T he Zorokov estate was just as beautiful as the Mikov estate had been, if not more-so. It was certainly grander, with more obvious signals of
wealth. Esmaris had so much power that he had little to prove, and his taste in decor had reflected that. Everything had been crafted immaculately out of white marble, the kind that needed no decoration to announce that it was wildly expensive—you just felt it.
The Zorokovs’ taste was a bit louder. Silver and gold edged the roofs of their buildings, which rose above us in blocks like an ivory mountain. We were all silent as the cart rumbled through the gates. More than a dozen of us were packed into this cart, all chained, though I was the only one to have multiple sets of restraints around both my wrists and my legs. They bound me to the bars, the bench, myself… like my captors were afraid I would fly away.
I would not fly away, of course. I was very good at being the perfect slave, the perfect prisoner.
I’d stood under many of these entry arches by now. Still, every time the shadow of another Lord’s sigil passed over me, I stiffened. I had always been standing at a different entrance, going back to a different master, back when I was just a child.
I swallowed this fear. I was no longer a child.
I watched the city as we rolled through, memorizing the layout. There were two walls, one around the broader city and another around the home itself. The streets were wide, I noted, and very straight. Convenient.
The little girl that had recognized me in the cage was here, too. She sat across from me, her neck craned to watch me the entire journey. Now she
leaned closer and said, quietly, “Did you really kill Esmaris Mikov?” I shook my head at her—not saying no, but saying, shush!
Too late. “Don’t talk to her,” one of the slavers snarled, and whacked her so hard across the face that her small body was flung against the woman next to her.
“Don’t do that!” I bit out, before I could stop myself. “She—”
WHACK.
Pain cracked across the back of my head. Everything faded.
 |
I WOKE up still in chains. My head was pounding. My stomach churned. I was half unconscious when I found myself on all fours, vomiting.
All my senses seemed dulled. By the time they started to return to me, the first thing I heard was a wordless sound of disgust.
“You wretched thing,” a rough, female voice muttered. “Now I have to clean that mess up.”
With great effort, I lifted my head, then sank back against the wall.
My wrists and ankles were all bound with iron and chained to the corner, where the wall met the floor. The floor was marble, like, no doubt, everything else in this house. A small bed sat to my left, just far enough that surely my chains were too short to lie on it. The room was tiny. A single desk. A single dusty mirror. No windows.
A thin woman with wiry grey hair and a stress-pinched face regarded me with open revulsion.
“I expected you to be bigger,” she said. “After all the trouble you’ve caused.”
I blinked at her blearily as my vision cleared. She wore fine clothes— slaves’ clothes, yes, but they were well-made, which meant she was a house slave. People of this class liked to be surrounded by visually appealing things.
She held a mop, which she slapped to the ground beside me to clean up my mess, hard enough to send flecks of it over my face.
“They’re thrilled to have you, let me tell you that.” “Where is this?” My voice was hoarse.
“Surely you aren’t stupid, after all you’ve done.” “The Zorokov house.”
The woman rolled her eyes in a way that I chose to interpret as agreement.
“The main house?” I asked. This was a house slave’s quarters that had been outfitted to keep me in. Not a dungeon, which would be in a separate building on the estate grounds.
“They want to keep you close. Hence why I’m here scooping up a prisoner’s vomit. Not usually my gods-damned job.”
A forceful scrub of the mob sent a small wave of watered-down vomit soaking through the hem of my tunic.
I scooted away from it. “And who are—”
“My daughter’s dead because of you, you know,” the woman cut out, without looking at me. “They took her hands first. I hear they sent ‘em to you.”
My mouth closed, a pang of hurt in my chest. I thought of those hands every day.
“I’m sorry.”
The woman shrugged. “Doesn’t do much for me now.”
I tried to reach for her with my magic, only to realize why my head was so fuzzy—it was only because I was so disoriented that I hadn’t recognized the sensation earlier. I had been dosed with Chryxalis. By the feel of it, massive amounts.
