<<Should be the last of the “fodder for the beta” so I decided to go a bit long on it. We’ll be seeing a fairly significant alteration in the next one. Basically all of this is going to get binned soon, but it’s been useful finding a path to a more focused variation on the core idea.
This is DEFINITELY not required reading to understand what’s coming down the tube. More just for me that it’s going up.
This is essentially a variation on the way Yasette is introduced and how Aveline gets out of the bad situation. We’ve got some fairly significant restructuring coming down the pipes now that I’ve meandered about through an alpha. This variation on Aveline is WAAAAAAY too passive, and the situation I threw her into is rough for agency. Will probably be starting the real story essentially at the end of her getting OUT of the terrible situation, and the method I’m actually going with is going to be a hell of a lot more apocalyptic than this. But this was a fun way to have some wild necromancy and close this out.>>
“For a cav, it seems you’re at least capable of making an impression, because Magister Zoivan wants you today. But then our lord likely have wanted you there anyways, as you’re the reason these guests are here.”
I tried to ask, but Berza lost all interest in talking to me the moment she was done speaking. “You’ve got to change, cav; you can’t go up there, covered in webs.”
It had to be Marvale and my father. They’d been hunting for me, even gone so far as to put a bounty out on me, and they knew I’d been taken by Vel Zerav. If they were here, it had to mean they’d made some deal with Magister Zoivan. Clearly I wasn’t so valuable as I’d hoped.
I’d managed to avoid spiraling on the thought, but my father had me killed for the sake of his honor. Was I even going to be able to look at him without completely breaking down? It would be impossible to ignore what he’d done if I actually had to see him.
Should I run? But where would I go? I was on an island, in towers lands, and I was obviously undead. The inhuman pallor of my skin alone screamed death—but far worse were my eyes. I’d seen them in the mirror over the last tenday, and they were as milky white as the eyes of the dead.
I wasn’t slipping away unnoticed.
While I fretted, I’d been cleaning the webs out of my hair and stuffing myself into that orange dress, all under the watchful eye of the vellum. It was a fantasy to even debate the merits of running; they weren’t going to let me go anywhere. I’d never get off this island, unless it was on Marvale’s ship.
Walking up those stairs felt like walking up a scaffolding to my own execution.
But when I pushed through the doors into Magister Zoivan’s opulent chambers, I didn’t find Marvale and my father waiting for me.
I found my husband.
Seeing him shattered me. I’d been stuffing down the grief, and now it cracked through my ribs and throbbed out into the world. They’d killed this man; killed him because of me.
I fought off a resurgence of that feral mindlessness that overtook me the day they finally found us; the day they murdered him. I’d been so easily pinned by one of Marvale’s men. Weak, pathetic little girl. Dorien should never have been there. Heaven above, he never should have married me at all—it’s not like he ever loved me; no one ever had.
And that’s when it all came up in an awful rush.
I was a terrible person.
Dorien had been in love with another girl in town. They weren’t married, or even officially betrothed—I wasn’t that horrible—but everyone had known they were fated for years; I’d been the only fool who wouldn’t accept it.
Elzabelle. We’d been inseparable when we were children. I had a swarm of female friends until puberty, at which point I sloughed them off one by one like a growing child discarding old clothes that no longer fit. She was the most painful loss by far, and it had all been my fault. Supposedly, I wouldn’t stop flirting with Dorien, and he’d laughingly made fun of me for it to the rest of the town’s teenagers. Not exactly the stuff deep romances are made of.
Elzabelle ambushed me about it that night—“Heaven above, why can’t you just fucking stop, Aveline! You don’t get to have everything!”—and together, we tore up a decade of friendship in a single awful conversation.
My late adolescence spun out of control after that night. That friendship with Elzabelle had been the best thing about being me. She was clever, sharp eyed, and riotously hilarious, better than me in every way but the one: I was prettier than her, and it wasn’t even close.
The worst thing was that in the end, being prettier than her was enough. When I came crying to Dorien’s door three years later, fleeing my arranged marriage to that monster, Marvale, he let me in.
Would he even have opened the door if my dress weren’t plastered to my chest by the rain?
Who fucking knows—but I doubt it.
I stole the love of her life and got him killed; Elzabelle was right to hate me; Heaven only knew I hated myself too.
And now, he was here, standing in front of me, and it was all just too much to handle.
“I wanted to show him your little black book,” a middle-aged woman was saying, as I trembled in the doorway, still unseen, watching her trail her fingernails across Dorien’s jaw. “You still keep that cursed old relic, don’t you?”
The book. They had to be talking about the book. Zoivan had it locked away in the bedside table, but I could still feel it pressing into the room, pressing so hard it was almost distracting enough to tear my gaze away from my husband. Almost, but not quite.
