Lynn
THEY THREW ARIADNE in the cell first, then me. The door slammed shut, cutting out the light, as I scrambled back onto my feet.
“What are you doing?” Ariadne whispered.
“Just getting my bearings.” The room was clean-swept and empty. I found the door and wrenched at the handle—yes, locked. Not that I’d expected otherwise, but it’s best to try the simplest solution before getting fancy.
“Lynn, stop that and sit down!”
“Why?” I stooped and squinted through the dimness at the door fastener, trying to figure out whether it was a warded lock or just a latch.
“They’ll hear us, they’ll come in here, you’ll only make it worse—”
“Well, I hate to break it to you, but I’ve already made it worse. Jada won’t forgive me for throwing up on her if I sit quietly in a corner for a while.” I shook the door hard, and the hinges rattled.
“Stop it!” The words tore out of her, hoarse and desperate. “They’ll beat us! They’ll beat us!”
“They sure will, if you keep making noises.”
Her mouth snapped shut so fast that her teeth grated together. She was learning.
I left it at that. No point in trying to comfort her. All the platitudes in the world don’t mean much when you’re locked in a bare cell, waiting for a woman with a whip to decide exactly how much she wants you to hurt.
Leaning back against the door—I couldn’t stop anyone from coming in, but I could make sure of a few seconds’ warning—I ran my fingers along the hem of my shirt. Milo’s men had searched me when they first brought me into the Keep, but they hadn’t stripped me, the damn amateurs.
When I found the stiff spot in the fabric, I bit away the hemming thread, poked two fingers into the hole, and drew out my garrotte. I wound it around my right wrist, where it belonged, and felt a bit better.
“Come over here,” I said.
“I don’t want a hug.”
“Good, because I’m fresh out of those. Get over here. Please.”
She would have argued if she’d had more energy. As it was, she shuffled towards me. Once she sounded close enough to touch, I patted around until I found her arm, passed her the knife, and wrapped her fingers around the hilt.
She almost dropped it. “What’s this?”
“I hope that’s not a serious question, because I know for a fact that you’ve seen a knife before.”
“Where the hell did you get a knife?”
“Darren. She lurched over to kiss me before the Freemen dragged me out of the hall—”
“Oh gods, that idiot . . .”
“No, this was a strictly practical kiss. She squashed herself against me so that nobody could see what I was doing with my hands. While everyone was watching us suck each other’s faces, I reached backwards to a guard’s belt and groped around until I found something hard. Which could have been very awkward, if the hard thing had been something other than a knife, but it was, in fact, a knife. Take it.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Keep it on you, just in case. Things are about to get hairy. Milo’s struggling to keep control, and if he slips, then the Freemen could do something stupid.”
“You mean they might kill us.”
Actually, I meant that they might kill her, but there was no need to go into that level of detail. “Yes. So hang onto the knife, and if worst comes to worst—”
“If worst comes to worst . . . what? What do you expect me to do if some hulking thug tries to cut my throat? Challenge him to single combat? If they want me dead, I’m dead!”
The shrillness in her voice could have been terror or fury, but either way, it was exhausting. For just a second, I let my head loll back against the door. This would be so much easier if Darren and I didn’t have any deadweight to carry.
“That’s not true,” I said, with an effort. “As long as you’re alive, there are things you can do to try to stay that way. If someone attacks you, then pick a body part of theirs and do your best to rip it off.”
“You really think—”
“Shut up and listen. This is the important part. Once you start fighting, you can’t stop until everyone around you is friendly or dead. You can’t stab twice and then cringe away and hope for the best. In a fight, the first person to stop hitting loses, so keep hitting, no matter what. If they break your arm, use the other. If they break both of your arms, kick. But whatever you do—”
Metal crashed against the wall in a shower of sparks. She’d thrown the knife.
“No wonder he likes you,” she said, voice raspy and trembling. “You even sound like him.”
“What are you talking about?”
No answer to that, just heavy breathing, and the rustle of cloth as she let herself slide to the floor. Then she said, “You know, Gwyneth, when you were with my mother—”
“When I was ‘with’ your mother?” The dam in my head broke and icy water rushed through. “I wasn’t dating her, you know. She was my jailer!”
“When you were with my mother, no matter how bad it got, at least you were never disposable. You knew she couldn’t kill you.”
“No. I really didn’t.”
I listened to her shuddering breaths in the darkness. She was barely a foot away from me, but the space between us had substance and weight.
“Do you actually want to play the who-had-it-worse game?” I said at last. “That won’t end well, but if you have to get it off your chest—”
“I know who had it worse,” she said, biting the words off one by one. “I’ve never been confused about that.”
Well, good. I ran my forefinger up and down the rough wood grain of the door.
“But it doesn’t matter. Maybe what I’m going through is just a pale shadow of what you’ve lived—hell, maybe it looks like paradise to you. But I still can’t take it. You hear me? I can’t.”
