Song of the Forever Rains by E.J. Mellow

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

With Larkyra’s gift of Sight, Hayzar hardly resembled a man in this moment. Even with his complexion restored, no longer sunken and tired, he was so coated with midnight oil, his mouth a constant dripping of slow-moving ink down his chin, that she could barely see his smartly tailored red dinner jacket and shirt underneath the mess. How did he not see the hideousness he wore? What it was doing to him?

The answer was obvious, of course: he could only feel the bits of ecstasy it brought, the power that he had once lived without now obtained. Every other repercussion of the drug became a dull, unimportant side effect with the promise of greatness the drug whispered in his mind. To Hayzar, his reflection in this state was beautiful, powerful.

At least, this was what Achak had told Larkyra and her sisters.

Little did these addicts know that the magic they “possessed” was hardly stronger than a cloud of steam compared to the storm wielded by someone like her. While Hayzar could most likely perform simple magic and various levels of spells, depending on the drug’s potency, it was all a mirage, quickly fading to nothing with each trick performed. But it was exactly this effect that kept addicts coming back for more, more and more often.

Well,thought Larkyra, this certainly answers the question of his personal-business matter.

Regarding the duke in all his dark glory, Larkyra wondered if Zimri had been successful in tracking him, and if so, what news was he bringing her father? Larkyra would send her own letter through Kaipo tonight, the very moment she was set free of this room. The oppressive energy that hung around Hayzar was like a hole to the No More, draining every good memory from the room, while thick black tentacles of stolen magic snaked out from his shoulders, grabbing, searching, hungry for something to eat. One stretched out and clung to Larkyra, caressing her cheek, her neck, down her side, and she held her breath, burrowing her own powers deep inside her chest.

Steady head,she silently whispered. Steady heart.

“Lady Larkyra, you look lovely this evening.” Hayzar did not stand as she entered but merely gestured to the chair at the center of the table, the fingers of his soured magic retreating. “Please sit and tell me what you’ve seen and done here during my absence.”

Grateful for the years of performing and painting herself into a multitude of masked realities, Larkyra managed an easy smile as a servant pushed in her chair. “I explored your hedge maze the other day, Your Grace. You must give my compliments to your gardener. They have done an excellent job on its design.”

“My hedge maze?” Hayzar cocked a brow as a waiter came to fill their wineglasses. “I had no idea we had one of those. Darius, did you know this?”

“I did, Your Grace.”

Even across the distance between them, Larkyra could feel the tension radiating from Darius. No longer was he the smiling man who had walked her to dinner. And though he might not have been able to see what she could, surely he had to sense it? Smell it at the very least? How did such tainted magic appear to those who did not have the Sight?

“Extraordinary,” said Hayzar as the servers began the first course. “Perhaps you and I could take a stroll through them tomorrow, my lady. I’d love to learn what other secrets regarding my estate my stepson has kept from me all these years.”

“The gardens are hardly a secret,” said Darius. “They are within view of your wing.”

“I hope you are not insinuating that I am unobservant,” said Hayzar, fingers grazing the sharp end of the knife beside his plate. “For that would cast me in a rather unflattering light for our guest.”

Darius’s gaze drifted to the duke’s hand, a twitch to his jaw.

“On the contrary.” Larkyra attempted to break the gathering tension. “I could not tell you the color of the shoes on my very feet most days. Which is probably why my sisters have tried to convince me to wear only one shade.”

“How clever your sisters are,” said Hayzar, dragging his eyes from his stepson. “I so enjoyed meeting them at your Eumar Journé.”

“I am happy to hear that, Your Grace, but may I tell you a secret?”

This finally caught his full attention. “Of course. Secrets are some of my favorite things to collect.”

She grinned and leaned toward him, exposing more of her chest. “I’m glad you did not enjoy them as much as you enjoyed meeting me.”

Hayzar’s gaze drifted to what she displayed, and a spark of hunger lit his eyes before he tilted his head back, laughing. “Oh, Lady Larkyra, you and I shall have some fun, won’t we?”

“I certainly hope so,” said Larkyra while holding in an internal eye roll. How easily showing a bit of skin could distract. Niya’s advice from before her arrival filled her mind: Women must use all their advantages to their advantage.

Indeed,thought Larkyra morosely.