Dorien was a towering fantasy of a storybook knight, with floppy golden hair and a smile more beautiful than wildflowers in summer.
Only he wasn’t smiling now. He just stood there beside this woman I’d never seen, swaying slightly.
His skin was tinged blue, like a body dug out of the snow, and his fingertips were blackened with gangrene. And those eyes, which had always been green as a forest of new growth, were clouded with death.
“I even flip through it from time to time,” Magister Zoivan said, speaking through his vessel. “Little good it does me.” Zoivan looked Dorien over. “Do you believe it’s wise to take the risk, Heshara?”
The name sounded familiar, but it took me a moment to place it.
I hadn’t quite walked into a standoff, but there were two clear sides to the room. Zoivan’s vessel stood between the newcomers and his wizened body on the bed, along with Vertale, a few other acolytes, and a half dozen vellum knights in red plate.
Dorien was with the group I didn’t recognize. Other than Dorien and the Heshara, there were only three of them, along with a pair of vellum knights clad in yellow plate armor.
They were clearly high ranking necromancers, going off their robes. I’d come to recognize the towers uniforms over my time here. The non-necromancer retainers of Vel Zerav wore orange, but the necromancers were garbed in fine charcoal robes, all with the same sigil embroidered on the middle of the chest in various colors.
I couldn’t read the language, so I hadn’t known until now what that sigil meant: given the acolytes of the other group had the same charcoal robes, but a different sigil, it must have been a distinguishing mark for the tower.
So this was another tower come to visit? No wonder the room was tense.
And that’s where I knew the name. Vertale had told me about this woman, when I asked what would be done with Dorien’s body. Magister Heshara of Vel Kesse, the eccentric who tore her own veil to ribbons, whatever that meant. Someone the other towers would have killed long ago, if only she weren’t so intermittently useful.
Oh Heaven above, what did this woman do to my husband?
And was there any of him still left in there?
“Oh but you’d never hurt me, would you dear?” Heshara patted Dorien’s cheek. He grunted mindlessly. “See? I told you, Zo. I’m charming. Everyone says so. You remember those imperial envoys? Oh but they were so delightful! Fine strong bones, and muscle fibers like a wolf! They let me have them, don’t you know. Offered freely. I’m not an animal, stealing limbs and burglarizing bodies, unlike some old brutes I know. Oh don’t take offense, Zo—you know I love you so much I could gobble you up, crinkly old bones and all. So should we try it? I think we should, shouldn’t we? It would just be marvelous to have another one! A deadwitch, and such a handsome fellow too? I made him cold. That’s the only problem. You remember how Kertuvesh used to make them? Chilled out from the bone? Cold Ones, didn’t he call them? The man was dreadfully dull with names, his one fatal flaw. Well, anyways, I found his book, up in a crumbling tower, hidden away in the pinelands—you remember how he used to flitter about the north—and you wouldn’t believe all the fanciful secrets he’d sequestered away. Oh, what a brilliant old fool. Such a shame he went and got himself killed.”
The woman tipped back her head and laughed uproariously. Nobody else joined her, but she didn’t seem to mind.
“Yes,” Zoivan said. “It is a shame, Heshara. And it wasn’t necessary.”
Wait, Hesharia is the one who killed that other Magisters? And they didn’t punish her? What kind of chaotic world had I walked into?
“Oh, don’t be an old grump, Zo! I thought we were past this; you can’t seriously still think any of that was my fault. The man practically asked me to do it! How was I supposed to react? And speaking of horrific hospitality, where is that new revenant of yours? You told me I could test his memories, Zo, but she’s still not here.”
Vertale noticed me in the doorway and irritatedly waved me forward. “She is here, Magisters.”
Let him recognize me. I prayed as I stepped toward them, trembling. Let there be some reaction when he sees me. Something.
“Oh, delightful!” Heshara said. “This ought to be exciting. Come hither, girl. Let’s have a look at you, and see if any sparks still fly.” Heshara pressed on Dorien’s chin, turning him to look at me with those dead eyes. “Look at the new girl, dear.”
“Dorien?” I whispered. Please, by every angel that ever was, please. I smiled, blinking tears from my eyes. The air was chilled around him. Frost crinkled on his clothes. It didn’t matter, so long as he recognized me; so long as there was still something there; so long as I hadn’t destroyed this man by dragging him into the ruin of my life. “You remember me, don’t you?”
His features hardened with disgust.
“How could I forget you?” he said, voice low and rough. “You’re the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
It would have hurt less if he’d ripped my heart out of my chest. I couldn’t even sob; I just caved into myself.