“You are taking it. This is what it means to take it. The pain happens, and you live through it because you don’t have any choice. I don’t have some magical way of coping. If I did, I’d let you know. But this is all there is.”
More silence. When she did speak again, it was muffled, as if she was curled into a ball, with her head on her knees.
“I’m sorry if I disappointed you,” she said.
We didn’t speak for the next few hours.
“AREN’T YOU GOING to ask me about Latoya?”
It was well into the evening, judging from the chill in the air. The silence between Ariadne and me had gone from annoying to ridiculous. She still hadn’t lifted her head.
“What’s to ask?” she said dully. “Latoya mutinied. Now we’re both here. End of short, stupid story.”
“She mutinied because she wanted to save you.”
“Yes, that detail did not escape me. Thanks for the reminder that I can’t even fall in love without screwing you over.”
Well. That was new information.
“So you do love her,” I said. “I’ve wondered.”
She let out a dull little cough of a laugh. “Have you ever tried not loving Latoya? It is a frustrating enterprise. She’s steadfastness and kindness and strength and patience and . . . just everything good. Plus, have you seen her? Especially the legs. Gods on high, the legs.”
“So why . . .”
I let my voice trail off before I asked the obvious question—something along the lines of “Why, in the name of every last god, have you been shoving her away from you with a stick?” There wouldn’t be an answer that made a lick of sense. If there was one thing that Ariadne and Darren shared, it was a talent for making simple things complicated.
Instead, I said, “If the three of us are ever in the same room again, I’m going to toss both of you in a large wooden crate, drill a few air holes, and nail down the lid. Once you’ve sorted yourselves out, I’ll send Darren along with a pry bar.”
I thought she was ignoring me until I saw her shoulders shaking, her hand pressed against her mouth. Didn’t she ever run out of tears?
I tried again, just for something to do. “You know, I’m fairly sure that Latoya would break this island in half for you. I’m not saying that’s enough, or that it’s the only thing that matters. But it’s true.”
She sniffed, wetly.
“Does it help at all?” I pressed. “To know that she’s out there?”
Ariadne wiped her nose on her palm, then wiped her palm against the floor. She spoke in a voice that sounded like the puff of air that escapes when you press on a dead man’s chest.
“The night that Jada sent me out to be whipped—well, the first time—I didn’t believe it would actually happen. Not because I thought you and Latoya would storm the palisade in the nick of time and snatch me away. I just couldn’t imagine the whip. Not really. Not in connection with my own back. Not until they had me up against the post, and my face was to the wood, and the wood had this reek of sour sweat from a hundred people’s terror—I won’t talk about that part, you know what a whipping post smells like. The point is, my body got the message, that bad things really were about to happen to it, and my heart began to go like the clappers and the blood was shrieking through my veins, steam hot. And I thought, I have to keep breathing. Regon told me that, it was the last thing he told me—I have to concentrate on something else so I can keep breathing. So, I watched the horizon. The whipping post is outside the palisade, there’s a view of the horizon, and I looked past the post and out to sea.”
She leaned back against the wall, eyes half-shut, as if in a trance. “I wasn’t sure which way I was looking, because there were clouds blotting out the stars, but I thought it was maybe north and I knew the Banshee was to the north of the island somewhere. And there was a light. Not a star, redder and ruddier than that, and I thought, or I guessed or I imagined, that it was lantern-light. That it was the ship. And I said to myself, Latoya’s out there. She’s safe and she’s free, and for some reason, gods know why, she cares for me, and if there’s anything on earth she can do for me, she’ll do it.”
“And did that help?”
“No. Not at all. It seemed like a cruel sort of joke after a bit. Once they’d started, I mean. I was staring at the light, at the horizon, and the light jumped with each stroke of the whip. And she was out there, maybe, but that couldn’t be as real as the pain. Before long, I couldn’t see or think anymore. But later—the third night, or maybe the fourth—when Jada was done with me for the day and I was lying on that stinking cot, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t actually dying—I realized, that’s what I must have looked like to you. Back when you were my mother’s favourite victim, and I floated by in the evenings to try to cheer you up. Me with my lilac gowns and my poetry. That’s what I must have looked like to you then—a distant light, almost lost on the horizon.”
A short pause.
“Are you done?” I asked—rather politely, I thought, under the circumstances. “Or is there more very important self-pity that has to happen?”
Her head lolled forwards. She breathed hard.
“Stop wallowing, Ariadne. Those years with Melitta? They were hell, and now they’re over. And you won’t make anything better by going into a guilt spiral. The last thing I need is for you to pull yet another stupid useless bullshit act of self-sacrifice.”
“If you haven’t noticed, I’m still a bit busy with my last stupid bullshit act of self-sacrifice.” She pounded the floor with a balled fist. “Which, by the way, would be a damn sight less useless if you hadn’t surrendered yourself to Milo!”
