Yethyr unwrapped me in the tent, and all eyes darted to my white blade, gleaming in the firelight.
Everyone leaned forward except Kettir. He shrank back so noticeably that even Yethyr quirked an eyebrow.
“I’m not going to kill anyone.”
“You’re not?” Ruzar said with disappointment.
“I want to try something first.” Yethyr hesitated, my father’s curse writhing within him. It was difficult to resist, but he managed to hold me out to Ruzar. “Touch the blade.”
Ruzar recoiled. “Master, I couldn’t possibly. That’s a weapon.”
“Holding it is different than wielding it. ‘Assinthir carried the knife to his mistress when the moon reached its zenith and the crowd was wroth,’” Yethyr quoted. “The tale never mentions any stain from the act.”
Ruzar chewed his lip. “No doubt he purified himself afterwards.”
“Which I give you leave to do.”
Ruzar visibly relaxed. “Alright.” Tentatively, he reached out to touch me.
Ruzar.
His name came with a confusing concoction of sensations. The pain of his wounds. The eerie numbness where his legs were supposed to be. His terror of touching me fought with an unnatural eagerness to do so. Whatever Ruzar’s usual disposition, the inescapable allure urged him to clasp my naked blade firmly despite himself.
Through his eyes, I saw Yethyr. The Prince looked so young to Ruzar. So young and in pain. The aches Yethyr hid very well seemed obvious from his perspective.
I focused on Ruzar’s own torment, trying to silence his agonized nerve endings as I had with Yethyr, but his body slipped through my every attempt to grasp him.
Yethyr’s heart sank as he felt my disappointment. My bond with Ruzar had not been sealed in blood. Perhaps I could grant him physical strength, but I could not exert power over him, not even to ease his pain.
Jaetheiri slipped into the tent behind Yethyr.
“By the angel!” She was at Yethyr’s side in moments. “What are you doing?”
Yethyr sighed. “I had hoped it would help heal him, as it did for me, but that apparently requires killing with it.”
“I won’t do that,” Ruzar said flatly. “Not ever—”
“I wasn’t suggesting you do,” Yethyr said gently. “I would never do that to you. Not ever.” He began to pull me away, but Ruzar held on.
“Wait.” The chef frowned down at me, unsettled. “Let go for a moment.”
Yethyr reflexively squeezed my hilt harder. “Let go?”
Ruzar. “Yes.”
I didn’t like what I felt brewing within Ruzar. I wanted to warn Yethyr, but I dared not use words, even disguised as Yethyr’s thoughts. Ruzar was holding my blade and, therefore, would hear me.
Instead, I only used emotions to urge him to get me away from Ruzar. Yethyr sensed that influence and compounded with my father’s curse, the impulse to rip me out of Ruzar’s hands was strong.
And Yethyr, stubborn Yethyr, resented that.
Just to rebuke my influence, he let me go.
Now, only Ruzar weakly gripped my naked blade. I gave him what strength I could to hold me up. He would have cut himself otherwise.
Ruzar looked at me, carefully analyzing his feelings. He didn't want to give me back to Yethyr, which didn't make sense to him. He wanted to kill with me, which made even less sense.
He stared down at me, baffled as my father’s curse tore through him, feeding him desires he had never wanted before.
The sensation filled him with horror and dread. It was not the knowing revulsion of Kettir. This was ignorance. This was a terrible misunderstanding. He thought it was his fault. Somehow, he thought my poison was in him, being worked through him, and he would not permit it.
No evil would use him, I felt rather than heard him vow.
“Don’t!” I tried to shout in Ruzar’s voice, but I could not stop him; I had no control over him.
I could do nothing as Ruzar plunged me into his chest.
Yethyr gasped, and Jaetheiri wailed. They both tried to snatch me from him.
“I am already corrupted,” Ruzar hissed. “I feel a hunter’s urge for slaughter, and I refuse to turn it upon you, Master. If I must kill, then let it be me who I fell.”
“But not with this sword!” Yethyr cried. “It will deny you Heav—”
It was too late; I was already eating Ruzar’s violent memories. There were many. So many! Unlike the hunter memories I had devoured, none of them were battles.
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Beatings. Of himself and of everyone around him. So many beatings. I knew what the strike of a belt felt like from Thured’s memories of his drunken father.
The whip, it turned out, was much worse.
Again and again, I relived Ruzar’s memory of that pain, for both mistakes and whim. The kitchen where he had learned his craft was a place of exacting standards and casual cruelty.
It only intensified when the King dined in his master’s hospitality.
And then that master fell, and the Witch Queen Felnae was in his kitchen. Her circlet was bone white, which just served to make her red hair all the more striking. She sat beside the cutting board, eating figs as Ruzas’s master bled out beneath her bare, dainty feet.
Over the dying man’s choked sobs, her voice was as soft and cold as snow.
“You made the minced pie, didn’t you?”
“Yes…Witch Queen.” Ruzar had not been sure if that was the right address. He did not know if she was even a queen anymore, but he dared not say anything else. She was not supposed to be there, in this kitchen, walking free, and he feared the many things she was not supposed to be able to do to him.
“I am your queen now. I defeated your stupid master.” Death gurgles below them, emphasizing the point. “That’s how it works with you, Brinn, does it not?”
Ruzar frowned. There were a dozen reasons why it didn’t work like that, but he raised the safest objection.
