Chapter 75: Bring me the Real Catch

(Location: Obsidian Palace)

The chamber had never seen proper light.

Not once. Not in all the years it had existed beneath the earth, carved out of cold stone and silence and the kind of dark that had texture to it, that pressed against skin like something alive.

The torches along the walls burned low and orange and threw more shadow than light, and the shadows sat in the corners like they had been invited there and had decided to stay permanently.

A woman hung from the far wall.

Chains at her wrists. Her head dropped forward, her hair falling loose around a face that was hard to look at directly. Not because it was ugly. Because of what had been done to it.

She had been beautiful once. You could still see the shape of it underneath everything that had been taken from her, the way you could still see the outline of a building after fire had moved through it.

She was shaking. The small, continuous kind of shaking that came from a body that had been pushed past every limit it had and was still somehow being asked to keep going. Every few seconds a sound left her. Barely a sound. More like the memory of one.

Nobody in the room looked at her.

At the center of it all, another woman stood still.

Her gown was torn at the side, the fabric ripped clean from where she had hit the ground outside the castle. She had not fixed it. She stood with her hands clasped in front of her, eyes down, back straight, and she did not speak. She did not fidget. She had been in this room enough times to know that the first rule was silence until she was addressed.

From somewhere in the deep shadow at the far end of the chamber, something moved.

Not much. Just a shift. The kind of movement that reminded you of something that you had almost managed to forget about.

Then a voice came out of the dark.

"Drusilla."

She bowed her head slightly lower. "Yes, my lord."

The silence that followed was not empty. It never was with him. It was the kind of silence that had weight to it, that sat on the chest and reminded you that you were waiting on someone who had never once in his life been in a hurry.

"What is it," the voice said slowly, "that you desire most?"

Drusilla lifted her eyes toward the shadow. She could not see him. Just the outline of him, the suggestion of a figure sitting completely still in a place where the torchlight had given up trying to reach.

She answered without hesitating.

"To be young again." Her voice was steady. Practiced. "Beautiful again. The way I was before."

The room was quiet.

Then, "I can give you that."

It was not a question. It was not a promise either, not exactly. It was a statement of fact delivered by someone who had never had reason to doubt their own capabilities and did not intend to start.

"Yes," Drusilla said. "I know you can, my lord."

Another silence. Shorter this time.

"Then report."

She told him everything.

The group that had entered the Wraithfen. How many warriors. The alpha at the front of them, broad and difficult and harder to move than she had anticipated. She told him about the cabin, and everything that happened after.

Then she stopped.

The shadow waited.

"The boys were taken," she said. "As planned."

"And?"

She kept her voice even. "The blue pearls were broken, my lord."

The chamber changed.

Not visibly. Nothing moved. But the quality of the air in the room shifted in the way it did when his attention sharpened, like a temperature drop that happened too fast to be natural.

He leaned forward slightly. Just enough that the edge of the torchlight caught the line of his jaw, the sharp angle of it, nothing more.

"How," he said.

Not a question. A demand delivered quietly, which was always worse than one delivered loudly.

"I don’t know exactly," Drusilla said. She kept her eyes forward. "I did not see who broke them. But the boys collapsed. They did not die. Which means whatever was inside them was pulled out, not destroyed."

A pause.

Then he laughed.

Small. Contained. The sound of it had nothing warm in it, nothing that belonged anywhere near actual amusement. It moved through the cold air of the chamber and dissolved.

"A simple job," he said. "And you cannot even tell me how they undid it."

He looked toward the woman on the wall.

The woman’s shaking got worse. Her body seemed to understand something before her mind caught up with it, pulling inward, trying to make itself smaller even though the chains made that impossible.

"Useless," he said. Quiet. Almost gentle.

Drusilla spoke before the silence could settle again, desperate to regain her worth.

"My lord, there is something else."

He looked back at her.

"I found something," she said. "While they were in the forest. Something you will want to hear."

He said nothing. He simply waited, the way he always waited, like time was something that happened to other people.

Drusilla straightened slightly.

"I felt three kinds of power while the group moved through the Wraithfen."

Still nothing from the shadow. Just listening.

"The alpha’s power first," she said. "Strong. Expected."

"I have no interest in that."

"I know." She did not rush. "The second was a sorcerer’s power. It came from one of the men among the warriors. Controlled. Practiced. Old."

The shadow was very still now.

She let that sit for exactly the right amount of time. Then she said the third one.

"The third power was not open," she said carefully. "It was not awake. It was leaking. Just a small amount of it, slipping through like light under a door that is almost completely closed."

She paused.

"But that small amount, my lord. That small leaking amount." She looked toward the shadow directly. "It stopped everything I was doing. I have not felt something like that in a very long time."

He stood up.

He moved out of the shadow and into the space where the moonlight fell through the single narrow opening in the stone above, and for the first time, the chamber held his full face.

He looked young. Unreasonably, almost offensively young, like someone had drawn the features of a man in his early twenties and then decided to leave them exactly that way regardless of how much time passed.

Dark hair. Brown eyes that were warm in color and completely cold in everything else. A face that was handsome in a way that made it worse somehow, that made the things sitting behind it harder to reconcile.

He looked at Drusilla.

"Who did it come from?"

"I could not trace it precisely," she said. "The power was not strong enough yet to be fully located. But I think it came from one of the two women in the group. The ones who were not warriors."

He looked at her for a long moment.

"Interesting." He said it softly, like he was talking to himself. Then his eyes found hers. "Why do you say that?"

She didn’t look away. "The first time I sensed that power coming from Crescent Moon was the day they held the Luna trial. Which means it belongs to one of their women."

He smirked and turned.

He walked toward the woman chained to the wall, and the woman’s shaking became something else entirely, became the full-body trembling of a person whose body had run out of ways to express fear and had started over from the beginning.

Her head stayed down. Her fingers gripped the chains even though the chains were the source of the pain, because they were still something solid in a room that had stopped feeling real a long time ago.

He reached her.

He reached out and touched her face with two fingers, gently, tilting it upward the way you might tilt a flower toward light. She flinched so hard the chains rang against the stone. Her eyes, when they came up, were the eyes of someone who had forgotten what it felt like to hope for anything.

He looked at her. Something in his expression was almost curious. The way a person looks at something they find mildly interesting before they decide what to do with it.

Then he opened his mouth.

And something left her.

It had no proper name and no proper shape but it was visible, just barely, in the low torchlight of the chamber. Something rising from her skin, from somewhere underneath her skin, pulling free slowly the way roots pull free from dry ground. It moved toward him like it had been called and had no choice but to answer.

As it left her, her body changed.

Slowly. The way a fruit changes when everything inside it dries out and pulls away from the skin. She shrank. Her shoulders drew inward. Her face changed beneath his fingers, pulling tight, pulling back, the shape of her collapsing into something that no longer had the right proportions for a living person.

Her hair went dry and thin against the chains. By the time it stopped, what hung there looked like something left behind after the real thing had been removed. Ancient. Hollow. Still.

The chains held something that had once been a woman.

He straightened.

He licked his lips slowly, the way a person does after finishing something that has satisfied them, and he turned away from the wall without looking back at it.

Drusilla had not moved. She was looking at a point somewhere on the floor in front of her feet, and her face was giving away nothing, and she was breathing very carefully.

He walked back toward the center of the room.

He stopped beside her.

"The children were never the point," he said. His voice was the same as it had always been. Calm. Patient. Completely unbothered by what had just happened behind him. "They were just the hook."

He turned and walked back into the shadow.

"Bring me the real catch."