“You should have left the island when I told you to go—”
“And you should never have come back! Gwyn, do you have the faintest idea of everything that I’ve given up to try to make sure that you could have a life?”
“You want me to thank you for the thousandth time? Or do I have to go further than that? Should I get down and grovel for a bit?”
“I have never asked you to grovel! I just don’t want you to waste it! You know, all those years after you ran away from home, when I didn’t have a clue where you were, when I spent half my time sick with worry about you—I told myself, over and over and over, that you could take care of yourself. I thought, if nothing else, you knew how to survive. But all of a sudden, you’re spending all your time in war zones and . . . and giving yourself up to a murderer just for the hell of it—”
“Sure. If, by ‘for the hell of it,’ you mean ‘to stop them from starving Darren to death.’”
“Darren. Of course, Darren. Because you love to lecture other people about not taking pointless risks, but if Darren’s in trouble, all bets are off. Because of course you should gamble your life over and over and over again for a pirate with an inferiority complex who likes to tie you to a bed.”
There were footsteps down the hall, but I barely paid attention. A skinny vein in my forehead was ticking with a steady pulse.
“I know part of you misses the time when you were everything to me,” I said. “But I don’t. So you’ll have to find a way to cope, because I’m not that child anymore.”
She wasn’t listening. Face rigid, she stared at the door. “They’re coming.”
“I know. I hear them.” I shook myself, trying to reorient. “Get the knife.”
“I’m not touching that thing! Do you know what they’ll do if they find it on me?”
She was on her feet again, wringing her hands, and I was torn between wanting to shake her hard and wanting to hold on and never let go.
“This could be it,” she said, brokenly. “Tell me you don’t hate me.”
“I don’t hate you. I could never hate you. Come here, quick.”
I still wasn’t in a hugging sort of mood but you don’t always get to choose when goodbyes happen. I gathered her in, her teary face hot and wet against my shirt.
“You could though,” she mumbled into my shoulder. “You would hate me if you knew, I know that you’d hate me if you knew . . .”
The door smashed inwards to reveal Jada. She grabbed Ariadne by the neck, ripping her away from me, and dragged her up until she was forced to stand teetering on tiptoe.
“Have you been keeping secrets from me, pet?” Jada asked. “Not smart.”
“I’m sorry,” Ariadne said, without hesitation. “I don’t know what I did, but I’m sure I’m sorry—”
“Get her out of here,” Milo said, stomping through the doorway. “Get her out of my sight and make her shut up. If I have to see that useless little bitch again today, I don’t want to hear anything from her except silence or screaming.”
“I can make that happen for you, Master of the Free Isle.” Jada’s lips curled up in a poisonous smile. “Do you want to watch?”
“Jada, this is not the time for one of your stupid games.”
She blinked, looking absurdly hurt. “I’m just trying to help.”
“So take her away. You can amuse yourself however you want once you’re out of here, but for the love of all the gods, don’t bother me when I am trying to work!”
Jada pressed her lips together, sullen, but she managed to incline her head in a more or less respectful nod. Then she dealt a quick, vicious kick to the back of Ariadne’s ankles. “You heard the man, pumpkin. He wants you to learn how to be quiet. Let’s go practice.”
She steered Ariadne out the door with one forefinger pressed to the back of her neck. As I watched them go, I made a mental map of Jada’s arteries, and imagined slitting them open lengthways, one by one.
Then I turned my attention to Milo, and found that those blue-blue eyes of his were like bits of paint in an old fresco: flat and cold.
“Did you say some prayers last night?” he asked.
“Never do. I was badly brought up.”
“This would be a good time to learn how to pray.” He jabbed a finger towards the door. “You think your sister’s having a hard time? I can make it so much worse. The markets in Sohanchi pay double for blondes, and they don’t much care whether they’re virgins.”
Something had happened. He’d been on edge earlier, but not off balance. Was he . . . scared?
“What’s going on?” I whispered.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know.”
“I don’t have a clue. That’s why I’m asking.”
“All right, Lynn. I’ll play it your way.” He stepped closer. “The lovesick giant just arrived on the Isle.”
My heart skipped several beats. “Latoya’s here?”
“Not in the Keep. She didn’t get anywhere close. And let me make it perfectly clear—if she had reached the gate, I would have had your pirate and your sister hung from the rafters and skinned. Just as a matter of principle. I warned you what would happen if—”
“Milo. Milo, listen to me.” My pulse was racing so fast that it buzzed in my ears. “I told Latoya not to attack, not to do anything stupid—Milo, I begged her. Please don’t take it out on Ariadne. Milo, please—”
He slapped me hard across the face, and I took the subtle hint and stopped talking. While he gathered his thoughts, I waggled my jaw. Not broken. Just felt that way.
“Follow me,” he said at last. “We’re going to have a long talk, and you’re not going to enjoy it. But if it’s any consolation to you, your mistress is going to enjoy it a whole lot less.”