing more than the usual grunt. Melia joined him.
‘All good?’ she asked.
‘Not a single complaint. What about here?’
‘Quite a number of complaints actually, but we dealt with them. Most of them. We have a problem. It’s a nasty business, Kurt.’
‘What’s that then?’
‘Mageborn.’ She made a face. Melia didn’t have a lot of time for the mageborn. ‘Acting… strangely…’
He frowned. ‘More strangely than usual?’
She shrugged. ‘I’ll show you. It isn’t pretty. We trapped one of them. Held him for you. It wasn’t easy.’
‘There’s more than one?’
Melia tilted her head to one side. ‘Yeah. But they’re gone now.’
The tone said it all. No humour there. Gone meant dead. This did not bode well.
She led him along the dock front, along a narrow lane only the rats would call home, to an empty warehouse. Ten of their toughest men and women guarded it. None of them looked happy, every nerve on edge, and no one would meet his eyes. These were hardened foot soldiers in his little makeshift army of Thorns. Whatever they’d seen had left them shaken. Kurt didn’t like it. The feeling of uncertainty made his skin itch.
‘What happened?’
‘It’s best you see first,’ Melia said. There was a tightness to her voice he’d never heard before. ‘We stopped him before it got too bad but… it took a lot to take him down. We weren’t expecting anything, no sign of going hollow or what-have-you. It came out of the blue. And he’s not the only one. Just the latest.’
With no Academy left in Rathlynn, everyone had to fend for themselves when the mageborn went hollow. It was happening more and more and they were under pressure. Kurt could hardly blame them. No Lord of Thorns to help them now. And if Aurelie’s people caught wind of them, she had them rounded up and locked away in the palace. Divinities knew what they did to the mageborn in there. Nothing good, that was for sure. So they hid. Taking off the collars helped only so much, because the collars themselves, with their embedded sigils, served to mitigate the effects of the magic inside them scrabbling to get out. They were afraid and fear made people desperate. And dangerous.
Kurt understood all of this. He’d made it his business to know about the lives of the mageborn. He helped people hide, sometimes helped them escape.
When mageborn went hollow there was precious little that would bring them back. They killed themselves, their magic tearing through them, sometimes taking others with them. It was brutal, but it was over pretty quickly.
This sounded worse than usual. Much worse.
Melia opened the door to the warehouse. It was a huge empty space and in the middle there was a cage, the type used to hold livestock of a more belligerent strain.
The man sitting on his own in the centre of it was playing with something that, at first, Kurt took to be a doll or a puppet. He dangled it in front of him, made it dance, bow, sat it on his knees. He laughed and smiled at it, and then flung it as hard as he could against the bars.
It made a sickening, wet crunch.
‘Shit,’ Kurt said. It was about as articulate as he could manage.
‘Yeah, don’t get too close, all right? He used to have to touch people to control them but he seems to have got stronger. We almost lost two of our people trapping him. And we only managed to lure him in there with the body.’
‘Whose body?’
Melia grimaced. ‘His daughter. He’d already killed her. We were too late to save her life. He was a Gore. I don’t know what the fuck he is now.’
Kurt couldn’t contain his horror. He stared as the man picked up the small figure again, chastised her for whatever he believed she had done wrong and began to play with her again. The body wasn’t going to last much longer. It was barely holding together as it was, only so much dead meat, broken bones and lengths of sinew.
Kurt Parry was not a man generally revolted by the grimmer aspects of his life, or life in Rathlynn, but he almost lost his last meal there and then.
Melia waited patiently while he recovered himself.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘We got a message sent from Chandler’s Row about noon. He’d gone insane, they said. But when we got there, no one was prepared for it. His eyes, Kurt, do you see his eyes?’
You couldn’t miss them. They were black as night. You could see neither iris or pupil, just emptiness. Like holes in his head. Like someone had dug them out and filled the sockets with liquid tar.
And he was clearly insane. No one acted like that when they were in their right mind. Not really. But the magic… it was stronger than Kurt had ever seen in anyone mageborn. Except perhaps Bastien Larelwynn and he wasn’t sure that really counted. If you believed Danny, the bastard prince was actually a god or something.
Plus, not insane. Not like this.
Maybe he could send word to them? Maybe Larelwynn would know something?
But that would take too long. And maybe Larelwynn wouldn’t answer. Besides, Kurt didn’t want to be beholden to the likes of him.
‘We need to find out what the fuck he is now,’ he muttered.
‘Do we need him alive to do that?’ Melia asked, matter-of-factly. He always appreciated that about her.
There was another wet crunch.
‘Definitely not.’
She pulled out a brutal-looking sigil as a precaution, one of the super strong ones they kept for special cases. They were starting to run low and Kurt didn’t like the prospect of running out, especially when faced with this new development.
‘You two, with me,’ Melia called, and grabbed a pike from the g
uards who joined them. The three of them circled the cage, but the Gore kept on playing with his daughter’s corpse. ‘On three,’ she told them, sigils ready in one hand, pike in the other.
It didn’t take long. Kurt wasn’t sure the Gore even knew what was happening and the pikes were long enough they didn’t have to get close. He’d been gone for some time, lost in his own dream or nightmare. The little body lay as still as his.
Kurt didn’t feel like food any more. He wanted the strongest drink he could lay his hands on at the Larks’ Rest. And he wanted some answers.
He could think of only one place to get them and it was not an enticing prospect. He needed to be careful. He needed a plan. Danny might joke about improvisation like it was a badge of honour but Kurt believed in setting out everything meticulously, right down to the smallest detail.
Melia came back to him, her heart beating just a bit too fast. No one else would probably notice, Kurt thought. But it always paid to pay attention.
‘You okay?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, boss. We’ll torch the bodies, scatter the ashes. Nasty business, that’s all.’ She ran her hands through her cropped hair and shuddered.
Nasty business was an understatement.
‘Tell Syl I want to see him, will you? I have a job for him. I’m going to need to get inside that bastard palace.’
Melia gave him a look that said he was insane. ‘Why?’
‘We need help, Mel. There are mageborn in there, ex-Academy, the ones we haven’t got out yet. One of them has got to know something about all this.’
Chapter 8
Bastien was woken by hammering on the door. He wasn’t even aware he’d fallen asleep, watching her, waiting for yet another nightmare. Grace was up first, on her feet and armed, murderous in her half-asleep state.
‘Stay there,’ she told him.
He wanted to remind her that he was the most powerful magical being in this world and that very little could hurt him, let alone kill him. And he wasn’t the one who’d been targeted in the last couple of days by unknown assailants or a host of dark gods intent on chaos. But she didn’t look in the mood for an argument.
Nightborn: Totally addictive fantasy fiction (The Hollow King Book 2) Page 6
