“You’re a fucking liar, and a bad one at that. I know you’re soft for her just like Larus. She isn’t a baby anymore, Seth.”
This is such a gross mischaracterization of our relationship that I can’t help but laugh. “He’s going to torture me, and you think that’s because he cares too much about me?”
But then I wonder if there’s something to what she said. He could have tortured me by now, easily. He could have hurt Taran.
But he hasn’t. He’s threatened us, but he hasn’t hurt us.
Could it be that somewhere deep down, Seth is more like me than her?
But then I remember what he really wants, and how he’ll use me to get it.
Adria strides over to me, yanking the chains that hold my wrists and pulling me to my feet. Her eyes are filled with hatred, her expression sneering and cruel. She flickers a flame into her palm and holds it an inch from my face as I try to escape her grasp. “If you’d prefer, I could kill you right now. Just ask, and I’ll do it.”
Taran rises to his feet, and Adria flings the flame at him. It hits him square in the chest, but his water magic shields the worst of the damage.
Then she ignites the flame once more and presses it to my sword hand.
I scream from the agony, and Seth jumps to his feet as Taran’s water snuffs it out.
“Keep your fucking distance, or I’ll kill all three of you,” shouts Adria. She turns to Seth as I yank my burned hand away from her, the charred flesh stinging and sending jolts of pain deep under my skin. “They need leg irons, you idiot, and you should keep them separately so they can’t help each other.”
Seth rolls his eyes. “Yes, your highness. Are you finished? I have a lot of writing to do.”
Adria turns back to me. For a moment, her expression softens. “It didn’t have to be this way,” she says. She tucks a strand of my hair back behind my ear as I flinch away from her. “The thing I’ll miss the most about you is seeing Mother’s face. You look so much like her.” Then she snatches her hand back suddenly, and her eyes turn cold. “But you aren’t Mother. Make this week count. The next time I see you, it will be the last.”
Just before she leaves the tent, she turns back to Seth. “I want those orders before midnight,” she says, and then she’s gone with nothing but charred and wine-stained ruins to mark her presence.
“What a fucking mess,” says Seth, sorting through the stack of papers with something like genuine grief.
His evening has well and truly been ruined, but I find it just a little difficult to find any sympathy for him as my eyes fill with tears from the pain of the burn. Taran comes over, but his chains won’t let him reach my bed. I hold out my hand to him, shaking, and he presses water to it gently. The cool touch of his magic is immediately soothing. “Aloe,” he says to Seth.
Seth doesn’t stop his sorting, trying desperately to find something that can be salvaged. “What was that?” he mutters.
“She needs aloe,” says Taran, his voice taking on the commanding tone of the leader of the Royal Guard. General Taran Orinsen, Ronan’s second in command, is making an order. “For her burn.”
And for his own. His shirt is singed, and a black mark is visible on his pale skin near his tattoo. The Orsan tattoo that marks him as water-born, a symbol I once despised and now am eternally grateful for.
“Oh,” says Seth absently. We’re beneath his concern at the moment. He reaches into the drawer and finds the bottle, tossing it to Taran. “Here.”
Then he tosses the willow bark bottle too. “For the pain.”
What the fuck.
After all of that about torturing us, he’s just letting us treat the wounds Adria gave us?
I look at Taran as he helps me with my hand. How did he know Seth would help us? “Your family,” he mouths, shaking his head as he touches the aloe to his own chest, “is seriously screwed up.”
“I know,” I mouth back.
Seth doesn’t get around to torturing us that night. He’s far too busy rewriting all of his orders on unspoiled paper, and then it’s time for our baths before we move again in the morning.
“He’s like you,” Taran whispers to me later when Seth is sleeping.
“No, he isn’t. I watched him cut a man’s hand off my first day here.”
“And what did that man do?”
My throat tightens as I think of it. “Touch me. Threaten to hurt me.”