“You’ll be gone soon,” the woman said, slapping the mop down on the tile again. “I think that’ll be better for all of us. Just let everything go back to how it was. Back when you only got your hands cut off for stealing, not because some uppity Nyzrenese bitch decided to start a gods-damned civil war.”
I could tell her that she was too late. Even if I died today, the fire had grown too big to be stomped out. Too many people were too angry to ever go back to the way things were.
“What was your daughter’s name?” I said, instead, and her movements paused for a split second.
“Salen,” she said.
“That’s a beautiful name.”
Her eyes shot to me, as if I had said something horribly offensive. She looked quietly furious. Then she turned back to her work, running the mop
over the floor one more time and dropping it with a loud SPLASH into her bucket.
“She was a stupid, hotheaded girl. She thought what you were doing was just wonderful. Just loved it. Right up until the end.”
Rusty wheels screamed as she yanked her bucket of water to the door. “Wait,” I said. “What’s your name?”
She threw open the door. “Laron,” she said, and slammed it behind her.
|
I TRACKED the time by the warmth of the light that spilled beneath the door. I watched it grow colder, and then warmer again, due to the setting sun and the glow of lanterns in the hall.
That was when Lady Zorokov came to see me.
It had become obvious to me by then that they had pumped me full of a truly massive amount of drugs, made even more potent by the concussion I was clearly suffering. When Lady Zorokov entered the room, I couldn’t get my head to turn until she had been standing there for several full seconds. Once I did, my vision was so fuzzy that she seemed like an apparition, her long white dress pooling at the floor, golden curls falling nearly to her waist.
Two guards stood on either side of her, dressed in black, silent.
“It is lovely to see you again, Tisaanah,” she said, with a sweet smile and a voice that sounded like music.
“Likewise.” My voice, on the other hand, did not sound like music. Lady Zorokov laughed.
“Forgive me if I skip the pleasantries,” she said. “Today has been a very busy day, so let’s get down to it, shall we?”
And what, exactly, I wanted to ask, are we getting down to?
I didn’t have time. Because it only took seconds—less—for Lady Zorokov to nod to one of the guards, who then crossed the room in two long strides, grasped my right hand, and bent my small finger back until it snapped.
The pain exploded through me. I let out a strangled cry. I tried to yank my hand away, but the guard gripped my wrist too tightly to allow me to move.
“Again,” Lady Zorokov said, in a world that sounded very far away. “No—” I choked.
The guard grabbed my ring finger. Bent it back.
SNAP.
Oh gods oh gods oh gods oh gods—
My limbs thrashed on instinct, every part of me reaching out to strike him, to get away.
“Again.”
Perhaps if I had been able to think through the pain, I might have paid more attention to the way the guard cringed slightly before he obeyed, like he was stabbing some sort of vicious animal and bracing for inevitable retaliation.
He grabbed my two broken fingers and twisted. I didn’t realize I was screaming.
My restraints cut into my skin as I thrashed. Ages passed. Civilizations rose and fell. None of those things were as constant as this agony.
Lady Zorokov said something I couldn’t even hear over my own screams. The guard released my hand. I was shaking and covered in sweat.
The reprieve was only enough to let me catch my breath. Then the guard moved behind me and pushed me to the ground, pain spearing my dangling fingers as I used my hands to stop my fall.
RIP.
My shirt tore. My back was cold and bare, my shirt in tatters around my waist. The guard pushed me roughly to the ground, my chin nearly smacking the marble.
Lady Zorokov’s eyes flicked over me. She would have a full view of my back.
“Look at those scars,” she murmured. “What a shame. You had such a lovely body.”
I heard a sound I couldn’t identify behind me.
My heart was racing. I was so afraid. I’d forgotten what it was like to be at the mercy of another.
“Stop.” The word came out as a whimper.
