He’s a brutish man with flat, squished features that seem too small for his broad face, one of the fire-born that attacked theUmbra. I hate the leering way he looks at me, the way his eyes linger on my body as I walk by him.
And I hate him even more when he opens his mouth. “Heard you like the taste of Selaran cock,” he says. “What’s the matter? Sucked off so many Nithyrians you got bored?”
The others just laugh as he mocks me. I know his opinion is the common one even if he’s the only one brave enough to voice it.
“It’s hard to get sick of something that barely exists,” I say. I hold up my pinky finger. “When this is all you’ve got, no wonder I had to look elsewhere.”
He barrels across the deck and backhands me hard for that one. My jaw burns from the contact as my head jerks to the side, and my lip splits from impact with my teeth. I spit blood from my mouth and then stare back up at him, defiant.
It was worth it.
Seth’s camp is upriver from Adria’s by several miles, perched just on the edge of the Machair Wastes. The rear legions of our troops complain loudly about the hard riding they’ve done to cross the mountains and the Wastes in just a few short days, and I understand why, having completed the same journey in a carriage a few months earlier. I have no doubt that Seth’s pace was even more relentless.
Seth’s lackeys bring me to a tent of green canvas with a number of decorative flourishes that seem wholly unnecessary for the battlefield: scalloped edges, sashes, golden trim. This can be none other than Seth’s tent itself—no one, not even our fallen minor nobility, would go to the trouble to show off during a war except Seth.
I expect him to greet me and then chain me up with the dogs like Adria did, but he isn’t inside. The tent is furnished as finely as the antechamber to Ronan’s throne room and in a similar style—heavy Nithyrian wood chairs around an intricately carved table, rugs woven in deep blues, shelves stacked with books and scrolls, and even what appears to be a full-size feather bed at the back.
Gods, he made someone carry all this over the mountain for him.
There’s a pillar in the center to hold the canvas up, and that’s where Seth’s men chain me. The brute that slapped me takeshis time with it, grabbing onto my legs to hold me still while I struggle away from him.
“Quit squirming, cunt, or you’ll get what’s coming to you,” he says, grabbing at his crotch. He leans close enough that I can smell the stench of his breath and says quietly so that only I can hear, “Or maybe I’ll give you that either way. Teach you what a real man is like.”
“Well, this is unfortunate,” says a voice from behind the man.
I know that voice. It’s cold, slippery, and laced with malice.
“Sir, I was just—”
“I can see what ‘you were just’ about to do perfectly well. Hand, please.”
Seth strides into the tent, letting the curtains fall closed behind him. He flicks his hand towards the candles around the room in turn, lighting them without even looking to see where his flame goes, and then he lights a fire in a wooden stove not far from me in the same way.
The flames dance as they come to life, casting strange shadows on the brute’s face, which has drained of all its color.
Seth doesn’t look exactly like me, as the twin from Octavia’s crew claimed. In fact, the older he gets, the more he looks like my father, sometimes so much so that the only thing that stops me from believing that Ronan lied and that Father truly survived their duel is his brown eyes. None of us got our father’s blue.
He isn’t quite as tall as Father was either, but he’s close, and his hair is a little darker, an ashy color that’s brown in some lights and blond in others. But the way he stands now in his Nithyrian chainmail with an effortless authority is Father through and through. There’s an unwavering confidence to him that can seem charming at first, but that becomes more and more alarming as you realize just how far he intends to go.
“Hand,” he says again, his voice almost bored.
The brute pulls himself up gracelessly, stumbling back and nearly knocking over a stack of books on the floor. “Please, sir—”
The man is considerably larger—both taller and broader—than Seth, but when Seth takes him by the right arm, he does not resist. “I think you ought to address her. Ask her. See what she says.”
The brute hunches under Seth’s cruel grasp as Seth slams his arm onto the table in front of me so that the hand dangles in the air. Oh, gods. I know what he’s going to do.
“Please, miss,” says the brute, unable to even look at me. He’s crying now, tears streaming down his flat cheeks, but I feel no pity for him. I doubt I’m the first woman he has threatened in such a way. “I’m a good fighter,” he says to Seth, not to me. “You need good fighters right now. And I need my hand to fight.”
“He’s got a point,” says Seth with some mirth. The whole situation seems to be amusing him greatly. “What do you think, little sister? Do you think if I let him keep the hand, he can keep it to himself?”
Truthfully, I doubt it, but I can’t stand to see this kind of brutality. “Just—can you put him on the front lines or something? And get him away from me.”
“Hear that?” says Seth. “She’s willing to let it slide. How nice of my sister. How noble. Tell her thank you.”
The brute is sobbing too hard to pay Seth any attention.
“I said, ‘Tell her thank you.’ Do it now, before I change my mind.” Seth rolls his head back with all the drama and ennui of a child being asked to put their toys away, as if he had big plans today to play outside and the man is inconveniencing him by making him do this.
