CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Haunted
“Vanja!”
I ignore Death. I think—I think I can pull this off.
I let only the one sip go down my throat. It burns like liquor, but with a strange salt-and-copper aftertaste. If I’m right, it’s close enough to the dose the augurs use that I’ll just have a very eye-opening hour.
I make a show of coughing and wrinkling my nose. “Oh, this is dreadful. I think I’ll—”
“Drink your medicine,” Adalbrecht orders. “Allof it.”
I blink at him.
And then I blink again. I see it now, what was wrong in the portrait of him as a boy. He and his brothers all had hazel eyes.
Now Adalbrecht’s are blue as the heart of a flame. If anything, they look like they’re almost glowing . . . no, burning . . .
The room around us wobbles like jellied broth. I catch my breath. Then—then—
It’s as if the walls, the floors, Adalbrecht,everythingis blistering and peeling away. I see coats of paint on the walls, decades of paint, I see blood on a carpet that hasn’t been there for forty years. The wall of hunting trophies is all old dead things but for one beastly skull burning with the same blue fire that’s in Adalbrecht’s eyes.
When I look at him, I don’t see the face of a man but a horse’s head nailed to his shoulders, a crown of more iron nails floating above, teeth bared, eyes of cerulean fire.
“Drink,” he thunders, blood and blue flame spilling from his mouth. But I see, Isee—
I see a spill of golden hair in a bloody battlefield by night, a soldier of no more than twenty lying motionless, blood sluggishly streaming from a whistling wound in his chest, hazel eyes half lidded in pain and delirium. Every agonized breath is a curse on the wretch of a general who lost this battle, a curse on the empress for sending him to die among the chaff, a curse on his father for letting her. Weak. His father was weak. House Reigenbach was once a house ofkings. And now—
He is the last of his brothers, meant to be the greatest. Now he’s just nothing but the greatest corpse in the dirt.
He was good as any prince. He deserved to be a king.
I see anachtmahrcrawl onto his sternum, giggling as it paws at his face. I see a crow hop over, pecking curiously at his ear.
Weak. He can’t stop it. The breath is crushed from his lungs.
Weak. Just like his father.
His eyes fly open. He seizes the crow, snaps its neck in one hand. Thenachtmahrlets out a squeal, form writhing, and suddenly it’s no longer a little man but a half-rotted crow.
It looks to the soldier for orders.
The soldier sits up, his wounds limned with sapphire-blue flame. And now—now I see that same blue ignite in his eyes.
He was born to wear a crown, even if he must make it himself.
Now I see him slaying beast after beast for thenachtmären, trading their lives for wicked deeds and borrowed crumbs of their power. A marmot buys the death of the general, a fox for his father, a goat for the empress, too many more to count. Now I see him swearing to keep them fat on terrible dreams as he whips his soldiers into battle after battle, laying the cornerstones of a kingdom, claiming what was always meant to be his.
Now Iseethe margrave standing before me in the study, reaching for me—
There’s a scream that sounds like a cat and a child and a woman all at once, and a blur of black fur and red eyes streaks into the study from behind me. I jump and drop the goblet in earnest.
The blur claws its way up Adalbrecht’s legs as he howls, makes a couple of loops around his torso, then launches itself onto his desk, sending papers flying. It’s Ragne.Ragnesaved me.
She hurls herself onto the mantel, still caterwauling, and tears down a tapestry, dragging it into the fireplace. Flames eagerly gnaw through the embroidered wolves. The carpet below starts smoking as well. Her final coup de grâce is to knock over the water pitcher on her way out the door, leaving Adalbrecht very little to douse the fire.
“I’ll—I’ll go get help,” I gasp, and run out of the study on Ragne’s heels. I think Adalbrecht shouts after me, but when I dare a look back, he’s trying vainly to stamp out the flames.
