Inkmistress (Of Fire and Stars 0.5)(53)
As the warrior heaved Hal to his feet and shuffled him out of the room, the girl approached us and removed a set of glass vials from her belt pouch.
“Stop,” I said, my voice weak. “Don’t do this.” It terrified me to think what Nismae would do with my blood.
“I’m sorry,” the girl whispered softly. She jerked the blade out of my arm and blood gushed from the wound. I nearly blacked out, only aware enough to dimly note that the wound wasn’t spurting, which meant the knife had missed any major arteries. The wrap bracelet Ina had given me fell away—it had been cut clean through.
Nismae held me pinned against the door while Poe funneled my blood into glass vials. I stared at Ina, cycling between pain and rage. She watched the whole time as if my suffering was a show put on for her amusement. Somewhere deep inside, the cinder of anger born of her betrayal smoldered. I had never hurt her intentionally. Now she’d done it to me twice.
I deserved better than that.
They drained me until I could barely hold on to consciousness, until Nismae declared it enough. Then Nismae let me fall to the floor. I had no energy to try to fight them off or to run.
The needle pinched as Poe stitched me back together with confident hands. Nearby, Nismae flipped through the pages of my journal, her excitement growing as she read. The pit of dread in my stomach deepened. If she and her people had the ability to restore something like the chandelier I’d destroyed, I had no doubt she’d figure out how to decipher the notes Miriel and I had spent years compiling. She’d learn how to use my blood to enchant Ina and make her powerful beyond all reality—and like all enchantments, only their creator could break them.
“This is the last bit of luck we needed,” Nismae said, her face glowing with satisfaction as she shut the journal and gathered my vials.
“No,” I whispered, knowing it was futile. If Nismae hadn’t known how to enchant my blood before, the journal would give her all the information she needed. Combined with her own research, who knew what horrible things she’d be able to achieve?
“The king won’t know what hit him until I tear out his throat with my teeth,” Ina said.
I weakly turned my gaze to Poe.
“Let me die,” I whispered to her. If I bled enough, I could die like a regular mortal. In this state I would never be able to fight my way free of them. If they had enough peaceroot, they could keep me captive for a long time. They wouldn’t care about the vicious headaches caused by use of the herb. They could drain me as many times as they wanted. Perhaps they could even figure out a way to use my own blood and potions to force me to write for them. I prayed they wouldn’t use enough peaceroot to cause me to suffer the worst effects—necrosis of the fingers and toes.
Poe ducked her head and kept stitching, refusing to meet my eyes.
Nismae came over and crouched beside me.
“I wouldn’t dream of letting you die.” She brushed a lock of hair from my face, tucking it behind my ear as gently as a lover. “This is just the beginning.”
I shuddered, and a tear traced its way down my cheek.
“This is the least you can offer after the way you lied to me,” Ina cut in. “Your gift is what got us into this situation in the first place. Now it will make me queen.” The iciness of her voice froze me to the bone.
Poe bandaged my arm and tipped some liquid into my mouth. The bitter tang of it numbed my tongue, making my insides feel as though they were stuffed full of clumps of raw wool. My Sight faded into nothingness until my eyes were as ordinary as any mortal’s. By the time Nismae’s soldier returned to the room, I couldn’t even sense the second soul of his manifest in his body. I was blind.
“Put her up top by herself in one of the one-way chambers,” Nismae said. She pulled a loop of keys out of her pocket and unhooked an ornate one with a green stone mounted in the center of the bow. “Bring this back to me after you leave her.”
The large warrior took the key, slung me over his shoulder, and headed for the door through which Ina had come in. I tried to claw at him, to fight, to do something to get him to let me go. It took mere seconds for me to realize the futility of it. I couldn’t move the fingers on my left hand. The knife must have severed tendons. Without my magic, I had nothing.
The warrior carried me up flights and flights of stairs. My arm throbbed with every step he took, and I fell deeper into shock. When I thought we could surely ascend no farther without reaching a level of the building the same height as the top of the cliff we’d come down, the warrior inserted the key into a lock in the wall and then stepped through into a tiny turret room. It had only one notable feature—an empty archway that opened to the outside. The room stood so high that I could see the far side of the canyon. We’d risen above the fog. Night had begun to fall in halos of peach and purple that cut through the sky from the west like broken promises.
He set me on top of a ratty straw-stuffed pad through which I could feel every uneven spot on the stone floor, then manifested into a red-tailed hawk and winged out into the dying light. I lay on my side, staring through the archway with tears blurring my vision. When night finally fell, the stars glittered like vicious sparks in the velvet dark, reminding me that everything that had happened tonight was just like them—unchangeable and true.
CHAPTER 21
DAYS PASSED IN A HAZY STRING AS THE NIGHTSWIFTS let me heal. They took me to bathe often, no doubt to reduce the chances of infection in my wound. Meager portions of food were delivered twice each day, accompanied by tea that was syrupy with peaceroot and a substance that dulled my pain and left me too exhausted to do anything but sleep. I tried to avoid the tea, but they offered me no other liquid. Those who delivered it were never familiar and always left through the window by manifest as birds. My pleas to see Hal and questions about what they were doing with my blood were met with silence. Eventually I gave up speaking.