“We’ll see whether you can make me.” She smiled. “Just like you made Esmaris Mikov stop. Do you know what his problem was? He loved you too much. The rest of us used to whisper about it when we went to those parties of his. The way he doted upon you.” She clicked her tongue and
nodded to my scars. “Those? Those are passion. But I promise you, darling, there is no passion in this. I take no joy in it.”
The knife moved slowly over my back, slicing a slow, straight line over my skin.
Oh gods. Oh gods. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think.
The knife dug deeper. I could feel the resistance of my skin, the sinew beneath it, parting. The knife moved down. Again.
An explosion of pain. Resistance.
They were peeling off parts of my skin. My self-control gave out. I screamed.
“Stop, stop, stop—” The word rolled from my lips without my permission. My muscles shook violently; my stomach lurched, and I would have been vomiting if there was anything left in me.
I felt him tear off another chunk of skin. It dropped in front of me, nearly grazing my nose. A bloody chunk of white-and-tan flesh against the marble.
Oh gods. I would die. This would kill me. I wouldn’t survive. “Can you make me stop, Tisaanah?” Lady Zorokov asked, calmly.
I railed against the restraints. Her bodyguard stepped a little closer to her, as if preparing to protect her. But I flopped uselessly against the chains, and that knife kept on cutting.
An age later, Lady Zorokov said, “I think we’ve seen enough. She’s sufficiently clipped.”
Six neat squares of skin now seeped on the tile before me.
The guard released me, and I collapsed half-naked onto the floor, tears streaming my cheeks.
“Poor thing. Look at that little broken bird,” Lady Zorokov cooed. I forced myself to look up at her. Pain and the drugs made my vision blurry, but she leaned in close enough to be the only sharp thing in this world.
“Your rebellion has no teeth, Tisaanah,” she said, and only now was there emotion on her face, a little sneer at her lip. “Look at all of you, stumbling around trying to be fierce, like kittens learning to hunt.” She scoffed. “No. A lion knows a lamb when they see one. Too bad I can’t hang your skin up to let the rest of them know they’re wandering into the slaughterhouse.”
 |
AFTER SHE WAS GONE, I forced myself to my hands and knees. A gasp escaped my throat when I moved—everything hurt so badly I wanted to curl up and die.
But I knew that I would not die. The Zorokovs needed me for something. The torture was painful, but it wasn’t fatal. They wouldn’t allow me the mercy of death.
Their goal wasn’t to kill me. Their goal wasn’t even to punish me. No, that had been a test, and a shockingly obvious one. They’d heard all about what happened at the Mikov estate. They wanted to make sure they clipped my wings.
It had taken all my self-control not to break, not to lash out with the dregs of magic I still did have at my disposal. But a few chunks of my flesh were a small sacrifice to hide my flight.
My head swam as I crawled across the floor. I had been drugged more, though, apparently, I had been unconscious when they’d been administered. Perhaps it was in the water I’d chugged down earlier. Every part of my body ached to go to sleep, but I forced my mind to sharpen.
The drugs made it difficult to tell how much time had passed since I had arrived here, but surely by now Max knew what had happened. The fact that he hadn’t yet come for me meant that he understood what I wanted him to do, which meant—I hoped—that he was on his way to Orasiev.
If I was going to be ready for what happened next, I still had work to
do.
Unpleasant, unpleasant work.
I dragged myself to the wall and looped my chains around my good
hand. With the other—using my two functional remaining fingers—I picked up the tatters of my old shirt and stuffed the fabric between my teeth.
I set the chain over my shoulder. It was rusty. Just the touch of the cold, rough metal to my still-bleeding skin made my vision blur.
Gods, the things that I do.
I clamped my jaw down hard on the fabric.
And then I pulled at the chain as hard as I could, sawing my wounded back against it, feeling my flesh rip deeper and deeper and deeper.
I counted the first few strokes before I lost track. Blood pooled around my knees, then hands.
I stopped when I lost consciousness.