At least Hayzar was no longer looking at Darius as though he were his plaything.

The first course was placed before her, a stew with a spicy curash aroma, and despite herself, Larkyra was positively ravenous. “This looks delicious,” she said before she spooned a bit into her mouth, the flavors exploding on her tongue.

Thank the lost gods, at least the food didn’t match the morgue in which they dined.

“Are you not hungry, Darius?” the duke asked.

His stepson looked paler than Boland as he stared into his soup.

“Don’t be rude, my boy. Eat.”

“Are you all right, my lord?” asked Larkyra.

“He’s fine,” said the duke gruffly. “Just being strange, as he always is wont to be.”

Larkyra wanted to laugh. The only thing strange here is the creature at the head of the table.

“My lord?” she said softly to Darius again, brows furrowed.

“Eat.”The duke pounded his fist onto the table.

Larkyra jumped. The black energy surrounding Hayzar seeped forward, a rush of darkness clawing its way across the table, his mood igniting with anger like a struck match.

“You are embarrassing me in front of our guest.”

“Your Grace,” interjected Larkyra. “I assure you, I am fine.”

But it was as if she were no longer there as the duke’s eyes locked on Darius.

How quickly his temperament changed with the departure of Zimri, of any gentlemen to witness.

“If you do not want to eat, my boy, then speak!”

“You know I cannot eat this.” Darius said the words so softly that Larkyra strained to hear.

“What was that?” asked Hayzar. “You know how I feel about muttering.”

“I. Cannot. Eat. This,” snapped Darius, finally meeting his stepfather’s gaze.

The duke raised a surprised brow while suppressing a grin. “And whyever not?”

Darius’s fingers curled into a fist. “It has curash in it.”

“And?”

“You know I am allergic.”

“Oh.” Larkyra let out a breath. “Is that all? Then let us skip to the next cour—”

“I have paid good money for our cook to make this dinner.” Hayzar cut her off. “You will eat every bite of it.”

“No.”

“No?”

Darius’s lips firmly pressed together, and his green gaze burned. Larkyra wasn’t sure, but . . . yes, he was shaking.

“Very well.” The duke drew up his napkin, dabbing at the corners of his mouth, his oozing energy sticking to the cloth as he brought it away. “By all means, don’t eat. I certainly can’t make you.” His attention fell to his stepson again. “Now can I?”

“Your Grace,” began Larkyra. “Please let us—”

Her next words were lost as Hayzar exploded with poisoned magic. Like a wave, it covered the floors, the walls, changing the fire from orange to blue. The room now churned and dripped the thick, inky mucus of his drug, the soured aroma almost unbearable. The only thing illuminating their surroundings was the fire behind him, which blazed higher with his anger. Everyone in the dining hall froze, the servants’ gazes transfixed upon a sightless point in front of them.

Larkyra watched, stunned, as the duke turned wholly monstrous with this outpouring of power, his eyes blinking completely black, his face ash and bone as his teeth lengthened, sharpened like those of a flesh-eating fish. The tentacles coming from his back hovered above the table before gliding over the face of every person in the room, penetrating their free will. When one of them found Larkyra, its touch was like ice shards slithering along her skin, whispering its intentions, fogging her mind. Sleeeeeep, his magic hissed around her. Rest your mind.

Larkyra’s power soared forward in response, flowing through her veins, rushing to protect her. Fight, it screamed. Let us out! Light headed, she gritted her teeth and kept her magic trapped in her throat. Like a muscle she flexed her power, forcing it to fan out into her fingertips and toes before hardening and remaining skin deep—a shield.

Steady head, steady heart, steady head, steady heart. Stay steadysteadysteady.She breathed quick, clinging desperately to the words that had always brought her clarity and calm in moments of duress while she mimicked Darius’s and the servants’ stony faces.

“Eat.”Hayzar’s words slid across her ears, grating, even as they were directed at Darius.

The young lord lifted his spoon, his face a blank mask, and sipped his soup.

“More,”commanded Hayzar, a sneer on his lips.

And so Darius ate more and more and more.

With each gulp, Larkyra was forced to watch his allergy quickly take effect, and he hadn’t been lying. His skin turned blotchy in an instant, hives creeping all the way up his neck. His lips swelled, and one eyelid had ballooned by the seventh swallow.