“Oh how positively delightful!” Hesharia said. “I told you it worked, Zo! Am I not the most brilliant woman you’ve ever known? You wouldn’t believe the state he was in when I got my hands on him, but now? You’re good as new, aren’t you, dear?” She squeezed Dorien’s cheek like a doting grandmother, then turned back on Zoivan. “So we just have to try it, Zo. I’ve got such a good feeling about this one.”
“Fine,” Zoivan said, going to the bedside table with the book. “But only to test if he hears the call. We need a full council before we bring another deadwitch into the world.”
“Well of course,” Hesharia said, laughing with delight. “You don’t seriously think I’m that unreasonable, do you?”
Vertale snapped at me. I jolted out of my devastated stupor.
“Get us food, you useless girl,” Vertale hissed.
“Of-of course, Arbiter.” I stole a glance at Dorien, who was watching me get humiliated. An uncontrollable whine started in my chest. “I’m sorry. I—”
“Now!” Vertale demanded.
I stumbled through a curtsy, and bolted out of the room.
“And something is supposed to happen?” Dorien asked as the book’s cover frosted in his hands.
It was easier to rip my attention away from the book when looking at it meant looking at him. I focused on moving through the crowd with my platter of spiral sea anemone. The food looked alien and foul, but then I wasn’t a local—and, of course, I was dead.
“Safe to say he’s not feeling the call, Hesharia,” Zoivan said. “I’ve read the accounts of Garnise the undying. The book consumed her. I say we simply must accept they were of a different age. A fine heirloom, perhaps, but otherwise this book is nothing but a curiosity.”
“Always so relentlessly impatient,” Hesharia said. “You’d think age would have cured you of that foible.”
Dorien flipped through the pages, frowning. “I’m not sure, I might be feeling something…”
“You would know, there wouldn’t be any doubt,” Zoivan said. “Hesharia…”
Hesharia sighed dramatically. “And here I thought you enjoyed my company. If you don’t want me around, just say so, Zo. We can be like all the other Magisters, and speak only through a Voice in the council. But I thought you and I had a connection.”
Zoivan held his palms out in submission, and Hesharia squealed with girlish glee.
“Delightful!” Hesharia said. “I do so adore your hospitality. Especially this one. I like her. So deliciously terrified.”
Turning on me and grinning like a bloody fox covered in chicken feathers, she trailed her fingertips down my neck as I offered her the platter of food. I forced a smile, and clenched every muscle to keep from bolting away.
This was my second round—the first had been with blackened shrimp—and still no one had snatched a single plate. Nobody was actually going to eat; it just wouldn’t be proper for them not to offer. I was an ornament, and nothing else.
Hesharia cocked her head, staring at me. “Only, she hasn’t offered anything to my creation. Why is that, little dead thing? What if he misses the taste of food? Would you curse him to ever wallow in lost longing? How heartless.” She set a palm against my chest. Her skin was feverish. “But then can any of us blame you for your cruelty, when nothing beats inside you.”
I was the cruel one, here? How absurd.
Vertale caught my eye and nodded forcefully at Dorien.
I wanted to scream. To hurl the platter to the floor.
Forcing a smile, I turned, trembling, and stepped up to Dorien. The book tugged relentlessly at my attention as I braced myself for another humiliation. At the bottom of my vision, I caught sight of the page, and the words scorched into my retinas. They weren’t blocking my vision, at least. It took self control to keep from glancing down at the book. I was going to meet his gaze. If he was going to humiliate me again, he’d do it while I was looking him in the eyes.
Dorien glanced at me in disgust, and turned back to the book.
I retreated, continuing my rounds, and wanted to scream. To hurl the plater to the floor. To sprint sobbing from the room and hide with the spiders. At least they wouldn’t look at me like he did; at least there I was more than some humiliated prop.
But more than anything, I wanted to slap Dorien as hard as I could. He chose me; he married me; he was going to make a life with me. No matter if it hadn’t for some deep affection on his part, shouldn’t it still be worth something? For Heaven’s sake, after we were married, I let that man shove his cock down my throat. He’d seemed happy enough with his choices then—but now that it all went to shit, I was the worst thing that ever happened to him?
The anger was a glorious feeling, but that first rogue spark fizzled out fast. I had too much momentum going in the other direction. One glance at Dorien, still idly flipping through the book’s pages, and that flimsy spark didn’t stand a chance before the tide of guilt, grief, and shame.
While the Magisters kept up their conversation and the acolytes mingled, I wandered vacantly about with my platter of food that no one was going to eat. I’d completely stopped feeling human by the time one of the necromancers from the Vel Kesse group spoke to me.
“You’re surprisingly emotive, for a revenant.” Her voice was bored.
I’d been crying without realizing it. Pathetic. Wiping the tears away with my left hand, I talked without thinking. “Hard not to be; I love that man, and he’s treating me like scum.” He’s always treated you like scum, Aveline. “Silly me, but I thought we were supposed to support each other.”
