Radiance (Wraith Kings Book 1)(72)
“Do you have a strong stomach?” he asked. He looked even more severe than when he’d snapped the raider’s neck. Blood dripped off the sword he held, and his dark eyes glittered hard as diamonds in the moonlight.
“Get out of my way, Lord Pangion,” she snapped. He stepped aside, and she brushed past him to fall to her knees beside the prone figure in the grass.
Brishen lay before her, quiet and still. At least she thought it was him. A scream swelled in her chest, roiled into her throat, and seeped through her clenched teeth, an inhuman cry of anguish.
Anhuset hadn’t lied, but she hadn’t expounded either. Brishen’s face, elegant, regal, and sublime by Kai standards, was swollen beyond recognition, mottled with bruises and cuts and washed in blood. It streaked his cheeks in cracked black ribbons that ran from his hairline to his chin. His mouth had been split multiple times, and the high bridge of his nose was crooked and swelled to twice its width. His right eye had swollen shut, and where his left eye should have been; only a sunken eyelid over an empty socket remained.
She clapped a hand over her mouth but refused to close her eyes. Bruises covered every part of his body she could see, and her gaze froze on his hands. They hadn’t stopped with his eye. Ildiko traced a delicate line over the back of his left hand. The lethal claws that could split a man from gullet to navel yet tease her skin with the lightest touch, were ripped out, leaving behind only bloody, mangled nail beds. His right hand matched his left.
Ildiko stroked the air just above his head with a trembling hand, afraid to touch him, afraid his beaten, brutalized body would disintegrate before her eyes. She didn’t know what she wanted to do more—scream her anguish or shriek her rage. “My poor love,” she whispered. “Why?”
Serovek spoke behind her. “We think the leader got away. We slaughtered all but a half dozen who say they can tell us who hired them in exchange for mercy. What do you wish to do, Highness?”
Ildiko stared at Brishen, at the shallow rise and fall of his chest as he breathed gurgling breaths. He stank of blood and agony. The wind lifted a strand of his hair, and she caught it between two fingers. It stuck to her skin, matted with gore. She didn’t care who hired animals to unleash their savagery.
“Kill them,” she said in a flat voice. “Kill them all.”
*****
When they returned to Saggara, she sequestered herself in Brishen’s chamber and didn’t leave for four days. She bathed there, ate there, and dressed there. Except for brief dozing spells, she didn’t sleep there.
The small troop of healers who tended her husband came and went, each time assuring her that time, rest, and regular doses of marseret tisane would see him through his ordeal. Ildiko found it ironic that the poison sap used to bring Anhuset low served a more merciful purpose in staving off Brishen’s pain.
He slept peacefully, his bandaged hands resting across his stomach. More bandages covered the arrow wounds in his shoulder and legs. Ildiko sat for hours in a chair next to the bed, content to watch him. The swelling had slowly receded, and the blood and dirt were gone. His right eyelid twitched as he slept. The left she couldn’t see. White cloth swathed that side of his face, hiding the deep cut that ran from below his lower lashes to the top curve of his cheekbone, testament to the brutality used when his captors cut out his eye.
Delirium didn’t plague him, and he drank the tisanes the healers coaxed on him without waking. Ildiko read to him sometimes and ventured a song or two before her voice warbled too much to continue. Anhuset often visited, updating him on the fortress’s daily activities as if he sat before her, awake and demanding a status.
She didn’t stay long. Ildiko always knew when Anhuset was about to bolt from the chamber. Her hands flexed on her sword pommel as if she wanted nothing more than to kill Brishen’s torturers a second time. Ildiko knew exactly how she felt.
“You’ll send for me as soon as he wakes?” The same question each time before Anhuset escaped.
“Of course,” Ildiko promised each time she asked.
No longer afraid to touch him, she caressed the unbandaged side of Brishen’s face. Ildiko had once admired him, naked and glorious on his bed within a corona of golden sunlight, and thought him invulnerable. How terribly wrong she had been.
“This should never have happened, Brishen.” The inevitable, annoying tears threatened, and she blinked hard to force them back. “We were unimportant, you and I. We weren’t supposed to mean anything to anyone.”
A slow, deep sigh escaped his lips, and his right eyelid opened, revealing a glowing, lamplight gaze. Brishen’s voice was hoarse from disuse but still clear. “Woman of day,” he said slowly. “You mean everything to me.”
No amount of blinking this time held back Ildiko’s tears. They streamed down her cheeks to drip off her chin and onto Brishen’s shoulder. “Prince of night,” she said in a watery voice that echoed another moment when she’d greeted him with the same words. “You’ve come back to me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Brishen was a man who chose to see the good that came of any situation. He had yet to find it with the loss of his eye, but he had discovered it with the loss of his claws. While his recollection of his torture remained murky, his fingers still throbbed sometimes, as if the memory of a terrible pain had imbedded itself in his flesh. The nailbeds had healed over the months, the claws slowly growing across the exposed skin. They were still short—well below the quick—but lengthening and hardening every day. He’d have a full set of scythes on both hands within a year.