From where the LaMorte army stands, forming battalion after battalion of muscle and iron on the precipice of Mount Briar, Deluce’s palace looks like a tiny oil painting that’s been left in the rain. The fog surrounding it appears quaint, like a lady’s skirt. A lady they are going to ravage and make theirs.
For a moment Vulture hears a whisper on the wind, a horse’s quiet snuffle, and it makes him remember . . . what it felt like to be an I and not a we. What it felt like to see from all sides of his eyes, instead of through tight black holes. He turns his beaklike mask to the left, and sees the rest of them. The queen calls all of them Vulture. They are no longer individuals but one dark mass of masks and black cloaks, of heavy armor and impenetrable eyes.
Malfleur paces along the cliff, counting off, conveying instructions. She approaches Vulture but keeps walking without any acknowledgment. The queen has forgotten him. She has forgotten that Vulture—this Vulture—is special. She had required a talented groom, a skilled rider, someone familiar with destriers and coursers, their behavior, the shape of their long noses. It was he, Vulture—this Vulture—who was asked to design the terrifying silver muzzles worn by all of her warhorses.
They wear the beaks for protection from the sickness, which is not, he now understands, her doing—though what terrible magic created it, he cannot say. But the masks do more than just block the disease. They narrow the focus, they separate the man from the world he is riding into, from the victim he must either gain command over or kill.
And there is something deeply reassuring about the darkness within the mask. Vulture can sink back into it like a boundless sea, can let go of almost everything that once made him who he was and weighed him down. All that’s left of before is a faint twinge. The rest is black ocean, is night sky, is anger, is flight.
But that twinge persists . . . a tiny spark within him that makes him want to go back, to flee the oil vessel in one of the smaller dinghies and look for her, rescue her, or risk death in the vast real ocean trying, rather than stay and face the mercenaries who bound him, who threatened him, who gave him no choice, who turned him into what he is now, into one of them. Vulture.
As Malfleur passes him by, he catches a glance of her glossy dark hair, lifted and wild in the breeze, and he sees not the queen, but her.
Her, falling backward into the waves alone.
Her, laughing, rebuking, arguing, rallying, racing through fields on a mare’s bare back. Her, throwing her hands up to his face to feel what he felt, to change him, to leave her mark on him.
But it is pointless, he knows, to think of her.
For what would Isabelle say if she saw him now?