I stole another glance at Dorien, now uselessly glaring at the book, and grief dug into my chest. I couldn’t tell what I was grieving. Him? That idiotic fantasy I’d spun out about rescuing his body and proving our love?
All I knew was it hurt. His words smoldered in my skull, scorching hotter than the book’s words smoldering at the bottom of my vision. I was the worst thing that ever happened to him.
“Oh, don’t misunderstand me,” the necromancer said, “you’ve certainly earned your emotions, given the circumstances: if I’d married that man, I’d be crying too. What I’m surprised about is that your emotions are so clear. Forgive my prying curiosity, but you were a live embalming, I assume?”
I tore my gaze away from Dorien and turned on her with a forced smile.
She was a slim, bookish young woman with mismatched eyes and calico skin. Her glossy, tri-colored hair was in a stylishly spiraled bun, like a conch shell at the back of her skull.
One of the valefolk. The empire may have proclaimed ethnic impartiality, but those proclamations weren’t worth the wasted paper. Even in the most unusually cosmopolitan towns I’d seen in my youth, I’d never seen half so wild an ethnic melting pot as the tower lands. Here, competence was all that mattered—and this bookish young woman was clearly competent, going off the Arbiter’s all-seeing-eye pendant holding the black silk wrap scarf in place where it draped across her slim shoulders.
I stiffened. I’d been speaking to Vel Kesse’s arbiter without knowing it. Had I said anything improper?
“Yes, Arbiter,” I said with a curtsy. “They embalmed me in Port Sadrine.”
“I’ll think you’re demanding judgement if you refer to me by my title, Aveline. Let’s stick with names, between us. I’m Yasette, and that’s good enough for me.” She smiled like a friend, calico skin crinkling around her mismatched, blue and brown eyes. “From what I’ve seen, a live embalming is among the worst ways to die. You have my sympathies.”
Yasette’s casual compassion blindsided me, and my composure melted like ice in the sun. That was the first time anyone had shown me the slightest sliver of empathy since Dorien and I were captured. It nearly took me to the floor.
“Thank you,” I said, blinking my eyes clear and shivering around a long breath that wanted to break into a sob. “And no. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience.”
“And I can’t imagine it’s gotten much better for you since.”
“I…” I flicked a glance to Vertale, close enough to hear. “Vel Zerav has been very welcoming.”
Yasette snorted. “Oh, I’m sure. It’s alright. I won’t force you to publicly speak ill of your slavers. That’s the sort of thing you keep between friends—and you look like you need one.”
Out of an inner pocket in her robe, she pulled a thin whitescale snake the length of my forearm. Instinct had me recoiling away so fast I nearly flung sea anemone onto the floor. A mimic snake. One of the boys in town had idiotically tried to show his manhood by proving he wasn’t scared of a whitescale, and we’d all had to listen to him scream as his arm rotted off over the next six days.
Yasette laughed gently. “It’s alright, love. Nothing to be afraid of from a little bite; after all, you’re already dead.” She held the limp snake out to me with a shrug. “And so is she.”
Some friend the snake would be, then. Humoring the woman, I took the dead snake in my free hand.
Yasette casually gestured at the snake, and it slithered to life. I tried to fling it away with a yelp—in the process finally dropping the platter to crash against the ground—but the snake coiled around my wrist faster than I’d have thought possible.
“My fault entirely!” Yasette said, cutting off Vertale’s scolding over the dropped platter. She had moved to block everyone’s view of the snake; she didn’t want anyone to know I had it. When I realized that, the snake was immediately more precious than any gift I’d ever received. I didn’t fight it as the snake coiled up my arm and wriggled into my tight dress, disappearing.
She motioned to the two yellow armored vellum knights. “You two, clean this up.”
“Handling nonsense like that is all she’s here for,” Vertale said.
Yasette turned on him. “But I made the mess, not her.”
Vertale huffed. “Suppose it’s best something else cleans it up anyways. Heaven only knows we don’t need more proof of the girl’s uselessness.” He rolled his eyes away from me, and rejoined the Magisters’ conversation.
Yasette turned back to me, and spoke softly. “If it’s any consolation to help you through this relentless degradation, you won’t be powerless for much longer.”
“Excuse me?” I asked. “I don’t follow.”
“Just hold on a little longer, darling. You’re almost through.” Her eye traced the faint line of the snake under my dress. “Oh, and don’t be afraid of her; she’ll be very friendly with you, I promise. You tell her anything you’d like, and who knows, she might just hiss some wisdom back at you.” She leaned in close, whispering just for me. “Because I’ll let you in on a little secret: that snake is me.” Yasette winked, and strode off to join the Magisters’ as Dorien finally stopped flipping through the book.