“You’re supposed to issue a formal challenge if you aren’t already at war.”
“But we are at war.” She smiled with all her teeth. “My war with you Brinn has never ended. It is only my strategy that has changed.”
Ruzar shuddered, but was on firmer ground with a declared enemy. He was young then, so very young, and cowering was an old habit.
“What is your bidding then, Mistress?”
“You will come with me to King’s Horde, and there you will deliver three meals to my chambers from now on. I will leave the details to your expertise. Know only that you will be nourishing more than me.”
Ruzar glanced at the hand on her stomach. “You are with child?”
She smiled without teeth this time. “I will leave you the privilege of informing your King.”
She hopped off the table, and the death gurgles filling the room cut off to abrupt silence.
“Serve me well and no one will touch you.”
She was right. The Witch Queen’s personal chef was as untouchable as the King himself, perhaps more so, for at least there was nothing to be won by attacking Ruzar.
Any who entered her chambers besides him was slaughtered at the door by the Witch Queen herself.
It was the only violence he ever saw in those days. There were no beatings in his workspace anymore, for he forbade it, and now, in the royal kitchens, his word was law.
The next truly violent memory was many years later.
Ettisar. Ettisar, who trained the young prince with a brutality that went beyond sense. Ruzar watched blow after blow rain down on the boy he had been feeding since before he was born and hated like he had never hated before.
He knew Ettisar would suffer in Heaven. Ruzar would ensure it, and that comforted him after Yethyr would come crawling to his kitchen, bloody and bruised day after day until he grew too weak to do even that.
Only later did he learn why the boy was growing so weak and that education was bloody. Body after body fell to the demon puppeting the sleeping prince. Spryne never touched the chef himself, even then, even when he was in the same room.
Ruzar was still the Witch Queen Felnae’s creature, and that meant something, even to a High Lord of Hell.
He said nothing when the demon greeted him with Yethyr’s voice, just as he said nothing to Ettisar or the King or Felnae herself. The quarrels of the vicious and victorious were none of his business.
But when Jaetheiri took Yethyr's place as Ettisar’s training dummy, he could not stay silent.
“It is wrong of the young master to make you do this,” he told her. Ettisar had thrown her in a cage with a rabid dog. The stick he had given her as protection could not possibly have penetrated its thick fur.
Jaetheiri batted the creature back as best she could regardless. “He’s not making me do this. We have a pact, nothing more.”
Ruzar watched her through the bars of the cage. She was either oblivious or uncaring that her teacher was clearly trying to kill her and it made him angry. “You are of the blood of thralls. Your body isn’t meant for this violence.
“Every Brinn is of the blood of thralls. Half of the mothers of the kings were thrall concubines.” She dodged a vicious swipe, but her voice stayed grimly steady. “The line is drawn in law, not blood.”
“And in spirit,” Ruzar insisted. “If you do this, you will be damning yourself to a huntress's fate, being devoured by Maethe and hers if you are unlucky, becoming an extension of her hunger if you are lucky.”
“I don’t fear joining the Hunt of Heaven.”
Ruzar did not understand. “You will toil for millennia. You will toil until God is reborn anew. The joy of Heaven will never be yours.”
The dog attacked again, and Jaetheiri defended with weary eyes. “I have already killed. That way may already be shut to me.”
“Nonsense. You were defending the Master, and you did not touch a weapon.”
Jaetheiri’s stick snapped in two at the dog’s assault. It wasn't a real weapon after all. Jaetheiri darted back, broken wood shards in both fists, but she still spoke calmly.
“Alyzeari never touched a weapon, but when she poisoned the Shivak hordes to defend her master, Maethe made the Poisoning Fang from her bloodied spirit.
“Aye, and a great honor that was, of course, but that killing was legendary.” Ruzar eyed the dog warily, but he spoke on. He needed her to know she could leave this cage, that becoming a huntress wasn’t the only way. “What you did is small, easy to wash clean. Many who enter thralldom later in life have killed many more than that.”
The dog struck, and Jaetheiri plunged a wood shard into its eye. It writhed, but she forced the point deeper. It was gruesome and quick, and then the dog was dead. Jaetheiri glared up at Ruzar with blood splattering her cheek and frenzy in her eyes.
“You don’t understand, Ruzar. I don't want to wash it clean. This is the only way for me. All that I was good for was taken from me.”
“You have your hands. You can still—”
“Take revenge.” She looked more feral than the rabid dog dead at her feet.
“Revenge?” Ruzar was baffled. “You are a thrall. You have no need for revenge. Your nemesis is a hunter, a hound of Maethe. Stay the course, and you will rule Lord Duvalheir in Heaven.”
“I will rule him in this life,” Jaetheiri bared her teeth. “All who mocked and laughed will salute me as their better in this life. Just as I am. Let them be lords and hunters and whatever else, and let them bow to a whore.”
And they did.
She became his mistress, as Felnae had been. She became a Brinn huntress, as none of her mothers before her had been. A Heavenly Lord. A Venerated Victor. A hero worthy of being told of in firelight. And Ruzar was the only one who grieved. All Ruzar wanted, for him, for her, for everyone, was the peace of Heaven.
She would never know that peace, and now, neither would he. Not now. Not ever.
I swallowed his memories and trapped his life within my blade forever, and I could do nothing to stop it.
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