House of Sand and Secrets (Books of Oreyn #2)(82)

I stand stiffly before her. Her fingers press against her neck as she goes still. My courage returns, and with it my knowledge that I must confront my own capacity for cruelty. “I apologize.” The words hang cold and stark in the room. “It was a vile action – an unworthy one. You did not deserve my anger.”

The room is silent with expectation and the vampires are watching her with a slit-eyed patience, like hunting animals.

She breathes in deeply through her nose then nods once, a curt little acceptance.

“It seems,” says Guyin slowly, almost as if he cannot believe it himself, “that the Lady Eline had no knowledge of her husband’s actions.”

She swallows and drops her fingers. “Please, just Carien.” Her eyes close slowly and deliberately. When she opens them again the amber is muted, a forest brown full of shadows. She’s in hiding. “The Lord Guyin – Harun–” She smiles thinly. “–told me that you have in your possession a bat that belonged to my husband. I would like to see it.”



*



Merril is barely fit to walk. Just watching him stumble forward, wincing with every step taken, makes the guilt in me fester. He hurt Jannik, that is true, but all I can see is a child destroyed by a man who truly believed him nothing more than an animal. He’s a wild thing – a feral dog, starved and kicked. He took his chance when he saw it. It could have been anyone of us he attacked. Jannik was simply the closest. I check my thoughts. Is House Eline’s prejudice tainting even me? He’s not a dog. But something will have to be done and for now, I have no idea. We can’t keep him caged up forever. “Merril?”

He looks up at my voice, lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl. He lunges back as I reach out one hand to him.

“Felicita, what are you doing?” Jannik holds Merril still, keeping his grip tight on the boy’s bound arms.

Merril’s cheek is rough, slightly pocked and badly shaved. The hollows of his eyes are purple-black, the skin stretched too-tight over his bones. His broken nose is swollen and the bridge is skew, the bruise bloody. There are scrapes on his mouth where the flesh is raw. My fingers run lightly down his cheek, and I think of the child he must have been, bought and sold. This close I can hear the uncomfortable wheeze of his breath, smell the curious damp must, as if there is no way to scrub clean the taint of that cellar, and I realize what we have done to him. He is still a prisoner, but we have taken him away from his own version of safety. I can’t give him back, even if that’s what he wants.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him softly. And it’s for more than hurting him; it’s for being born one of them – a Lammer whose belief in my own superiority is so ingrained it never even occurred to me that others suffered merely so that I wouldn’t have to think. “I will make Eline pay for this.” I drop my hand.

He stares at me, eyes unguarded and dark.

Jannik looks at me over Merril’s shoulder and he smiles just slightly, enough to let me know he understands what I mean. Then, with a gentleness to match my own, he pushes Merril forward, nudging him into the room where Carien is waiting to see this relic of her husband’s perversities.

Her face doesn’t change when we enter. She looks Merril up and down, appraising him like a nilly at a market. Finally, satisfied, she takes out her small pipe and pinches poisonink into the bowl, and lights it with a match. She takes a long thoughtful drag on the pipe and hides herself in a cloud of iron-grey smoke before talking. “You belonged to my husband?”

Merril nods, and a small muscle in his cheek twitches, jumping under the discoloured skin.

“I see.” She blows more fumes around her, wrapping her indecision in the sharp smell of a high. I can almost see the questions she wants to ask him but cannot bring herself to say out loud – not here, not in front of us. None of us have had the cruelty to ask Merril how he has been used. I think we all already know. He is, after all, a rookery vampire. Perhaps that is another reason why Isidro hates and fears him so much. Merril is a reminder of his past, of what he has been and done. All the things he has tried to forget about himself. It’s harder to hate someone when you see through to their fears.

She sniffs, thoughtfully. “He likes to own things. It makes him happy. Did he make you sing for him, little lark?”

Merril bares his teeth.

There is an understanding between them. Harun looks out the window, preserving some kind of dignity. It’s easy for men to be weak and merciful when it suits them. The burden falls on me to stab the knife deep.

“So now, as awkward as this is, I must ask where you stand,” I say to Carien.

She draws her gaze away from Merril to stare at me with a mulish unblinking gaze. “With regards to?”

“This.” I sweep my hand across the room. “Us, and your husband. Are you for us, against us?”

Another deep drag on her pipe. Her teeth click against the ivory and the smoke pours from her mouth and nose. “I must admit that games have never taken my fancy. I always preferred to watch from the side lines.”

“This is not a game,” Harun says. “I’ve heard enough.”

“Is that so?” Carien lifts one arched brow. “And what then do you plan to do to me – am I to stay here a prisoner? I could have lied. But I offered you the truth. I am not interested in your bats, in who owns whom. Is that not enough for you?”