A friend, in a place like this. Could I even deign to hope?
“I suppose he doesn’t hear the call, then. It’s probably for the best.” Hesharia patted Dorien’s cheek. She liked touching faces, didn’t she? “We’d probably have had to kill you if you did, my darling.”
I’d had a feeling something like that might be the case. For once, I was glad for my instinctive cowardice. If I were a braver person, I might have risked revealing myself.
“And he is so very glorious, isn’t he?” Hesharia grinned at Dorien proudly. “I did such a marvelous job, it would have been a pity to break him.”
“We all knew it was unlikely he’d hear it,” Yasette said, while the snake slithered across my ribs and up my spine, hiding beneath my hair and sending a shiver across my skin. “Because what a remarkable coincidence it would have been if both of you heard the call.”
I stiffened. She knew. Even if I’d been trying to contain it, she must have noticed the way the book drew my eye. Was that why she’d been so friendly? Lulling me into a false sense of security?
But she wasn’t saying anything.
“If there’s nothing else…” Zoivan said after he had locked the book away.
“Yes yes, I know how much you like your privacy, old man,” Hesharia said. “Well, you were certainly a true gentleman to humor me, Zo. We should get out more, you and I; relive our golden youth.”
“Maybe in another decade or two,” Zoivan said diplomatically.
When the entourage from Vel Kesse left, Dorien didn’t even look at me—but Yasette winked as she strolled past me, so this time his disdain didn’t dig too deep.
Yasette insisted that preserved dead were a grim fashion statement in tower lands—I’d seen them before, but hadn’t thought it was more than grotesque habit among the acolytes.
“Most of them are taxidermy,” Yasette told me through the snake. “Nothing but skin and stuffing. You can still animate it if you’re any good, but it’s not quite so deadly as, say, having a fox head resting beside your throat. That’s what I do. Let them try me. The only reason I didn’t wear it to meet your Magister is because it’s like openly wearing a sword. Anyways, my soul is sufficiently entangled with that snake that it’ll keep them out. They’ll think the it’s taxidermied, or even an outright fake. Sorry, dear, but you should know it’s a humiliating thing for anyone to think you’re wearing fake flesh.”
“Then they won’t suspect a thing,” I said. “They already think I’m pathetic.”
I’d expected more pushback the first time I wore it openly, but after I told Vertale some lie about someone giving it to me in the dining hall, he had just laughed at me like a child wearing her mother’s dress. “Just when I think you can’t stoop any lower. Hilarious. It fits you.” If he knew it was Yasette’s vessel, he’d have a different reaction.
Since then, I’d kept the snake coiled in my hair, woven through a complex crown braid. I arranged it so the head was by my ear, and Yasette and I had been speaking all the time.
After that, my time at Vel Zerav grew almost manageable. Any suspicion I had about Yasette dissolved away within the first few days of whispering with her through the snake. Maybe it was foolish to trust so quickly, but I needed a friend far too desperately to be cautious with my heart.
“But you really killed her last Arbiter?” I whispered as I teased out the venom in a spider’s fang. I was alone in the nest with Nocken and the servitors, but still kept my voice low, just in case. So long as my mouth was hidden from view, this was one of the best places to speak with her, given how loud it was down here. The spiders’ chattering and the squealing of the waiting livestock easily drowned out my whispers.
“He was a foul man, if it’s any consolation,” Yasette hissed in my ear. “He’d been stitching dead flesh into the living, trying to weave their souls together in the animation. It never worked, and the new limbs and muscles always tore the victims apart. You see that a few dozen times, and if can do anything about it, you’d better put an end to it. So I did.”
“That’s horrible,” I said.
Nocken twitched. Too loud.
I flashed a smile and handed him the jar of venom. “A horrible yield out of Blueback, don’t you think? She hardly gave us anything this time, did she, Nocken?” He twitched again at his name. The loose bones in his skull shifted under the bag.
I’d been working with Nocken for almost a full month, but I still hadn’t gotten a read on how much of a person there was in his broken body.
I took an empty jar as another spider approached the cocooned hog, eyeing Nocken. He didn’t seem suspicious, but would I be able to tell?
“Fine save there, Aveline. See? I told you you’re clever.”
“If I were clever, I wouldn’t be in this situation,” I whispered. “But why was he even attempting something so awful?”
“Progress marches ever onward. It’s far from the worst thing I’ve seen, since I came to tower lands. But I won’t feign immaculate virtue—I’m a ludicrously ambitious, megalomaniacal witch; his sins were a fine justification, but more than anything, I simply coveted the man’s job.”
“And Hesharia didn’t punish you?”
“That’s the way things are done here. Everyone’s scrabbling at the heels of their betters. It keeps the towers from growing complacent, so the thinking goes. I say it’s a mad method to run an organization, but I can’t change a thing until I scrabble my way to the top, so for now, I’ll use whatever tools they give me.”
