Blood Heir (Blood Heir Trilogy #1)(89)

The darkness came and went, but the pain was endless.

Ramson tried to rein his consciousness back from the depths of sleep, but then someone shook him.

He groaned and cracked an eye open. He immediately regretted it as bright light pierced his vision and the world swayed around him.

The air held the faded stench of blood and sweat. He recognized this room, with the bleeding walls and countless chains and the cupboard with vials of unknown poisons. He was once again in the dungeons of Kerlan’s estate—only this time, he was the prisoner.

His shoulders ached. He strained forward and found the familiar feeling of cuffs chafing against his wrists. Ramson sank back against the wall.

He had been here for hours, or perhaps longer—he couldn’t tell anymore. His interrogator, a hulking man in a black mask, was nowhere to be seen. Ramson’s eyes caught the pail of black water in the corner. A shudder ran involuntarily down his back as he remembered the suffocating feeling, the feeling of drowning.



“You’re awake.”

He would know that voice anywhere. Ramson swung his head to the source. “You.”

“Me,” Kerlan agreed pleasantly, as though he had just shown up on the doorstep of a neighbor. “I decided to take over, since my bruiser, too, needs sleep. That, and I only trust myself when it comes to these types of affairs.”

Ramson knew when Kerlan was trying to unsettle him. He turned his thoughts away.

Ana.

His chest tightened, and he forced himself to breathe steadily. She should be long gone by now, untraceable in the Syvern Taiga with her carriage and her alchemist.

Ramson had no idea where she was going, or if he would ever see her again. He’d consciously refrained from asking.

Kerlan was watching him with a smile. “Thinking about your girl, Ramson? Don’t worry. A friend of mine is seeing to it that she’s taken care of.”

Cold panic spread through his veins, and it was all that Ramson could do not to beg for an explanation. He forced his lips into a wicked snarl. “When are you going to do things yourself, Alaric, instead of sending your big musclemen—”

The blow came out of nowhere, a bolt of lightning to his head that sent him reeling. Ramson groaned and coughed, blood spattering the damp stone floor. “That felt personal, Alaric,” he wheezed.

“Did it? Well, I suppose the rest of your last few days will, too. Tell me, how do you wish to die, Ramson Quicktongue?” Kerlan paused. “Or should I say—Ramson Farrald?”

It was a name he hadn’t used in seven years, until tonight; a past he’d tried to bury by forging a new name and a new life for himself. Kerlan knew; and he wielded it now to inflict wounds that a blade never could.



Ransom growled, “You have no right to say that name, you son of a bitch.”

“You think you’ll ever be smarter than me, boy?” Kerlan hissed. “I have always been one step ahead of you. To me, you will forever be that poor, pathetic, sniveling beggar who crawled to my door seven years ago.” Kerlan’s laugh was a serrated blade as he lowered his face to Ramson’s. “You could have been great, my son. By my side, you might have changed the tides of this empire. Of the world. But now I suppose you’ll die unknown and irrelevant, your unmarked body rotting with the sewage of the Dams.” He grinned. “Just like your whore of a mother.”

Ramson spat at him.

Kerlan straightened, wiping the spit from his face as though he were cleaning some gravy from his cheek. “That felt personal, Ramson,” he said pleasantly, and Ramson knew that was Alaric Kerlan’s most dangerous tone yet. “And I suppose this will, too.”

At Kerlan’s signal, two members of the Order came in and shoved Ramson to his knees. The lashes of the whip nearly dragged him from consciousness. But it was when the bucket of black water came to meet his face that the real torture began.



* * *



—

Ramson knew the feeling of drowning well. As a Bregonian recruit, the trainers at the Blue Fort had wasted no time acquainting their pupils with the whims and wishes of the ocean. They learned to dive, to swim, to float, and to sink. They trained to hold their breaths in the ocean, to defy the need for air, and on some occasions, to nearly drown.



It was when Jonah Fisher died that Ramson realized one could never truly learn to drown.

It had happened one moon before the Embarkment, the most important examination of a Bregonian recruit’s career. At twelve years old, on the brink of adulthood, each recruit went through a rigorous mental and physical examination before a panel of the Navy’s most highly regarded fighters. The class was ranked, the rankings were published across Bregon, and captains of all ships in the Bregonian Navy came to select one recruit to take as an apprentice on their ship.

Exactly one moon before, Ramson had received a letter. It was from a healer in the small town of Elmford.

His mother was dying. It was something in the unhygienic water that the poor drank, the healer wrote, that caused rose-colored rashes and abdominal cramps and, in its last stages, high fevers.

His mother had asked for the healer only at the onset of the fever.

Ramson had felt the strength fade from him then, at that breakfast hall in the Blue Fort. Blue Fort recruits seldom visited home—at most once a year—but Ramson hadn’t been back since his father had shown up on his doorstep and taken him away in the middle of the night.