By the Obasi Sea.She had to stop this!

Larkyra’s skin felt stretched too tight as she battled her control. She could not bear seeing Darius in such pain. Especially knowing she could end it so easily, with barely a thought. A high note from her lips, a sharp scream, could obliterate this glimmer of power Hayzar probably believed to be the height of greatness.

But then what?

Manipulating Hayzar’s mind, as well as Darius’s and the servants’, to make them forget that they’d witnessed her gifts was something Larkyra needed her sisters to accomplish. She could hypnotize people into a blank fog to command, as the duke was doing now, but the nuances of rewriting memories, to ensure her family’s gifts remained safely secret, made for a job that was too subtle for her, especially with so many minds to alter in the room. Not to mention her uncurling rage toward Hayzar. Her magic scratched along her lungs to be set free, and she was a hair snap from giving in. Especially when Darius began to wheeze, a sign of his throat closing.

No, no, no, no, no.

Larkyra’s thoughts spun desperately for a solution as she silently prayed to the lost gods for Hayzar to stop this insanity before he killed his stepson.

He can’t kill if he’s dead.Her powers slithered, tempting, through her mind. We are stronger than he. Hurt back, they insisted, pounding beneath her ribs.

NO!She silenced the voice. Despite the madness of doing nothing as Darius slowly lifted another spoonful of soup, she would not be that monster here. That creature she only let out when her king ordered it, and even then, the first time had torn her in two.

Larkyra’s gut twisted, and an instant later, memories of her past spun forward.

She was a young girl, weeping in her dressing room beneath the palace in the Thief Kingdom.

“Hush, child.” Her father was by her side, his white king’s robes draped beside her skirts. “You must stop crying, or you will make it worse.”

Her sisters stood worried by her door, watching, waiting, there for support.

“Why did you make me do it?” Larkyra took in a jagged breath, attempting to calm herself, force her magic back in. But it kept spinning, whipping and knocking over items in her room.

Only her father’s armor protected him from her hurt.

Larkyra could not stop thinking of the man they had recently tortured with their gifts, by the order of their king, by her father.

“The magic you girls have is complicated,” said Dolion gently. “Its power must be used for good, and sometimes good is achieved by doing bad. You must understand this balance. That man had done very horrible things, and you helped stop that.”

“But I just learned to control my gifts,” she protested. “I just stopped hurting. And then, and then you ordered us to—”

“It is because you are now able to control it,” her father interjected, a hand to her shoulder, “that I knew you were ready. Do you feel you lost control in there?”

Larkyra wiped at her nose, thinking on the question. “No.”

“Exactly. Though you may have hurt someone, you were a master of your magic in that moment, my songbird. Do you understand this difference? You were in control of the pain you inflicted, just as you are in control of the joy you can now bring with your powers. You are the constant in your magic, Larkyra. You decide the direction it goes.”

“I decide,” she repeated.

“Yes. I will ask you girls to do many hard things, the same difficult decisions I must make myself every day, but we do it to control a world bigger than us. The Thief Kingdom is a place that must be ruled with a stern hand. We are the grip keeping the chaos contained.”

“I understand,” said Larkyra after a moment, her swirling emotions settling along with her magic.

Her father nodded. “Good. And just remember what Achak taught you if you ever do feel your control slipping.”

“To—to swallow my breath in stress, not exhale it.”

“Exactly. I know it is hard to achieve, my songbird, but I know you will. Your life may be filled with pauses, but it is safer that way. And you have your sisters. Look to them when you feel frightened. Use their strength. Grab their hands, anything to stay yours. You must remain steady.”

Steady. Steady. Steady.

It was Larkyra’s forever burden, to remain calm, light, happy. For the alternative was much harder to control. Yet if she could hold in her screams when her finger was chopped off, she could remain silent now.

And though it was ripping her heart to ribbons to watch Darius’s allergy grow fatal, she had no alternative. She had to choose her family. If she moved a muscle, opened her mouth to speak one word, she feared it would all explode, the room, the people, perhaps even the castle. The truth of her family’s magic would be revealed, and they’d be ostracized—or worse, hunted. She could not do that to them, could not take their lives away. Not as she had taken away so many other things, caused so much pain over the years, even her own mother’s death.