“Huh,” I said, a little overwhelmed by her, as was becoming a norm.
When I was silent for a few more seconds, she hissed, “I dueled him honorably, for what it’s worth.”
I had never met anyone like Yasette, especially not a woman. Up in the pinelands, the only things a woman could be ambitious about were who she would marry, and how many children she’d give him. And here was Yasette, dueling men—honorably—for power, criticizing the structure of her world, and wrestling her way to the top so she could remake it in her image.
It was entrancing.
“An honorable duel,” I whispered, filling another jar with venom. “Heaven above, where I’m from, the idea of a woman even having honor is absurd, let alone her dueling in a way that supports it. The closest I’ll ever get to honor is having my actions reflect well on the men in my family.” I shivered at the echo of the last conversation I had with my father. “And that’s not something I’ve been particularly successful at.”
“Heaven above, they really managed to saturate you in this absurdity, didn’t they? Well when I’m done with you, we can be sure all that drivel is going to be purged from your mind.”
“So how do you do it?” I asked, wanting to twist the conversation away from me.
“That’s up to the challenged. The idea is simple, though. You get into a pit with some corpses, and wrestle over authority. The challenged gets to choose what goes in the pit. It’s a little grim, but when I was an acolyte, we used to have these tournaments dueling with just a single severed hand—those were never to the death, obviously, just for prestige.
“Anyways, for our duel, old Makaskalo tossed in a few dozen of his own creations. He wanted to overwhelm me with numbers. Not a bad strategy, given what he knew about me: I’d been winning those tournaments so consistently we had to change the rules to keep it interesting. By the time I challenged Makaskalo, it was taking three acolytes working together to even make the hands creep towards me—and yes, if you hadn’t already picked up on it, I am disastrously vain, and I’m trying to impress you.”
I chuckled. “Oh I’ve picked up on it, don’t worry.”
“Good. Now don’t tell me if it’s working, that’ll spoil the—” Yasette cut off abruptly, and the snake twitched. “Oh these blessed fools. Sorry, dear. I need to handle this.” The snake went dormant as Yasette retreated from it.
With her gone, the rest of my day in the nest was a hollow mechanical chore.
The tower’s merchants in Port Sadrine came again that night for this tenday’s supply of spider venom, which meant another awful night in the dining hall. Given I’d stopped being quite so scared for my place in the tower after I realized how much wealth I was making for them in the nest, this second job increasingly seemed to be nothing but an opportunity for humiliation. In fact, maybe that had always been the goal.
It would explain a lot. I couldn’t say how many people knew the reason why Vertale wanted to keep my spirit crushed, but if I’d had any doubt, that night made it clear that word had gotten around: degrading me was fair game.
And then, halfway through dinner, it happened, and everything changed.
It started with a man groping my ass. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, not even the first time it had happened that night, but abruptly, I had enough. I knew I was worth more than them than this. I saw through them. And I was done.
So I turned and slapped him as hard as I could. “Don’t fucking touch me,” I said.
The table of cackling men went silent. The man’s expression went dark, face flushing from my slap. He flicked a glance to the side of the room.
Vertale, leaning against the wall beside a painting, watching everything. Oh, fuck. He sighed, and I saw my father in his cold, disappointed expression. The sigh of a man about to teach a lesson. My world crushed in with the force memory.
Then, casually, Vertale rolled his hand through the air, telling them to get on with it, and abruptly, the men were hooting like apes in a jungle, and I ripped forward, slammed flat onto the table while I screamed, and there were hands, hands everywhere. Spilled wine. Food, smeared into the back of my dress.
“Don’t touch her, she says?” the man laughed at me. With irresistable strength, he snatched my ankle, and bent my left leg up to my chest, hitching my dress up to my hips. For an awful, screaming moment, I was sure he was going to force himself on me right there in the dining hall.
Instead, he just kept bending that leg back. He bent until my hip and knee slid apart. “You should be grateful any of us want to touch something so disgusting as you.”
Then, right there in front of a laughing crowd, that table of men contorted me into an inhuman, alien thing. I tried to fight it, but wasn’t nearly strong enough, even when I had the leverage. Once they started pulling my joints apart and twisting my muscles and tendons, I could hardly even move. I lost clothing piece by piece as it got in the way of the contortion. Most of it had to be cut off me. The vertebra in my spine clicked and stretched out away from each other over the table, until my skull was twisted around to stare up at my own hips, watching from behind as someone pried the bones of my pelvis apart.
By then, I’d completely shut down. A vacant shell, I stared, blankly, and waited for them to be done.
I shouldn’t have done anything. It was all my fault. Never stand up for yourself again, Aveline. What were you thinking, you stupid girl?
