I emptied.
It was a mouth I had kissed goodnight, wiped at with a cloth, smeared with the last of the sloe berries until her lips were stained purple.
“Adelaide?” My question died under the boot of the sanctum, their chants and heckles an impatient leather sole.
I charged for the dais, my feet squeaking on the marble, rendered useless by the druid caging my stomach.
I wanted to touch her: skim the curve of her cheeks, trace the outline of her lips, count her eyelashes, kiss each of her eyes, a shade darker than Demetri’s but no less warm. Yes, it was Adelaide, but herbuttons. I slumped into his arms, chest heaving, stitches straining. Her buttons were gone. Every last one. The glare of the sanctum shadowed her skin, her face marred by pinkish scars that dipped like someone had taken a spoon to the butter. Her beautiful buttons.
I sobbed, an ugly, wretched thing.
Her buttons.I’d counted them once. All twenty-two of them.
Her eyes left Demetri’s, and for a breath, landed on mine, their edges crinkling, her dark eyelashes webbed with tears.
I screamed, or at least tried to, but his hand was a bridle, cloaking the sound.
“Look,” came a breath from behind. “Look.”
The High Druid’s hands loomed over her shoulders like storm clouds. His gloved fingers found her ears, shifting her headdress to trace the curve of her lobes—lobes I’d once pierced with a pin. The acolytes to her sides thrust her into his touch, her jaw trapped by their crimson-tinged fingers.
“With her ears, she listened to plots and whispers and schemes, yet chose to donothing.”
The hand at my mouth vibrated, a bumblebee wing, not an earthquake, but there. With my one free hand, I reached behind me, finding a small patch of flesh between his vambrace and elbow. I poked at it, prodding and pinching, but he held on even more firmly than before, my teeth pressed hard against the crush of my lips.
“With her lips,” his father continued, voice quiet, the creak of bodies leaning forward to listen, overlaying the clicking in her throat, “she allowed breath into her lungs that gave her life to defy every single demand expected of her.” With a pitying tap to her cheek, the High Druid’s shadow left her, turning to clamber back up to his throne.
“And so, what must we do?”
Silence.
I longed to break it, my tongue near bleeding from the force of my teeth as they bit down, unable to pry my jaw open to gnash at Lycandor instead.
“We shall take them all. ForHim.” He gestured towards the lower steps, seating himself once more in his throne. “Druid Falstaff.”
Falstaff seemed to appear from the shadows, his hand already poised with a scalpel. With his back to us, he aligned himself with her front.
From behind, Lycandor’s knee jostled my gown. I peered up, his hold loosening to allow me to do so. His helm flickered from me to the line of seated druids, to Capriche, draped in his chair, shoulders slumped, like this was simply another day of the same oldbird shit. I pinched once more at the gap of his armour, hard enough to blister or bruise.Do something,I screamed into his palm, the sound nothing more than a gurgle.Please, please, please.
But I had long since learned the price of placing one’s faith in druids who demanded you put it there.
I closed my eyes.
Wrath, I internally begged, lids swelling with bubbling tears.Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?
No warmth. Just the frigid chill of metal at my back and the frost of druids to my front.
Shake the earth. Crumble rock. Make them stop.
Make them stop.
Make them stop.
Make them stop.
Nothing. No preternatural heat, only the burn of a fury entirely my own.
I opened them, abandoning Lycandor’s mesh to look upon the dais.