So as Darius’s face turned a ghastly shade of purple, Larkyra sat still, gripping the arms of her chair and biting her tongue until the taste of blood filled her mouth.

She chanced a glance at the duke, caught the triumphant gleam in his black eyes as he regarded his stepson bending to his will. She thought of the late duchess, Josephine, her items and the portraits he guarded in his quarters. Her lock of hair so gently bound together with silk. If this man had ever truly cared for her, how could he treat her only child thus?

How truly dark is your heart?thought Larkyra. And how good would it feel to silence it?

“That is enough.” The duke’s voice rang through the room.

Darius’s hand shook as it paused, mere inches from his mouth. A bead of sweat ran down his brow, and that was when she saw it, the glimmer of lucidity in his helpless gaze. The part of Darius that could feel every inch of this suffering.

The fire inside her burned higher.

What is this nightmare I’ve walked into?Larkyra’s grip tightened. How long had Darius been living it?

She had witnessed many dark things growing up in the Thief Kingdom. Men murdered, skin torn from flesh, lives shattered, but never cruelty to someone so undeserving. The Thief King had his own punishment for those who preyed on the innocent, and no one who witnessed the screams of the sinners would dare try their luck at such a game.

“Oh, you poor boy,” said the duke as he slouched, tired, in his chair, his magic receding from the walls, the floors, the fire. With its departure it was as if the very air gasped in relief, the servants along the walls slumping, free of the duke’s will. Larkyra, her heart in her throat, watched Darius blink back to consciousness with the rest of them.

He dropped the spoon with a clatter, as if it were on fire. His breaths rasped shallowly as he ran a hand over his swollen features, realizing what he must have done, his skin growing redder with each desperate pull of air.

“You really are allergic.” The duke raised a shocked brow. “You should never have eaten so much. Why don’t you leave us and get yourself cleaned up? Hmm?”

Darius’s chair scraped across the floor as he pushed himself up. He swayed slightly before placing a steadying hand on the table, and Larkyra half rose, wanting to help.

Darius’s swollen gaze swung to meet hers, a silent plea to return to her seat.

Don’t,his eyes said. Forget I exist.

The same impossible demand she gave to the magic that swam in her gut.

Larkyra swallowed hard, forcing down down down the gifts expanding in her throat as she managed to return to her seat. When she finally felt she could speak without damage, she turned to the duke and asked, “What happened to him? He looks dreadful.”

She made sure to play the fool he wanted them all to remain.

“He really does, doesn’t he? But do not worry yourself.” Hayzar waved a hand. “He’ll be fine.”

Larkyra glanced in Darius’s direction, but his chair was now empty, the dining room door beyond slowly closing. Relief washed through her at his escape, though it was quickly replaced with dread.

She was now alone with a lunatic.

And not the kind of lunatic found in the Thief Kingdom. Those were pleasant. Those she could distract with something sweet, something shiny, or make a puppet with her powers. Here she was supposed to be without. And without her magic, well, it was like living as half a person. It was her Lierenfast all over again, but worse, for she couldn’t even show off her talents with her blades.

At least, not yet.

Her gaze moved to the closed door once more, to Darius’s vacated seat. Would he be all right? Did he have medicine to calm the allergy?

Everything in her screamed that she should dash from the room to find out.

“No need for my stepson’s carelessness to ruin the rest of our dinner.” The duke snapped his fingers, prompting the servants to clear their plates and bring out the second course.

By the lost gods,she thought, staring down at the slice of meat that was placed before her. How could I possibly eat now?

“So, my dearest.” The duke cut into his dinner, visibly tired, but still a man wholly charmed and charming. Well, besides the black oil still spilling from his every pore. “Tell me more about what you did while I was gone.”

Larkyra blinked.

She wanted to yell, You just tortured your stepson, in front of a room full of people.

With soup.

But of course she didn’t say any of this. She was a Bassette, after all. Adaptable, a survivor, and cleverer than the smug bastard who sat before her. There were too many answers left to unearth, bank vaults to be discovered, lands to free. A long game, she reminded herself again and again and again. This was a long game that would have a satisfying end.

So while a young lord lay shaking in pain somewhere in the castle, gasping for each breath, Larkyra remained with the duke, chatting and smiling and ensuring she ate every last bite.

While imagining every one of Hayzar’s being his last.