Then, just when I was thinking I might be able to make it through this without completely shattering, I heard the most horrible thing. It wasn’t the jeering laughter. I’d gone deaf to the laughter by then.
It was Yasette, hissing in my ear.
“Sweet Heaven, what the fuck are they doing to you?”
No no no, don’t let her see me like this, please. I tried to speak, but given the way I was contorted, I couldn’t breathe enough even to whisper.
“Oh these walking corpses went and signed my book, didn’t they,” she hissed softly. “See, I’ve been wondering how I was going to get you out of there, but this makes it all so marvelously simple; I’ll just kill them all. You hang on, dear. I’m coming.”
I was filthy with food and wine and hollow, so far retreated into my mind that I may as well have been a servitor.
Someone had grabbed Nocken, and they had him pinning me in place with one hand on the side of my face, pressing hard enough I felt the plates shift in my skull, and a knee on my ass, crushing my pelvis into the stone, holding my torso twisted in a full rotation between my skull and my hips. My spine was a grotesque corkscrew, my skin and muscle stretched until it burned, and my ribs fanned apart like the pages of a book set flat on its spine. Those pages were going to settle into two halves, and I was going to snap.
And it was Nocken. We’d worked together for a month, and he didn’t seem to care. Loyal servant. Clearly there wasn’t anything there.
“And here I thought she’d rather be with her own kind,” a woman had taken over the humiliation, one of Vel Zerav’s acolytes. She had a lilting, horrifically polite voice. It made it so much worse. “We’re just trying to make the cav comfortable. You’d think she’d be grateful. We’re being awfully considerate, aren’t we? You got anything to say, cav?”
The leading acolyte waved at Nocken, and Nocken pulled back enough for the bones in my body to rearrange themselves enough to speak. He let my hips spiral back into position, legs flopping as I rearranged myself with an uncontrollable sob. Everything ached, but he hadn’t gone so far as to break me. It had been close, this time. Very close. Laughter. Relentless laughter. Almost forced. This had been going on for so long they had to be growing bored.
I curled in, fetal, shivering, hiding myself instinctively, pawing at my hair for the snake. A rational part of me knew it might make them realize it was more than some petty bauble, but I couldn’t control myself; Yasette hadn’t said anything for minutes, and I was losing control.
The snake was gone.
“No no no,” I whined. I couldn’t do this alone. Frantically, blinking away the tears, I raked my gaze across the floor, the crowd, everywhere. It must have fallen free as they contorted me.
“What was that, cav? You trying to say something in all that sobbing?” the lead acolyte said, laughing brightly.
I spotted Vertale, near the back of the crowd, waiting for me to give in—with Yasette’s whitescale snake, slithering up his boot.
She hadn’t abandoned me at all. All the terror fell away in an instant. I couldn’t help it; I smiled up at him from the floor.
Vertale’s expression went murderous.
But before he could do anything, someone in the crowd cut in. “What is that sound?”
Everyone went silent, and I heard it. We were three stories up, but something was scrabbling at the windows. Then a thud that made everyone jolt.
“What the fuck?” One of the merchants snatched a candle off a table and crept to the glass, holding the flame up to the darkness.
Birds. So many they were an undifferentiated mass. They hammered into the glass so hard they left blood and feathers stuck in the splintering cracks.
“Oh sweet Angels protect us,” the merchant said, stumbling away as the cracks grew with every bird that slammed itself against the glass. “It’s the Painted Witch.”
Raw primal terror rippled through the crowd.
“That conniving fucking calico!” Vertale yelled. “Gather the vellum knights! Vel Kesse is betraying—FUCK!” He screamed and kicked frantically, flinging the snake out across the floor toward me.
Yasette stopped feigning death with it, and slithered to coil around my throat. Vertale stared at me in horror.
“Stay down,” Yasette hissed in my ear.
And the windows shattered.
The air became a storm of feathers, beaks, and claws, tearing into flesh as people screamed. Talons dug furrows through skin and muscle, rending long shreds of flesh to the floor.
Nocken flailed away from me as the birds tore into him. I took the chance, and scampered away from him, getting under one of the tables.
A wailing man crashed to the ground in front of me, a raven clawing at his face and neck. I pinned a hand over my mouth to hold in a scream. He tore the raven off him, breaking bones, slamming it to the ground—but the raven kept fighting.
A husk. An unconstrained undead, made raw and fast, without any protections to keep it servile, smoldering with a hatred for the living.
Dead eyes unblinking, the raven bit into the man’s finger until he let go, then came at him again. Tiny shattered bones poked out of its feathers as it writhed unnaturally up his arm, ruining its broken body in the process, and speared its beak into his left eye, digging in until the bone shattered.
