The noose and the rain and the lever. The snap and my mother’s white lips, her frozen terror. The stampeding sorrow. A bone-breaking anguish.
Earth rising, rising, and then devouring.
Bloodlust.
It coated my mouth again, and I was freshly ravenous. “Did you do this?” I whispered, voice sapped. I was a husk now, I realized.
They’d bled me dry. All of them.
The lord took stock of me over his spectacles with an air of distaste. “Youdid this,” he said simply. “No one wrapped your finger around that trigger, Miss Clarke, did they?”
“Harrow.”My voice was a tremor, rippling out into the space between us. Did he hear my wrath knocking at his chest? “Where are you taking me?”
“You are to help me repair some of the fractured tensions betweenourpeople,” he answered.
I couldn’t make sense of it. Couldn’t see where I had been led, like a tethered dog. I only knew that I felt the rope at my neck, always pulling.
A sob climbed my ribs.
Here I was, shackled by the newest Head of House—the last one already forgotten, easily replaced—speaking to me of my duty to help him.
And I was so tired.
His voice droned on, just like Tanner’s. “It is the very least you can do. Do you understand? You can humble yourself before your countrymen, pray to Idia for forgiveness.”
But if Idia existed, she had frayed every last thread of me, and God was a villain.
“I advise you be gracious from here onward, Nina,” Terrence Shop said, my newest puppeteer. “Be thankful I didn’t order your throat sliced along with your wrist.”
I laughed, a new kind of hysteria in it. I could have hurled myself from the coach or simply closed my eyes and slept forever, right there on the carriage floor. “Kill me, then,” I said, then I leaned as far forward as I could, offering him my neck.
But long moments passed, and he did nothing. By the time I rolled my face back to his, he seemed sallow, strained, as though just now smelling the madness in me. “You and your fuckin’ ministry,” I said slowly, so that he could hear every rasp. “You wouldn’t kill me even if I begged you.”
And he seemed caught off guard to hear my voice was no longer that of a child’s, and that the world hadn’t stripped away my spine.
He righted himself. Crossed his legs. “The theatrics are not necessary, Miss Harrow,” he said. “But, where your life is concerned, you happen to be correct. I’ve brokered a compromise with the other lords to spare your life. If not for me, you’d be hanged this day.”
More deals. More bargains. My eyes rolled skyward. A school of fish had been painted on the carriage ceiling. “Do you fear death, my lord?”
He was quiet. Contemplative.
The fish swam in a mindless circle. “I find those who fear death have something to live for.”
Lord Shop shifted uncomfortably. “I’d hoped you’d see this as an opportunity to renew yourself. Fulfill your purpose. There is much we can achieve together.”
For the millionth time, I reimagined the siphoning ceremony, wherein I never made myself the world’s only earth Charmer. “Then you might as well take me to the gallows, my lord. I don’t care for my purpose, and I no longer fear death.”
After all, what remained that I should live for?
The lord chewed on his own tongue for a long moment. A sinister satisfaction seemed to come over him. “As I feared,” he said quietly, turninghis gaze away. “You’ll take the whip on the citadel steps for assassinating the governing leader of this country.”
A dull dread rippled up my sternum.
“It will be… quite severe. We need to send a clear message that murder is not tolerated—”
“If it is anArtisanwho is murdered, it is not tolerated.”
“—and that the punishment for sedition is grave.”