The man twitched twice, frothed at the mouth, and went still—then, he jolted upright, single eye passing over me without interest, then he scrambled frantically to his feet in an inhuman frenzy, joints popping, fingernails peeling and filling with splinters as he clawed up the side of a table to his feet, then, with no regard for his own safety, the fresh husk dove head first and tackled the nearest person to the ground.
They’d been at a table together. Now the dead man had his friend’s skull in his hands and was slamming it back against the stone floor again and again and again until it shattered. Skull fragments and brain matter splattered out across the floor.
“Oh sweet Angels above,” I whispered, cowering back against a table leg.
Raven still dangling from his skull, the killer dropped his dead friend, and lunged at a passing acolyte trying to gather some sort of resistance—the lilting voiced woman who had taken over my humiliation. He snatched her by the calf, and tripped her face first to the ground. Her nose shattered on the stone. Blood poured out in thick ropes as shoved up to her hands and knees. She flipped on her back with a scream, kicking, heel connecting with the raven and crushing it against the dead man’s cheek. He came on. Relentless.
The acolyte gestured at the corpse, like snatching a spiderweb out of the air, and pulled it taught. The dead killer froze halfway up her body. The acolyte hissed through her teeth and pulled her hand back tighter. Yanking on a leash. Holding back a snarling hound.
“Not so unstoppable after all, are you, Yasette,” the acolyte hissed.
While she held the raven mangled man at bay, the fresh corpse of his friend wrenched itself up to its hands and knees, brain matter sloshing out the back of its open skull, and clambered at her in a clicking rush. It slipped in the smear of its own gore, but just kept coming.
“Oh fuck,” the acolyte whispered. Scrambling back with a scream, she let go of the leash—and the first corpse dug its fingers into her hips, pinning her down. Wailing, she tried to repeat the gesture, catching both husks her grasp, but she couldn’t make it stick.
They ripped her to pieces in front of me. Every limb they tore free writhed to life when it hit the ground, and set itself to hunting for more victims.
“Oh sweet Angels,” I whispered again.
The same horrific scene was repeated throughout the room, a snowballing catastrophe of death and chaos. Anyone who could had fled out the doors long ago—but now they were slammed shut, trapping the survivors.
There was a frantic screaming last stand at the doors, but by then, there were dozens of husks, and it didn’t last long.
When the last of the living died, the husks all went still, and room rang with silence. The contrast was so extreme it felt like slamming under the sea after hurling yourself off a cliff. It was unreal. How could there ever be silence again after something like that?
The ground was covered in food, feathers, crushed birds, and gore. I couldn’t stop soaking up the awful sight of it. I might have sat there until sunrise, if Yasette hadn’t hissed in my ear.
“Wake up, Aveline. You can’t freeze up on me now, I need you.”
I tried to speak, but all I could manage was a wild keening.
“Breathe. It’s okay.”
“Yasette, what did you do?” I whispered in horror.
“Not half so much as they deserved. But now I need you to get up. Now, Aveline! MOVE GIRL!”
I scrambled to my feet, bashing my head against the table in the process, but I made it up. I was shaking uncontrollably. The last few hours had been insane, but this was unlike anything I’d ever seen. There was blood everywhere. Bodies. Gore. Torn flesh.
The smell. Copper and viscera. Wet, metallic, and foul, so thick I suffocated on it.
I was mumbling some frantic prayer under my breath when the snake bit my earlobe. I flailed back and hit a table with my hip.
“Get ahold of yourself, Aveline! You can freak out after we’re safe. They’ll be coming through those doors with vellum any minute now, and I can’t go in there to get you; I’m alive, so I’ll get torn apart. I need you to come to me.”
I gulped to hold in a sob. I shook so hard my body spasming. Blood was splattered on my skin.
“Whe-where are you?” I whispered.
“East window. By the fireplace.”
Half blind with shock, it took me a few seconds to see her dangling there in the darkness. I’d only seen her once, but seeing something familiar in all this chaos was a lifeline keeping me from completely unravelling.
“Good girl. Let’s go.” The snake whispered, while Yasette herself waved me on silently.
I sprinted at her, slipping on blood and viscera, just as something heavy and metallic began hammering on the doors. The husks ignored me as I passed them, but one of the husked merchants noticed her in the window and took off at a sprint. It only made it a few steps before stopping abruptly. In the inky black of another shattered window, I spotted a man dangling dangling, same as Yasette, holding the husk’s leash tight. She had a team; a coven.
Yasette nodded an acknowledgement to him as she helped me scramble out the window. After all I’d been through in the last few hours, I hardly even noticed that I was dangling over three stories of open air. I clung to her like a lost child clinging to their mother after being finally found.
“Let’s get you out of here,” she said.
I’d never heard a sentence I liked more.